Non-scientific knowledge is a faithful companion of humanity throughout its centuries-old history of development. Science in its current understanding is a rather young field of human activity.
She is only about five centuries old, while the history of Homo sapiens began much earlier, in the fifth millennium BC. At the same time, the process of man’s cognition of the world and his place in it went on continuously, at all times.
And only a very brave thinker would dare to declare that the achievements of mankind in the pre-scientific period are inferior in importance and significance to those of which modern science is proud today.
Scientific and non-scientific knowledge are the two main tools for obtaining knowledge about objective reality. In addition to these two forms, there is also subjective knowledge, as well as self-knowledge.
Definition
At first glance, it seems that non-scientific knowledge can be called everything that is not included in the subject of study of science. But this is far from true. In fact, non-scientific knowledge is a clearly formulated category of philosophy, which has its own boundaries, laws and rules of application.
Moreover, non-scientific knowledge is one of the main sources of information for science.
By non-scientific we mean knowledge that is accumulated by humanity without a specific system. It is not formally enshrined in the codes of laws of natural sciences and its main provisions are not considered or studied by those theories that have been developed by science.
Presentation: "Unscientific knowledge"
Characteristic features of non-scientific knowledge:
- maximum proximity to human sensory experience and the lack of research into ideal models of phenomena characteristic of scientific abstractions and empirical constructions.
- connection with the practical life and experience of a person and with his urgent utilitarian needs;
- the lack of special tools and methods that would allow us to study problems and hypotheses that arise in any form of extra-scientific knowledge;
- lack of uniform rules, standards, norms, and criteria for assessing the results of non-scientific research;
- the lack of possibility of interaction of non-scientific knowledge with each other and the impossibility of checking them for internal inconsistency, due to the fact that a taxonomy of non-scientific knowledge has not been developed.
Varieties
Officially, philosophy recognizes the existence of four forms of non-scientific knowledge. These are the following types of non-scientific knowledge:
- mythological;
- ordinary;
- folk wisdom
- parascience.
Mythology as a type of cognitive activity
Mythology is a way of human explanation of certain events of objective reality that has come down to us from time immemorial. Those phenomena that could not be studied by people using the existing body of generally accepted knowledge were explained by them from a variety of positions.
Each nationality endowed objective reality with those features and characteristics that would form a holistic image of the interaction of reality with a specific society.
The main characteristics of society that became the basis for the creation of myths:
- the structure of the social order (distribution of basic rights and responsibilities among all members of society);
- family structure (woman’s position, ways of raising children, attitude towards parents, etc.);
- methods of obtaining food and basic necessities (farming, cattle breeding, etc.);
- natural conditions in which the community lived.
Cognition in the process of everyday life
The form of acquiring non-scientific knowledge in the process of everyday life is called ordinary or everyday knowledge.
Ordinary knowledge has great practical value and tells a person how to behave in certain everyday situations.
The benefits of ordinary knowledge:
- gives nuances of applying the accumulated experience in everyday life;
- can be passed down from generation to generation through teachings;
- develops a base of universal knowledge that simplifies a person’s everyday life.
The disadvantages of using ordinary knowledge are that it is always subjective and before relying on someone else's experience, you need to verify its usefulness through your own experience.
Folk wisdom
This is non-scientific knowledge in the form of a kind of compilation of myths and everyday knowledge, which is passed down from generation to generation in the form of signs, proverbs, sayings, fairy tales, songs, etc.
Folk wisdom as a form of knowledge is characterized by:
- generality;
- heterogeneity and inconsistency;
- spontaneity;
- stereotypy;
- high probability of misconceptions.
Parascience
This form of human cognition of objective reality has existed much longer than science itself, and has always been interesting to people.
To understand processes within the framework of parascience, there is no need to develop a special categorical apparatus or use special devices, as science requires.
The solutions that parascience offers are aimed at quickly and effectively satisfying the immediate utilitarian needs of a person and freeing his ponderous doubts.
But the obvious disadvantages indicate that parascience is not able to achieve the results that it claims during its special research.
Disadvantages of parascience:
- use of information that is not experimentally confirmed and often contradicts scientific data;
- inconsistency of hypotheses and conclusions with basic scientific concepts;
- speculation on unexplored phenomenal phenomena.
