The question of free choice and determined decisions in selected concepts of social sciences

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Abstract

The subject of the article concerns the determinations of choices made by a person and their sources. Upon analysing the concepts that have appeared in social sciences to date, three model approaches were distinguished: (1) voluntarism, which assumed a lack of determination and pure volition of the source of the decision; (2) internal determinism, which searches for the source of the decision in factors within the human being itself, but not controlled by it; (3) fatalism, seeing the decisions made by persons as products of the environment in which they function. Next, the article presents the manner of approaching this issue as displayed by the most typical, in this respect, concepts in modern social sciences: sociological symbolic interactionism, sociologism with the idea of homo sociologicus, psychological behaviourism and psychoanalysis, sociobiology with evolutionary inclinations, the theory of rational choice and the Marxist approach.