Abstract

In this paper I make a distinction between some characteristic features of human activity which not only challenge the possibility of being explained (reduced) in terms of cause and effect relationship, or by universal regularities, but which assign an element of interpretation and understanding to every human activity. My aim is to demonstrate that it is not the understanding that is submitted to scientific explanation but that every scientific explanation contains the component of interpretation and is evaluated from the viewpoint of our everyday, pre-reflexive being in the world and commonly (often implicite) accepted contexts and assumptions. In other words, we have to constantly refer to the existing background—a network of unspecifiable beliefs and practices. I would like to point out, after Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus, that the responsible epistemology of the humanities must overcome a series of assumptions of modern and contemporarycognitive theory which appeared to be surprisingly congruent with the classic thinking paradigm concerning natural sciences. Last but not least, I would like to prove, relying upon involved epistemology or hermeneutic proto-epistemology, the possibility of mutual symbiotic relationship between the perspective of natural sciences and the humanities