Lecture:
In the previous lesson we talked about the elements of a person’s worldview. Among them, knowledge occupies an important place. Knowledge about the surrounding world, nature, and people is the result of one’s own cognitive and research activities. And they are also accumulated over centuries and passed on from generation to generation as a precious experience. Knowledge is constantly deepening, expanding and improving. Let's remember the basic definitions of today's lesson:
Knowledge- this is one of the elements of a person’s worldview, appearing in the form of learned concepts, laws, and principles.
Epistemology - the science of knowledge
Is it possible to know everything? What are the limits of human knowledge? The philosophical science of epistemology, the study of knowledge and the possibilities of knowledge, seeks answers to these and similar questions. Cognition is the main subject of epistemology, which is the process of acquiring knowledge about the world around us and oneself. During cognitive activity, a person explores the external aspects and internal essence of objects and phenomena. One of the main questions of epistemology is the question: "Are we cognizable of the world?".
People answer it differently and, accordingly, are divided into gnostics (optimists), agnostics (pessimists) and skeptics. If gnostics believe that the world is knowable, then agnostics deny this possibility, and skeptics do not deny the possibility of knowing the world, but doubt the reliability of the knowledge received, the reliability of its truth.
Cognition begins with sensory perception of the world and gradually moves into a rational understanding of the world. Let's look at the stages of knowledge.
Stages (levels) of knowledge
There are two stages of knowledge: sensory and rational. Sensory cognition occurs through the senses (vision, touch, smell, hearing, taste). This is a direct form of cognition, in the process of which knowledge is obtained through direct contact. For example, you went outside and felt cold. Thus, the sensory level allows us to cognize only the external properties of the object of knowledge. This level includes three forms. Remember them:
Feeling– reflection in consciousness of individual properties of the object of knowledge. For example, the apple is sour, the voice is pleasant, the stove is hot.
Perception– reflection of all properties of the object of knowledge in its entirety. For example, we eat an apple, we feel its taste (a separate property), but at the same time we perceive the smell, color, and shape of the apple as a whole.
Performance - an image of a perceived object of cognition, preserved in memory. For example, we can remember and imagine how tasty the apple we ate yesterday was. Representation can occur not only with the help of memory, but also with the help of imagination. So, even before the construction of a house begins, the architect can imagine what it will be like.
The result of sensory knowledge is image. The role of sensory knowledge is great. Sense organs connect a person with the outside world, without them he is not able to think and cognize. Sensory cognition is inherent not only to humans, but also to higher animals.
The next step is rational cognition occurs with the help of the mind and abstract thinking. If sensory cognition occurs directly, then rational cognition is an indirect form of cognition. For example, to find out whether it is cold outside or not, a person does not have to leave the house, just look at the thermometer. If at the sensory level a person cognizes the external properties of the object of knowledge, then at the rational level the internal properties of the object, its essence, are established. This level of cognition also includes three forms:
Concept is a thought that captures the signs and properties of an object of cognition. For example, "Tree". Concepts in the human mind are connected with each other and form judgments.
Judgment– a thought that affirms or denies something about a cognizable object. For example, “All trees belong to the class plants.”
Inference – the final conclusion that is formed in the process of thinking about concepts and judgments. For example, “Spruce is a coniferous tree. Since all trees belong to the class of plants, therefore spruce is also a plant."
The result of rational knowledge is knowledge. Rational knowledge is inherent only to man. Look at the illustration. Thinking is a holistic process that occurs as a result of sensory and rational cognition.
Which stage of cognition is more important, primary? In relation to this issue, two opposing directions have emerged in philosophy: rationalism and sensationalism (empiricism). Rationalists recognize reason and abstract thinking as the basis of knowledge. For them, sensory knowledge is secondary. And sensualists (empiricists) put sensation, perception and representation, that is, feelings, in the first place. For them, rational knowledge is secondary.
In reality, the sensory and rational levels of cognition are a single process. It’s just that in some cognitive processes sensory cognition predominates, while in others rational cognition predominates.
