Publication Details

Abstract

The theory of the social fact faces the problem of differentiating between the ontological, epistemological and methodological aspects of the social fact. The discussion of the problem began when the naive realism has been criticized, and resulted in contrasting ontological constructivism and critical or scientific realism. A fact is the state or a change of the state of the object (thing for us), which are identified by the subject as something real and reconstructed in his mind in the form of true propositions about facts. The latter should be clearly distinguished from our beliefs about facts, which could be true or false. A social fact is the state or a change of the state of social system and human action. It serves as the basis of an integrative social explanation, which is a combination of the nomologiocal explanation and humanistic interpretation. It is also necessary to distinguish between theoretical-methodological, valuation and ideological interpretations of the facts.