SOCIAL CAUSALITY, FOUNDATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF CRIMINALIZATION OF THE CREATION OF A TERRORIST COMMUNITY AND PARTICIPATION IN IT

The article is devoted to the analysis, theoretical substantiation of the establishment of criminal responsibility for acts related to the creation and participation in a terrorist community, as well as an analysis of the social causality of the criminalization of a terrorist community creation and participation in it. The article reveals the purpose and grounds for the criminalization of this activity. The author has paid special attention to the principles of criminalization and their compliance with the decision of the legislator to establish criminal liability for the creation of a terrorist community and participation in it. Attention is paid to the public danger of creating a terrorist community and participation in it, on which the social assessment of criminal acts is based.

The importance of metaphysics in the theory of nontrivial physical education – Polish tradition

The sociological cognition of physical education is, in itself complete but insufficient. Within sociological theory we will find explanations of the social and individual functions of physical education. However we find neither 1) justification of the reason for its origins: where does it come from?, why is it here?, nor 2) interpretation of the meaning – what value justifies the meaning ? The first question requires reference to the basics of metaphysics, and the second to the social philosophy and philosophy of culture. Expanding the scope of cognition of physical education by a philosophical thread shows this field of education to be a metaphysical singularity and a cultural universal with a three-stage chain of social causality. In the realities of a pedagogical university, the transformation of a theoretician of physical education into a philosopher of physical education takes place alongside the operation of justifying the sense of being. This is the transition from an explanation of the existence of being in the light of the truth about the cause, to a justification of the rightness of the existence of being in the light of the truth about the good. The intellectualization of the philosophical rationality of a student as a future teacher can increase discreetly the effectiveness of influencing the personality of the student. The aim of the considerations is to show the importance of metaphysical thinking in expanding the explicative range of physical education theory: from the trivial to the non-trivial.

Performance-Based Assessment of Social Cognition in Borderline Versus Psychotic Psychopathology

Individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) are known to display deficits in social cognition (SC). Our sample comprised 81 patients enrolled in residential treatment for complex psychopathology. We used performance-based assessments to test the hypothesis that individuals with SSD would display decrements on the cognitive/perceptual facets of SC, whereas individuals with BPD would evidence greater dysfunction on the affective/interpersonal facets of SC, with consideration taken for how gender may interact with diagnosis to influence results. Our findings suggested that women with SSD displayed more impaired understanding of social causality compared with their female BPD counterparts, while female patients with BPD evidenced greater expectation for aggression in their SC compared with women with SSD. These findings provide partial support for our hypotheses while highlighting the importance of accounting for the influence of gender on SC functional disparities between these two groups.

When Philosophy Met Social Psychology

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America is one of the foundational works of American and world sociology, famous for its innovative qualitative methodology. Its authors proposed new theoretical ideas, including a concept of social causality and a new theory of personality combining a biologistic concept of temperament with a culturalist concept of character. Interpreters of the book still disagree about the extent of each author’s actual contribution to the work and about its scientific status in light of modern sociological theories. This article claims that to understand the book one has to take into account the previous intellectual trajectories of both authors. As a theoretical dialogue between representatives of two contrary approaches, the work may serve as an alternative to the supposed theoretical “convergence” offered two decades later by Talcott Parsons.

Influence of Manipulative Attitudes on Mentalization in Patients with Schizotypal Disorders

The paper regards mentalization in the logic of systems and social mediation of cultural-historical approach. We applied Westen’s model to the analysis of TAT narratives and interpreted internal system relations between affective (“emotional investment in relationships”, “affective tone of relationships”, empathy) and cognitive (“сomplexity of representations”, “understanding of social causality”) components of mentalization; we also explored intersystem relations with manipulative attitudes in interpersonal communication (Machiavellianism). The detected low mentalization abilities of patients with schizotypal disorders (р<0,05) in their affective part (insensibility to the inner world of the Other) turned out to be dependent on the intensity of manipulative attitudes (р<0,001), which stresses the importance of interpersonal cultural context for social cognition. Interpretation of the acquired results in the logic of system structure of mentalization allows us to emphasize the resourcefulness of internal system and intersystem relations: “tolerance to uncertainty” corresponds with the high level of cognitive “сomplexity of representations”, while high “сomplexity of representations”, joined by “understanding of social causality”, promotes adequate behavior-based understating of the mind.

Ratio via Machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology

Recently, sociologists have expended much effort in attempts to define social mechanisms. We intervene in these debates by proposing that sociologists in fact have a choice to make between three standards of what constitutes a good mechanistic explanation: substantial, formal, and metaphorical mechanistic explanation. All three standards are active in the field, and we suggest that a more complete theory of mechanistic explanation in sociology must parse these three approaches to draw out the implicit evaluative criteria appropriate to each. Doing so will reveal quite different preferences for explanatory scope and nuance hidden under the ubiquitous term “social mechanism.” Finally, moving beyond extensive debates about realism and antirealism, we argue prescriptively against “mechanistic fundamentalism” for sociology and advocate for a more pluralistic understanding of social causality.