Types of knowledge
Knowledge is possible in a variety of areas. There are many types of cognition, and therefore types of knowledge. Let's consider scientific and non-scientific knowledge.
Scientific knowledge is a systematically organized process of obtaining objective and substantiated true knowledge.
Its features and distinctive features are:
- Objectivity – the desire to study the world as it is, regardless of the interests and aspirations of the subject of knowledge.
- Validity – reinforcement of knowledge with evidence, facts and logical conclusions.
- Rationality – the reliance of scientific knowledge on thinking, the exclusion of personal opinions, emotions, and feelings.
- Systematicity – structure of scientific knowledge.
- Verifiability – confirmation of knowledge in practical activities.
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE |
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Level | the main task | Methods | Form/result |
Empirical | Collection, description, isolation of individual facts about objects and phenomena, their recording in order to later, at a theoretical level, draw conclusions. |
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Theoretical | Summarizing facts collected at the empirical level, explaining the phenomena being studied, establishing patterns, obtaining new knowledge. |
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Let us consider the process of scientific knowledge using the example of research by a biologist studying the dependence of plant height on climate. So, the scientist suggested that trees are, on average, taller in areas with a warm climate. (This is a statement of a hypothesis that is confirmed or refuted by the results of the study.) In search of evidence, the biologist went south, measured the height of three hundred trees, and recorded the measurement results. (This is the empirical level of scientific knowledge.) Returning to the laboratory, the scientist made calculations, compared the data, conclusively confirmed the correctness of his hypothesis and drew conclusions. (This is a theoretical level.)
Scientific knowledge is impossible without identifying cause and effect relationships. One phenomenon or event is connected with another, which is called a cause and gives rise to an effect. Let's imagine a very simple example. Petya and Kolya are walking along a narrow path (event). Petya stepped on Kolya’s foot (event). The consequence is a sore leg. The reason is the narrow path. Thus, identifying cause-and-effect relationships means that it is necessary to establish the dependence of one phenomenon on another.
One of the types of scientific cognition is social cognition.
Social cognition– this is the knowledge of the laws and principles of the functioning of society, culture, and man.
The result of social cognition is social and humanitarian knowledge, which we study in history and social studies lessons. Social studies is an integrated school subject and includes several social sciences and humanities (philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, jurisprudence, cultural studies, psychology, etc.). Social cognition differs from natural science in a number of significant features. Let's look at them:
- if in natural science cognition the subject is a person, and the object is objects and phenomena, then in social cognition the subject and object of cognition coincide, that is, people know themselves;
- if the main feature of natural science knowledge is objectivity, then social and humanitarian knowledge is subjective, because the results of research by sociologists, historians, ethnographers, and lawyers are interpreted depending on their own views and judgments;
- if scientists - natural scientists who study nature, strive to achieve absolute truth, then scientists who study man and society achieve relative truth, because society is dynamic and constantly changing;
- the application of many natural scientific methods of cognition in social cognition is limited; for example, it is impossible to study the level of inflation under a microscope; this is done by abstraction.
The impetus for the beginning of social cognition is social facts (the actions of individuals or groups), someone’s opinions and judgments, as well as the results of the material and intangible activities of people. Social research aims to discover historical patterns and social forecasting. To achieve these goals, scientists and researchers use social reality (practice), historical informants (archaeology, documents) and the experience of generations.
Discovery of a historical pattern occurs when an objectively repeating connection is discovered between social phenomena and processes. Of course, historical events and personalities are unique; for example, there cannot be two absolutely identical wars or presidents. However, some of them have common features and trends. When these features and trends are constantly repeated, we can speak of a historical pattern. An example of a historical pattern is the rise and fall of any empire.
There are two approaches to the study of society and history:
formational (K. Marx, F. Engels);
civilizational (O. Spengler, A. Toynbee).
The classification of societies within the framework of the formational approach is based on the natural change of socio-economic formations from lower to higher, from simple to complex: primitive society → slave society → feudal society → capitalist society → communist society. The driving force of such development is the class struggle, for example, in a slave society - the struggle between slave owners and slaves, in a feudal society - the struggle between feudal lords and peasants. Throughout history, society develops, moving from one formation to another. The ultimate goal of this movement, according to the teachings of K. Marx, F. Engels, and then V.I. Lenin is communism.
