This callectian 'Of essays is, generally speaking, a cantinuatian of the themes that I have discussed in my baak Z metodologicz- nych problemow interpretacji humanistycznej.l Naturally, by continuatian I mean a resumptian 'Of certain questions that were already dealt with in the previous baok. But I treated them rather summarily there, and naw I will present them in greater detail. While daing so, I will have to face new issues, which were ignared previously, but which have ta be salved, at least tentatively, in 'Order ta make it passible for me ta elabarate more fully the suggestions made a...

The general treatment of problems connected with the causal conditioning of phenomena has traditionally been the domain of philosophy, but when one examines the relationships taking place in the various fields, the study of such conditionings belongs to the empirical sciences. Sociology is no exception in that respect. In that discipline we note a certain paradox. Many problems connected with the causal conditioning of phenomena have been raised in sociology in relatively recent times, and that process marked its empirical or even so-called empiricist trend. That trend, labelled positivist,...

This book studies the problem of acquaintance against the background of a more general theory of intentionality. Much of the relevant background is laid out in the book I wrote with Ronald McIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality (1982). However, since this book is not focussed on HusserI, I shall not assume the reader's familiarity with the prior book or with HusserI's philosophy. (I have sometimes referred to this book-in- progress as Acquaintance; I've rounded out the title a bit. ) of The initial inspiration for this work, in the 1970's, was a confluence ideas from the logic of perception and...

This work is divided into two parts. Part I contains sixteen critical es says by prominent philosophers and computer scientists. Their papers offer insightful, well-argued contemporary views of a broad range of topics that lie at the heart of philosophy in the second half of the twen tieth century: semantics and ontology, induction, the nature of prob ability, the foundations of science, scientific objectivity, the theory of naming, the logic of conditionals, simulation modeling, the relatiOn be tween minds and machines, and the nature of rules that guide be havior. In this volume honoring...

It was only after I had finished this volume that I came across the book by Barry Bames, Scientific Knowledge and Sociologi- cal Theory (Routledge and Kegan Paul). I am in full ag,reement with certain ideas expounded in that book, although it also contains others that I must object to. I have decided to make some remarks about them at the beginning of my book, as I believe that they may prove useful by way of int,roduction to the English version of this volume. I hope that anyone who has professional reasons to turn his attention to this volume will have acquainted himself with Scientific...

Wittgenstein's aphoristic style holds great charm, but also a great danger: the reader is apt to glean too much from a single fragment and too little from the fragments as a whole. In my first confron tations with the Philosophical Investigations I was such a reader, and so, it turned out, were most of the writers on Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Wittgenstein's remarkable ability to bring together many facets of his thought in one fragment is fully exploited in the critical literature; but hardly any attention is paid to the connection with other fragments, let alone to the many hitherto...

I first became interested in Husserl and Heidegger as long ago as 1980, when as an undergraduate at the Freie Universitat Berlin I studied the books by Professor Ernst Tugendhat. Tugendhat's at tempt to bring together analytical and continental philosophy has never ceased to fascinate me, and even though in more recent years other influences have perhaps been stronger, I should like to look upon the present study as still being indebted to Tugendhat's initial incentive. It was my good fortune that for personal reasons I had to con tinue my academic training from 1981 onwards in Finland. Even...

Cognitive science, in Howard Gardner's words, has a relatively short history but a very long past. While its short history has been the subject of quite a few studies published in recent years, the current book focuses instead on its very long past. It explores the emergence of the conceptual framework that was necessary to make the rise of modem cognitive science possible in the first place. Over the long course of the history of the theory of perception and of cognition, various conceptual breakthroughs can be discerned that have contributed significantly to the conception of the mind as a...

The concept of observability of entities in physical science is typically analyzed in terms of the nature and significance of a dichotomy between observables and unobservables. In this book, however, this categorization is resisted and observability is analyzed in a descriptive way in terms of the information which one can receive through interaction with objects in the world. The account of interaction and the transfer of information is done using applicable scientific theories. In this way the question of observability of scientific entities is put to science itself. Several examples are...