This paper presents the results of a study on the Polish version of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale (GCBS), which was designed to measure individual differences in conspiracist thinking (Brotherton, French, & Pickering; 2013). The Polish version of the scale had excellent internal consistency as measured by Cronbach alpha: .93. The Polish version also had excellent test-retest stability. To check the validity of the questionnaire, various tools were used to measure the characteristics that can be correlated with conspiracist thinking. As a result, it was found that conspiracist thinking is positively correlated with the external locus of control, the results obtained in the Scale of Belief in Zero-Sum Game and the results of the MMPI-2 Paranoia scale. It was also found that patients with paranoid personality disorder and paranoid schizophrenia had higher results on the adapted scale than healthy subjects. In sum, the Polish version of GCBS had satisfactory psychometric properties, which makes it useful for measuring conspiracist thinking.

Major works by Leon Koj deal with the issues of semiotics, logics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and ethics. Many of them refer to aspects of communication, however, this is not the main subject of his considerations. These references relate to the problems of satisfying: 1. the logical criteria, 2. the methodological criteria, 3. the ethical criteria, 4. the semiotic criteria. This article is dedicated to defining the semiotic criteria. It briefly covers basic semiotic notions present in Koj’s works. On the basis of Koj’s assumptions the concept of semiotics conditions for the realisation and functions of the communication process is defined.

Contrary to a widespread thesis about the non-cognitive character of religious beliefs, I argue that it is beneficial to highlight and not marginalize the place of religion in the epistemic sphere. At least some religious beliefs (especially theism) can be qualified as true or false. Holding them as true is usually based on the evidence which is not widely accepted. This, however, does not entail that these beliefs are not true. If they are true, then holding them to be true should be seen as rational, despite of the fact, that the supporting evidence does not seem to be strong in the light of current epistemic standards of justification. It does not mean, however, that such beliefs can be hold with the highest assertion if they evoke serious doubts. Changes in religious doctrines and religious pluralism do not constitute a sufficient reason for excluding religion from the epistemic sphere, as a similar situation concerns many academic disciplines, such as philosophy, or psychology.

There is a general agreement that remembering depends not only on the memory processes as such but rather that encoding, storage and retrieval are under the constant influence of the overarching, metacognitive processes. Moreover, many interventions designed to improve memory refer in fact to metacognition. Most attempts to integrate the very different theoretical and experimental approaches in this domain focus on encoding, whereas there is relatively little integration of approaches that focus on retrieval. Therefore, we reviewed the studies that used new ideas to improve memory retrieval due to a “metacognitive intervention”. We concluded that whereas single experimental manipulations were not likely to increase metacognitive ability, more extensive interventions were. We proposed possible theoretical perspectives, namely the Source Monitoring Framework, as a means to integrate the two, so far separate, ways of thinking about the role of metacognition in retrieval: the model of strategic regulation of memory, and the research on appraisals in autobiographical memory. We identified venues for future research which could address, among other issues, integration of these perspectives.

We are familiar with the grammar and logic of relational predicates in predicate calculus, chiefly as transmitted through Whitehead and Russell. In natural languages however, relations are frequently expressed using what Peirce called relatives, that is, expressions like brother, gift, head, effect, successor, which require completion by one or more definite terms to yield general names or terms. Peirce developed a logic of such relatives which influenced Schröder and Tarski. Later, Leśniewski used relative terms such as part, overlapper, class etc. to formulate his mereology, rather than the predicates and operators subsequently and more standardly used. In this paper I con-sider aspects of the grammar and logic of such relative terms, particularly in regard to several areas of general logico-philosophical interest: cardinality; functions; abstrac-tion; the order problem of relations; and Russell’s multiple relation theory of belief and judgment.