Socio-economic formation- this is a stage in the evolution of society, characterized by a certain stage of development of the productive forces and the production relations corresponding to it.
If the formational approach focuses attention on the universal, then the civilizational approach studies the uniqueness and uniqueness of the history of each people or country. Therefore, the basis for the classification of societies within the framework of the civilizational approach is the spiritual, ideological, and cultural factor. This approach to the study of history and society focuses on the local-regional characteristics of a particular society. Thus, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian societies or civilizations are distinguished. There are civilizations that have long disappeared, for example, the Mayan civilization, the Roman civilization. Most modern scientists adhere to a civilizational approach to the study of history and society.
Civilization- this is a stage of social development that has stable features of material production, spiritual culture, and the way of life of a particular region.
Social forecasting is the science of futurology. Its main goal is to develop options for the development of society or its objects. Forecasting is possible in various spheres of society, economic, legal, cultural. It is carried out by such methods as analysis, comparison, questioning, experiment, etc. The importance of social forecasting is great. For example, labor market forecasting provides information about in-demand professions and vacant positions.
Let's talk briefly about non-scientific knowledge and its types.
Unscientific knowledge - knowledge of the surrounding world, based on faith and intuition.
- Ordinary cognition based on a person’s observations and common sense, consistent with his life experience. Ordinary knowledge has great practical value and is a guideline for a person’s everyday behavior, his relationships with other people and nature. A characteristic feature of everyday knowledge is that they describe what is happening: “the paper is burning,” “an object thrown up will definitely fall to the ground,” but they do not explain why it is this way and not otherwise.
- Mythological knowledge - This is a fantastic reflection of reality. Myths arose in primitive society. Primitive people did not have enough experience to understand the true causes of the origin of man and the world, natural phenomena, so they were explained with the help of myths and legends. Myths still exist today. The heroes of modern myths are Father Frost, Baba Yaga, Batman, etc.
- Religious knowledge – this is knowledge based on religious texts (Bible, Koran, etc.).
- Artistic knowledge - this is cognition through the means of art. The world around us is reflected not in concepts, but in artistic images of works of literature or theater, music or cinema, architecture or painting.
- Folk wisdom - these are fairy tales, proverbs and sayings, accumulated over centuries and passed on from generation to generation, songs that teach how to behave towards others.
- Parascience- pseudo-scientific knowledge that arose a long time ago, when science was not yet sufficiently developed. Unlike science, parascience does not provide facts and is based on assumptions that are not confirmed by research. Parasciences include ufology, astrology, telepathy, magic, extrasensory perception and others.
Exercise: Give arguments proving the benefits of knowledge for individuals, society and the state. Write your opinion in the comments. Be active, let's help each other replenish the arguments for essays)))
In the most general sense, knowledge means a set of judgments about reality, which differ in the degree of their generality, the depth of its disclosure and the degree of reliability of the conclusions obtained. The term “knowledge” itself has at least three different meanings. Firstly, we can talk about knowledge in a purely practical sense, as the ability to do something, the ability to make some thing or perform a certain action. A skill that has become repeatable and habitual turns into a skill. But all such practical actions are nevertheless based on a certain knowledge, which has a spontaneously empirical character and is based on the common sense of everyday experience.
However, skills are necessary not only in spontaneous empirical knowledge, but also in rational scientific activity, where they are associated with techniques and skills in handling instruments and installations, methods of measuring quantities, and processing measurement results. The famous Hungarian chemist and philosopher M. Polanyi, who paid much attention to the philosophical problems of science, paid special attention to this. “The large amount of study time that students of chemistry, biology and medicine devote to practical classes,” he wrote, “testifies to the important role that the transfer of practical knowledge and skills from teacher to student plays in these disciplines.
From what has been said, we can conclude, firstly, that in the very heart of science there are areas of practical knowledge that cannot be conveyed through formulations.” Secondly, the term “knowledge” is often identified with the meaning that is meant when characterizing scientific knowledge. The most important characteristic of such knowledge is the value system that guides every scientist, and which consists of the search for objective truth. It is the orientation towards the search for more and more new truths about the world around us that is the main goal of any scientific research. In accordance with this goal, certain norms, criteria and research methods are established in science, which we will consider later. Thirdly, sometimes knowledge is called opinion, faith and belief, where the subjective factor plays a significant role. Opinions express the subject’s attitude to reality, which may turn out to be erroneous and contradictory to other opinions, and sometimes simply an illusion.
