Postulaty

Postulaty is the Polish plural form of postulant/postulat, and it is used to refer to statements or propositions that are assumed to be true within a given theoretical framework, as well as to a set of public goals or demands proposed by a movement, organization, or individual. In academic contexts, postulaty describe foundational assumptions from which further reasoning and derivations follow; in political or organizational contexts, they express the program or platform of a group.

In mathematics and logic, a postulate (postulat) is a statement accepted without proof and used to build a theory. Postulates are chosen to be self-evident or practically useful, and different theories may employ different sets of postulates. A classic example is Euclid’s postulates in geometry, including the parallel postulate, whose variations give rise to non-Euclidean geometries. In modern formal systems, the term is often used interchangeably with axioms, though the distinction is sometimes subtle and context-dependent: axioms are the foundational principles of a whole system, while postulates can refer to statements tied to a particular area or historical presentation. Theorems are proven from these foundational assumptions.

In addition to their mathematical meaning, postulaty frequently appear in science and philosophy as fundamental assumptions about phenomena, space, time, or inference rules that guide inquiry. In everyday language, especially in Polish, postulaty also denote demands or programmatic goals published by movements, parties, or organizations as part of their platform.

Etymologically, postulat comes from Latin postulatus, meaning something put forward. The term is used across academia and public discourse to describe the starting points of reasoning or the declared aims of a collective action, and while contents can shift, postulaty typically shape both method and objectives within a domain.