Jak filozofia empirystyczna zmienia myślenie socjologa na temat religii

Abstrakt

How Does Empiricist Philosophy Change Sociological Thinking about Religion?

In the article the author suggests three criteria of „good definition of religion”. He says that the empiricist criterion the most important. This is due to Hume’s requirement, which determines whether the word is cognitively meaningful. Then the author presented some of the objections against the requirement, but found none which would falsify it. Thuse, the author began the analysis of sociological functional and substantial — definitions of religion, using Hume’s requirement. It turned out that the functional definitions are a priori reasonable, and their sense is provided by a method of their construction. A lot of substantial definitions are cognitively meaningless. The main reason is a widespread error: ignotum per ignotum. This means that using these definitions, one cannot form sentences with logical value. Next, the author showed an idea how we can give meaning to these definitions? The idea is based on finding some characteristic and typical words for any religion, and describing it based on this model. For example: Sacrum is a property of the object. When contacting it, people behave, or ought to behave as follows....