Faith in the non-religious sense of the word is a subjective assessment of any fact, statement, assumption, guess, etc. In contrast to subjective faith, rational faith is also distinguished, which is based on empirical facts, their generalizations and logical conclusions. It is this kind of rational faith that is dealt with in science, when methods of statistical and logical probability are used to determine it. The degree of its reliability can vary from impossibility to practical reliability. A much more complex nature is inherent in beliefs, which include a rational-logical part, based on facts and logical conclusions, a psychological part, associated with feelings and emotions, moral, worldview and others. The rational-logical part of beliefs is usually analyzed within the framework of argumentation. In whatever sense, however, knowledge is considered, it must be distinguished from the process of knowing it.
If knowledge is the result of studying reality, then cognition is the process of its search and research. This difference is of particular importance for science, in which the process of cognition is particularly complex, going beyond the scope of empirical knowledge, which is limited to everyday, practical and other forms of extra-scientific knowledge. That is why in science they specifically analyze the results of knowledge in the form of existing concepts, hypotheses, laws and theories, on the one hand, and, on the other, the process of scientific research with the help of which they were obtained. If logical methods can be used to analyze, classify and systematize the results of cognition, then to study the process of cognition more often one has to turn to methodological and heuristic ones, i.e. search, means and methods, and also take into account the role of imagination, intuition, ingenuity, etc.
Ancient philosophers began to study various types of knowledge. Parmenides and Plato distinguished knowledge of truth (episteme) from opinion (doxa). If genuine knowledge gives reliably true knowledge, then opinion can be overcome by illusion, delusion, unfounded faith, etc. That is why Plato, for example, believed that the only reliable knowledge is provided only by mathematics. But his student Aristotle believed that it was possible to obtain true knowledge about nature, which he associated with physics (from the Greek “fusis” - nature) and he himself took the first steps in its creation. However, ancient Greek science remained generally speculative, since it did not know experiment, and used observations only for a simple description of phenomena.
The emergence of experimental natural science in the 17th century put forward as one of the urgent tasks the criticism of scholastic natural philosophical and religious views that prevented the knowledge of the objective laws of nature and their practical use in the interests of society. It was in modern times that the view arose that true knowledge can only be provided by science, based not only on mathematics, as Plato believed, but also on the experimental method, which was first created and successfully applied by Galileo. Therefore, the great founders of classical natural science, Galileo and Newton, invariably emphasized that scientific knowledge should be strictly distinguished from various forms of extra-scientific knowledge.
In the 18th century, I. Kant analyzed the structure and boundaries of science, who tried to provide a philosophical justification for the scientific knowledge that was represented by Newtonian mechanics. Kant proposed to precisely delimit the boundaries of science and clearly separate it from faith, opinion, myths and other forms of pre-scientific knowledge, as well as from art, morality, religion and other forms of consciousness. Hegel, who approached the consideration of truth as a dialectical process of the movement of thought, began to consider knowledge in a broader context. Therefore, he included in the composition of knowledge both pre-scientific forms of knowledge, as well as modern forms of spiritual culture. This dialectical approach to knowledge, with appropriate amendments, was later adopted by Marxism. Features of scientific knowledge. If in the pre-scientific period of its existence science was not yet separated from everyday knowledge and practice, then as it develops in the future it turns into an independent field of cognitive activity. The main goal of this activity was the production of objective knowledge about the world around us, and the basis of its value was obtaining true knowledge about the world. While in ordinary cognition the mastery of the world occurs within the framework of direct practical activity, science creates special abstractions and idealizations for this. Therefore, it deals directly not with material, but with abstract and ideal objects, on the basis of which it builds its hypotheses and theories.
