A large amount of solid and liquid wastes produced by mines and mills each year needs to be managed and minimized by alternative disposal methods like paste and dry stack. Increasingly strict environmental legislation and cost competitiveness also dictate the utilization of technically suitable, economically viable, environmentally acceptable, and socially responsible techniques. This paper reviews some of these techniques that could potentially reduce large volumes of mine wastes (with a focus on mine tailings and waste rocks) without causing significant environmental hazards. The new emerging techniques such as environmental desulphurization, covers built with sulphide-free tailings, co-disposal of tailings and waste rocks, geotextile tube dewatering, and use of tailings in the cement production and road construction for both industrial and environmental purposes are discussed in terms of waste minimization. The existing methods and approaches for efficient waste treatment and disposal are also discussed in this review paper.
Previous research showed that children can exhibit preferences for social categories already at preschool age. One of the crucial factors in the development of children’s attitudes toward others is children’s observation and imitation of adults’ nonverbal messages. The aim of our study is to examine whether children’s tendency to perceive and follow nonverbally expressed attitudes toward other people is related to ingroup bias, i.e. the tendency to favor one’s own group over other groups. We examined 175 preschool children (age in months: 61–87; M = 72.6, SD = 6.53) presenting them with a video of a conversation between a message sender and a message recipient. The study was conducted in a minimal group paradigm. We found that children accurately identified the message sender’s attitude toward the recipient and also generalized this attitude to other members of the new group. We also found explicit ingroup bias among children from the message sender’s group. However, no generalization of the sender’s attitude to other ingroup members was found. The results are discussed in reference to previous findings on the role of imitation of adult’s non-verbal behavior for the development of social attitudes among children.
While working on the oeuvre of P.F. Strawson (1919–2006), and especially on his metaphysics, I had a unique opportunity to exchange ideas with this eminent exponent of Oxford philosophy. Those exchanges, of which some have been reflected in private correspondence and in a published reply to one of my papers, were focussed on various interpretative questions. Three threads of those discussions seem especially pertinent for grasping the gist of Strawson’s philosophy and its general orientation. The first one concerned the nature of philosophical analysis, or to be more precise, the connective model of it, favoured by Strawson, and its relationship with the idea of concept presupposition. The second thread had to do with the position taken by the Oxford philosopher in the realism debate on three levels: semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical. Strawson made every effort to take a realist stand in this debate and avoid antirealism in any of its forms; however, his realism is in many respects very moderate and not so distant from antirealism. Similarly moderate was his stand in the traditional debate about universals, constituting the topic of the third thread of the exchanges with Strawson. He claimed that universals exist, but at the same time emphasized that they are objects of pure thought alone and as such do not form a part of the spatiotemporal world in which we live. One cannot also say much about the relation of exemplification in virtue of which universals manifest themselves in the world as particular instances. Presentation and elaboration of these three threads has led to the conclusion that although Strawson was a deeply systematic thinker, he avoided wide-ranging and ambitious statements and radical views. In characteristically minimalist way he dispelled some questions, and the ultimate resolution of many crucial and fundamental issues were for him choice and taking a particular attitude or stance.
In the skeptical tradition self-consciousness was transparent and it served as a basis for expressing doubts and developing arguments leading to certainty. After the linguistic and naturalistic turns, contemporary philosophy developed skeptical arguments against certainty and epistemic priority of the data of self-consciousness (both reflective and pre-reflective). Self-reflection reports on the stream of consciousness ex post, but the reports are meager and dependent on subject’s conceptual scheme, while the pre- -reflective data is unclear. Two contemporary skeptical hypotheses have been developed: H. Putnam’s content externalism hypothesis and so-called Kripkenstein’s quus hypothesis. I put forth the question what kind of self is immune to erroneous misidentification. The immunity seems to be limited to the contentless self, reducible to the pre-discursive feeling of one’s own existence. There is no guarantee that any content whatsoever can be attributed to self without error. I cannot negate that I exist any more than I can negate that something external exists, but any description of either is fallible. So the content of self-consciousness is not in an epistemically better position than the content of external perception.
Bogusław Wolniewicz, inspired by his formal ontology of situations, has put forward a question on semilattices with a unit (A question about joinsemilattices, Bulletin of the Section of Logic 19/3, 1990). The present paper is entirely devoted to this problem in the formulation given by Wolniewicz. First, the meaning of the question is analyzed and its lattice-theoretical and Boolean algebraic contents are exhibited. Second, set-theoretical and topological counterparts of the question are formulated and commented upon.
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