Volume 62 (2007), 9

The paper gives an analysis of the role of constructivism in post-positivist epistemo-logy and in the philosophy of science. The role of constructivism is thus analyzed in the sphere of the sociology of cognition. The author gives a detailed interpretation of Berger’s and Luckman’s social constructivisms. Attention is paid also to the relationship between… Read more

The paper offers a reconstruction of Popper’s conception of the logical situation. It provides the analysis of the structure of this conception, its genesis, and the attempts at its explication, as well as its critical discussion. The authors confront Popper’s method of situational logic with Kmita’s method of humanistic interpretation.

The paper is a pioneer work in mapping the methodological problems, which have been introduced into sociology by ABM as an important innovation. It sheds light on the sources and the background of ABM, comparing the latter with EBM. It shows also the main characteristics of multi-agent models and their wide-scaled applicability. The author focuses especially on… Read more

Participatory approach (PAR) is a social sciences methodology, a form of research praxis as well as the world view for many researchers. This paper describes the position of PAR in social research. The paper starts with an attempt to define PAR and to outline briefly its history as well as the ways of its legitimization as a research practice. Further it describes… Read more

The aim of this paper is to show the incompleteness of the exclusively logico-syntactical and logico-semantical approaches to one of the core issues of philosophy of science, namely, scientific laws and scientific explanation in C. G. Hempel’s works. I start with a brief exposition of the main characteristics of Hempel’s approach (labeled „the D-N model“) to… Read more

Humans and their relationship to the universe has been a philosophical problem since the antiquity. In the second half of the 20th century, however, due to new achievements of the relativist cosmology, the problem was revitalized. The developmental stages of the universe are analyzed with regard to the contemporary achievements in science. The humans and the… Read more

The paper examines the present condition of humans and some forms of understanding human existence, forms the relationship between person and society, especially its particular historical nature. The paper begins with a picture of conceptions prevailing in the history of philosophy. Further it outlines the contemporary spiritual situation and its origins in… Read more

The paper deals with the covering-law model of explanation as formulated by Carl Hempel and the role it plays in the area of philosophy of explanation. The first part of the paper begins with the exposition of the model and finishes with emphasizing some of its most important features, such as its non-causal and non-pragmatic character and the thesis of the… Read more