Scientific knowledge differs from everyday and practical knowledge also in its systematicity and consistency, both in the process of searching for new knowledge and organizing all known, existing and newly discovered knowledge. Each subsequent step in science is based on the previous step, each new discovery receives its justification when it becomes an element of a certain system of knowledge. Most often, such a system is theory, as a developed form of rational knowledge. In contrast, everyday knowledge has a scattered, random and unorganized nature, in which individual facts unrelated to each other or their simplest inductive generalizations predominate. The further process of systematization of knowledge in science continues in the unification of theories within individual scientific disciplines, and the latter in interdisciplinary areas of research. As an illustration of the interdisciplinary research that has emerged in recent decades, one can point to, for example, cybernetics and then synergetics. It is known that control processes were studied in various sciences even before the advent of cybernetics, but it was cybernetics that first clearly formulated them, gave them the missing commonality and developed a unified terminology and language, which greatly facilitated communication and mutual understanding between scientists of different specialties. Similarly, the problems of self-organization were studied on the basis of biological, economic and social sciences, but only synergetics put forward a new general concept of self-organization and thereby formulated its general principles, which are used in different areas of research. Her important merit is that she was the first to show that, given certain prerequisites and conditions, self-organization can begin even in the simplest inorganic open-type systems. The emergence of such interdisciplinary research indicates the presence in science of a tendency towards the integration of scientific knowledge, a significant impetus to which was given by the systemic movement that unfolded after the Second World War. This tendency overcomes the negative consequences of the opposite tendency towards the differentiation of knowledge, aimed at the separate study of individual phenomena, processes and areas of the real world.
Of course, the process of differentiation plays a significant role in the progress of science, as it allows us to study them deeper and more accurately. However, in order to reflect the unity and integrity of the world and its individual systems, it is necessary to integrate scientific knowledge within the framework of appropriate conceptual systems. The most important functions of theoretical systems of science are to explain existing concrete facts and predict new, still unknown facts. To implement these functions and, therefore, apply the results of scientific research in practice, science discovers objective laws according to which objects and phenomena of the real world change and transform. If such laws are known, then it will be possible to explain why certain phenomena and processes occur. On the other hand, knowledge of laws allows one to predict new facts, since they turn out to be logical consequences of known laws. Thus, it is precisely the orientation of science towards the discovery of objective laws of nature and society and the associated possibility of explaining not only known facts, but also predicting unknown facts, that fundamentally distinguish scientific knowledge from other, extra-scientific forms of knowledge.
Firstly, in contrast to a simple description of the phenomena and processes being studied, science builds ideal models of them, on the basis of which it gets the opportunity to study them in a “pure” form. Such research is carried out according to the internal logic of model development and, if the initial premises of the model were correct, then they can lead to true conclusions that were not known before. Due to this, such knowledge can significantly advance known knowledge and be unexpected for practitioners.
Secondly, the possibility of science getting ahead of existing practice opens up enormous prospects for the relatively independent development of its ideas, models and programs. Science can now not react to the immediate demands of practice and utilitarian needs, but continue to develop its theories, guided by the logic of the development of scientific thought. As the history of science shows, it is the results of the most important theoretical research that turn out to be most valuable for practice. The discovery of the theory of electromagnetism led to the creation of electrical engineering and radio engineering, quantum mechanics contributed to the mastery of atomic energy, the development of molecular genetics and the deciphering of the genetic code made it possible to control heredity, create genetically modified plant species and treat hereditary diseases. The number of such examples can easily be increased, and they all indicate the leading role of science in the scientific and technological progress of society.
Thirdly, using experimental methods, science has the opportunity to better control the process of scientific research and more accurately test its hypotheses and theories. This saves science from having to resort to current practice every time. First, new discoveries, hypotheses and theories are tested in it in laboratory experiments and only then find application in practice, in industry, agriculture, medicine and other sectors of the national economy. With the progress of science, the time frame for introducing new discoveries into practice is also noticeably reduced.
Fourthly, science, unlike non-scientific forms of knowledge, uses special means, methods, techniques and criteria for both empirical and theoretical research, which contribute to the targeted search for truth, make this search orderly and organized, which greatly contributes to the effectiveness of scientific research. Thus, in empirical knowledge, such means of scientific research as various observation and measurement instruments (telescopes, microscopes, cameras, etc.), and special instruments, instruments, experimental installations, etc. are widely used.
