Małgorzata Czarnocka - Böcker

Science often claims to apply reason and act rationally. However, the understanding of "reason“ and "rationality“ might be different and is not always transparent. Based on extensive analysis of existing concepts, Czarnocka offers a new concept of scientific reason. She shows that scientific reason is methodical and not instrumental and its basic forms are universal, i.e., they determine rules of cognition and action in all the human experience. She also argues that methodical reason grows out of subjective reason and ultimately from objective anthropic reason, i.e., from the foundations of human collective wisdom, as well as from ontic reason. The author claims that there is a three-layer hierarchy of reasons linked by the relation of conditioning. Methodical reason is conditioned by subjective reason, and this in turn is conditioned by the deepest layer which includes two objective reasons—anthropic reason and ontic reason. Moreover, she reveals that the problem of reason in science not an isolated problem of science itself, but is related to issues of human nature and of culture, as well as the problems of collective human wisdom and ontic nature of reality.

This book deals with correspondence truth, and offers an explanation of correspondence as a symbolization of reality. The author analyses those basic elements of known correspondence truth theories which are the cause of their inadequacy. She focuses on the theories which try to modify the strongest classical theories and shows that these theories are unable to free themselves from seeing correspondence as copying (mirroring). The book presents a «symbolic» correspondence truth theory claiming that correspondence is a specific kind of symbolisation in a Cassirer-close sense, and correspondence truth is neither a copy, nor any other imitation of reality, but its symbol.

One of the most difficult problems challenging the human mind is knowledge of the world in its human, natural, and supra-natural dimensions: what is the nature of this multidimensional reality? How do we know and verify the truth of our knowledge claims of this reality? A contemporary Polish philosopher, Malgorzata Czarnocka, has advanced one of the most comprehensive and insightful studies of the cognitive act and the conditions under which it takes place. The proposition explicated in this book is that Czarnocka’s analysis of perception functions as a model of explanation in our attempt to know the nature of the being that underlies the universe. This analysis becomes the basis of the author’s discussion of symbolic truth as a model of explanation and its other applications.