O nauce w telewizji śniadaniowej, potrzebie rozumienia i byciu w oddaleniu, w drugim z cyklu wywiadów z naukowcami, którzy są partnerami nie tylko w pracy, lecz także w życiu, mówią dr hab. Joanna Sułkowska i dr hab. Piotr Sułkowski.

In this paper Peter Strawson’s idea of non-reductive analysis is illustrated with the example of an analysis of knowledge along the lines of my book on the ‘sandwich theory of knowledge’: Epistemologia. Sandwiczowa teoria wiedzy (Kraków 2019). On this theory, knowledge and justification are intertwined and relativized to the context that has been determined, on the one hand by pragmatic presuppositions, including idealizations and the ceteris paribus clause, and on the other by the intended scope of applications. Knowledge so conceived need not be true, which permits granting to the outdated knowledge an epistemic status different than that of mere superstition. Still, the mechanism of revision of presuppositions in the face of novel applications can be thought of as driven by the regulative idea of truth in Kant-Popper sense.

The text was created on the basis of interviews with Caltech scholars (Pasadena, USA) in 2018. The talks concerned various contemporary theories of biogenesis and the role of their philosophical premises. The researchers also addressed the issue of popularizing science. The worldview is shaped (and established) by popularizing publications. They also answered the questions how their personal beliefs influenced on research.

The paper focuses on the social education of younger students, which I see as an important area of activity that enables a better understanding of oneself, others and the world. However, this can only be achieved if social topics include issues arising from the needs of individuals and social expectations and if expository methods of teaching are replaced by a reflective problem approach. & en “the different one” will cease to be perceived as inferior, dangerous, marked by stereotypes, and will seem interesting, worth knowing, and the world will become a space for the child to explore and discover in order to know it better and act in it more skillfully. The paper is a study report. The starting point for discussion are two conceptual categories of “the inactive bystander effect” and “the active bystander effect” taken from the Heroic Imagination Project by Philip Zimbardo, which I illustrate with the results of ethnomethodological studies conducted among 7–9-year old children during their classes about social issues. The research objective is to reconstruct the features of social knowledge and the process of its acquiring in the classroom. The paper includes a theoretical part that explains the idea and nature of social education with the emphasis on so-called new thematic areas resulting from the needs of individuals and social expectations. Then the paper describes the concept of the studies. The next section presents the research outcomes and highlights several areas of analysis, including lesson topics on social education, methods of their implementation, and the social importance that is revealed during communication practices. The final part contains research conclusions and summarizing reflections.

The article deals with the issue of the meaning of the Polish early education coursebooks for conservation/change in educational practices. It is the liberal and constructivist discourse to which the coursebook authors should refer (especially in the context of the present time and democracy) if these books are to become a tool of the prodevelopmental and emancipatory interest of both students and society. However, the research on Polish coursebooks for early education (grades I – III), show that this very condition has not been ful3 lled. In such a situation it is the German school coursebooks that might be inspiring because of their discursive background as well as of the methodological proposals and the range of content present in them. The article is also an attempt to reconstruct “the image of school” present in German early education coursebooks. It is possible to name and describe the key dimensions in this image such as: the democratic nature of teacher-student relations, the focus on the activation of students’ personal knowledge as well as on their ethical and cognitive autonomy, realistic vision of the world, trust in students’ competences, and creating the sphere of the nearest development.

This article asks the question to what extent Ryszard Nycz’s ambitious project of cultural practice outlined in his book Culture as Verb succeeds in opening up ‘a new form of knowledge’ and thus equipping the humanities with a fresh validity. Nycz takes up the poststructuralist concept of the humanities as a site of alternative or subversive knowledge, founded on the principles of interpretation and textual dispersion, and refocuses it on involvement (participation) and binary oppositions (borders), i.e. human vs. nonhuman, or nature vs. culture as a construct. The article, rather than addressing the issues of involvement and borders (liminality), concentrates instead on the contradictions that Nycz’ s theory gives rise to when applied to history, time and the emergence of subjectivity (identity). There is nothing objectionable about the proposition that temporal change is at the very core of culture, yet its locus must be sought not in the proclamations of individual agents, but in the conceptual ruptures that expose and reveal the boundaries of (collective) consciousness and unconsciousness, i.e. the operation of contingency.

Decision-making processes, including the ones related to ill-structured problems, are of considerable significance in the area of construction projects. Computer-aided inference under such conditions requires the employment of specific methods and tools (non-algorithmic ones), the best recognized and successfully used in practice represented by expert systems. The knowledge indispensable for such systems to perform inference is most frequently acquired directly from experts (through a dialogue: a domain expert - a knowledge engineer) and from various source documents. Little is known, however, about the possibility of automating knowledge acquisition in this area and as a result, in practice it is scarcely ever used. lt has to be noted that in numerous areas of management more and more attention is paid to the issue of acquiring knowledge from available data. What is known and successfully employed in the practice of aiding the decision-making is the different methods and tools. The paper attempts to select methods for knowledge discovery in data and presents possible ways of representing the acquired knowledge as well as sample tools (including programming ones), allowing for the use of this knowledge in the area under consideration.

This article aims to reconstruct Max Scheler’s conception of three types of knowledge, outlined in his late work Philosophical Perspectives (1928). Scheler distinguished three kinds of knowledge: empirical, used to exercise control over nature, eidetic (essential) and metaphysical. I review the epistemological criteria that underlie this distinction, and its functionalistic assumptions. In the article’s polemic part I accuse Scheler of a) crypto-dualism in his theory of knowledge, which draws insufficient distinctions between metaphysical and eidetic knowledge; b) totally omitting the status of the humanities in his classification of knowledge types; c) consistently developing a philosophy of knowledge without resort to the research tools offered by the philosophy of science, which takes such analyses out of their social and historical context (i.e., how knowledge is created in today’s scientific communities).

The article is an attempt to reflect upon the way in which some terms coming from modern anthropology (local knowledge, thick description) can be used in studies regarding proper names in the cultural and social perspective. This anthropological way of thinking has been presented in Artur Rejter’s new book “Proper Names in (Con)texts of Culture”. The author of the article shows that studying culture through proper names must entail the widening of the variety of scientific methods and strategies and adding those used in social studies and humanities.

In the article, the authors propose a typology of political knowledge from online learning activities and test its validity in an empirical qualitative study. The essence of their proposal is that meaningful study of the process of acquiring knowledge (rational analysis of factors modifying attitudes) must take into account both the perspective of the citizen (the demand for information) and an analysis of the publicly available knowledge (the supply of information). The authors distinguish three main methods of acquiring information: heuristic, reflective, and by-product learning. They note the importance of generational factors in shaping the cognitive activity of Internet users. There has been a gradual increase in the importance of source management, with simultaneous alienation and skepticism towards information obtained on the Internet. While the authors’ analysis is restricted to the Internet, their approach is not reductionist in that they consider the internet to be a medium for traditional media and its influence on civic attitudes.