In contrast to the common sense of everyday knowledge, science is also guided by certain standards, criteria or norms of research that ensure the intersubjectivity of the results obtained. For example, observational or experimental data must be reproducible by any scientist in the relevant field of knowledge, which means that they should not depend on the subject, his desires and intentions. This is why they are called intersubjective. The history of science knows many cases of scientists making conscientious mistakes when reporting their results, not to mention their deliberate falsification. That is why in science certain criteria and norms of research are established that any scientist must follow. Such criteria can be conditionally called universal for all science, because they serve, first of all, to ensure the objectivity of research results, excluding any bias, prejudice, arbitrariness and logical inconsistency of conclusions.
The criterion of the consistency of scientific knowledge ensures consistency of thinking, achieved by observing the known laws of classical, or Aristotelian, logic and, above all, the law of preventing contradiction. The criterion of consistency plays a decisive role in such formal and abstract sciences as mathematics and logic, where the very existence of their objects is based on this criterion. After all, a formally contradictory object or evidence has no right to exist in science. If the definition of a concept or the proof of a theorem turns out to be contradictory, then it is considered incorrect and therefore should be excluded from science or, at least, require correction.
Compliance with the criterion of consistency is mandatory not only for mathematics and logic, but also for any sciences, including those based on experiment or specific facts. Such sciences are often called empirical because they develop and are based on various forms of experience, including observations and experiments, the results of which form the empirical basis of science. These include most of the natural and technical sciences. In contrast, the economic, social and human sciences rely primarily on facts established through observations of social life and practice, and therefore they are often called factual sciences. Since both sciences ultimately rely on experience, facts and practice, and thus differ from abstract and formal sciences, in the future, for the sake of unity of terminology, we will call them empirical sciences.
It should, however, not be forgotten that in all these sciences knowledge is not limited only to observations and experience, but widely uses theoretical research methods. Why is the consistency criterion so important for empirical and theoretical systems?
From logic it is known that two contradictory propositions cannot be simultaneously true, i.e. their conjunction produces a false statement. But according to the rule of implication of symbolic logic, which underlies logical inference, both truth and falsehood can be obtained from a false statement. Therefore, allowing contradiction in reasoning would lead to the destruction of order and consistency in our reasoning. To exclude this possibility, a special law is introduced in classical and symbolic logic that prohibits contradictions in reasoning (the principle of consistency). From a substantive point of view, allowing a contradiction would lead to the futility of science, since a contradictory system does not provide any specific information about the world being studied. Along with contradictions in science, antinomies or paradoxes sometimes arise, which can even lead to crises in its foundations. A typical example is the theory of abstract sets, built by G. Cantor at the end of the 19th century to provide the final foundation for all classical mathematics. However, paradoxes were soon discovered in it, which indicated the troubles of this theory, which claimed to be a solid foundation for all mathematics.
Over time, the number of such paradoxes began to increase and a satisfactory solution has not yet been found. But what did mathematicians do with these paradoxes? Through the mouth of the great German mathematician D. Hilbert, they declared: “no one can expel us from the paradise that Cantor created for us.” Therefore, instead of the previous Cantor theory, they built an axiomatic theory of sets, in which paradoxes have not yet been discovered. Thus, the antinomies and paradoxes here turned out to be localized and isolated from the rest of the working theory.
In natural science, contradictions also often arise when old concepts and theories turn out to be inadequate to new experimental facts. Scientists do not immediately seek to discard such theories, but try to limit the scope of their application. But this does not mean at all that paradoxes should not be taken into account. Rather, their discovery in a theoretical system indicates insufficient validity and adequacy of the theory, and therefore the task of researchers is to revise and modify the theory, to eliminate the paradoxes in it. Often this leads to the construction of a new theory, as shown by the example of restructuring the analysis of infinitesimals in mathematics using the theory of limits or the creation of a wave theory of light in optics instead of a corpuscular one. However, logical contradictions in reasoning should not be confused with contradictions in the development of cognition, which are expressed in the inconsistency of different aspects, stages and moments of the development process.
