Abstract
As the present-day philosophy (or methodology, if you will) of science frees itself from the domination of the ideas advanced by logical positivists, research in the field is taking on an increasingly historical character. This trend meets with the approval of a large number of contemporary representatives of the discipline. Imre Lakatos’ statement that ‘methodology is wedded to history’ is not an isolated opinion nowadays.
It is to be born in mind that ‘cognition’ refers here not to psychological processes proper to individuals, but to a social process: the growth and development of society’s systems of knowledge (trans. note).
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Notes
For the description of subjective concepts see K. Zamiara, Metodologiczne znaczenie sporu o status poznawczy teorii (The Methodological Significance of the Controversy over the Epistemological Status of Theory), Warszawa, 1974, pp. 141–143.
Cf. W. Dray, Laws and Explanation in History, Oxford, 1957.
Cf. A. Malewski, ‘Zagadnienie idiograficznosci historii’, (The Problem of the Idiographic Nature of History), in his O nowy ksztalt nauk spolecznych. Pisma zebrane (Toward a New Shape of the Social Sciences, Collected Works), Warszawa, 1975, p. 162.
S. Kozyr-Kowalski, J. Ladosz, Dialektyka i spoleczenstwo. Wstgp do materializmu historycznego (Dialectics and Society. An Introduction to Historical Materialism), Warszawa, 1972, p. 146.
The use of the concepts of social practical knowledge and of the pre-theoretical (positivist) and theoretical (post-positivist) stages in the development of science refers to the results obtained by A. Palubicka in her book Orientacje epistemologiczne a rozwój nauki (Epistemological Orientations and the Development of Science), Poznan, 1977.
This regularity is not fundamental in character. It is a consequence of the objective function of scientific praxis previously alluded to. For a broader discussion of this question, see J. Kmita’s Szkice z teorii poznania naukowego (Essays on the Theory of Scientific Knowledge), Warszawa, 1976.
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© 1988 PWN—Polish Scientific Publishers, Warszawa
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Kmita, J. (1988). Epistemological Cognition as Historical Cognition. In: Problems in Historical Epistemology. Synthese Library, vol 191. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1421-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1421-6_1
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