On Science, Inference, Information and Decision-Making

There are two competing pictures of science. One considers science as a system of inferences, whereas another looks at science as a system of actions. This book contains essays which offer a view which intends to combine both pictures.

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Klemens Szaniawski was born in Warsaw on March 3, 1925. He began to study philosophy in the clandestine Warsaw University during World War II. Tadeusz Kotarbinski, Jan Lukasiewicz, Maria and Stanislaw Ossowskis, Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, and Henryk Hii: were among his teachers. Sza- niawski was also a member of the Polish Home Army (AK), one of the young- est. He was arrested and spent the last period of the war as a prisoner in Auschwitz. After 1945, he continued his studies in the University of L6dz; his Master thesis was devoted to French moral thought of the 17th and 18th cen- turies. Then he worked in the Department of Ethics in L6dZ. In 1950, he received his Ph. D. on the basis of the dissertation on the concept of honour in knight groups in the Middle Ages; Maria Ossowska was the supervisor. In the early fifties he moved to Warsaw to the Department of Logic, directed by Kotarbinski. He took his habilitation exams in 1961. In 1969 he became a professor. Since 1970 he was the head of Department of the Logic at the Warsaw University. In the sixties Szaniawski was also the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology.
In 1984 he was elected the Rector Magnificus of the Warsaw University but the Ministry overruled the autonomous democra- tic vote of the academic community. He served as the President of the Polish (since 1977) taking this post after Kotarbinski.