For example, in the development of scientific knowledge, a discrepancy periodically arises between new facts and old methods of theoretically explaining them. Such a discrepancy creates a difficulty or problem in science that needs to be resolved. Therefore, in contrast to a formal-logical contradiction, the discrepancy between new facts and old methods of explaining them is resolved not by eliminating this contradiction, but by constructing a new theory capable of explaining newly discovered facts. The logical criterion of consistency is used to check the inconsistency of some statements or fragments of theory with others and is therefore associated mainly with the theoretical stage of the study. In the empirical sciences, first of all, they strive to reconcile theories with reality. This is why they are tested. The testability criterion in empirical sciences is carried out by detecting the correspondence or inconsistency of scientific hypotheses and theories with the results of observations and experiments. At the same time, in some sciences we have to limit ourselves only to systematic observations (astronomy) or historical facts that have come down to us (archaeology, history, ethnography), in others (physics, chemistry, biology and others) it is possible to conduct experiments, in others (economics, sociology , political science) - basically you have to analyze existing concrete facts and only partially turn to experiment.
Precisely because all empirical theories give us specific information about the real world, fundamental to them is the testability criterion, which establishes whether the judgments derived from them correspond to reality or not. This criterion is recognized not only by supporters of empiricism and “naive realism”, but also by such influential trends in the philosophy of science in the recent past as logical positivism and critical rationalism. They all also agree that the criterion of testability cannot be understood too simplistically and require that every statement in theory or in science as a whole admit of direct empirical verification. Indeed, many initial statements, principles or theoretical laws of science cannot be directly correlated with empirical facts, since they contain statements about abstract and ideal objects that are absent from empirical knowledge.
A typical example is the law of inertia in classical mechanics, which states that a body not subject to external forces will move uniformly and in a straight line until it is acted upon by these forces. It is clear that in the real world it is impossible to directly test this law, since no experiment can free itself from the action of all external forces. Therefore, verification of this law, like other basic laws, principles and statements of theories of experimental sciences, is carried out indirectly by drawing logical consequences from the theory as a whole, which includes this or that law or statement. Since a theory is a system of logically interconnected laws and statements of varying degrees of generality and abstraction, the least abstract statements that are closer to the real world of experience are selected to test such a system. These are usually called empirically testable statements.
By comparing them with actual facts, i.e. With the results of real observations and experiments, one can judge the truth and falsity of the theory. If real facts refute the theoretical statement being verified, then according to the well-known logical law of modus tollens, i.e. the falsity of the conclusion based on the falsity of the consequence, the entire theoretical system is considered false. If this statement turns out to be true, then we can only talk about the partial truth of the hypothesis or theory, or more precisely, about a certain degree of its confirmation by facts. Obviously, the more such confirming facts there are, both in number and in their diversity, the higher the degree of confirmation of the theory will be. However, there is no guarantee that future observations and experiments will not disprove the theory.
Therefore, theories of experimental sciences, even those well confirmed by facts, in a strictly logical sense can be spoken of as hypotheses. The historical experience of science shows that even theories that for a long time were considered unshakable and almost eternal and absolute truths, such as Newton’s classical mechanics, subsequently turned out to be relatively true, true only for the processes of a certain area of reality and the specific conditions of their application.
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Along with scientific knowledge, there are also various types of non-scientific knowledge. It does not fit into the strict framework of scientific thinking, its language, style and methods. In principle, non-scientific knowledge is accessible to every thinking person. It has specific features and functions in social life. The variety of forms and ways of knowing the world testifies to the inexhaustible wealth of human intellectual and spiritual culture, the perfection of his abilities and the enormous potential of opportunities and prospects. Thanks to different ways of knowing, the world around us can be perceived in different ways: not only with the eyes and mind of a scientist, but also with the heart of a believer, the feelings and ear of a musician. It can be comprehended through the eyes of an artist and sculptor, and simply from the position of an ordinary person.
In addition to scientific knowledge, there is also everyday knowledge. Sometimes it is called “everyday”, “everyday” thinking. It reflects the immediate, immediate conditions of human existence - the natural environment, everyday life, economic and other processes in which each person is involved every day. The core of everyday knowledge is what is called common sense, including basic correct information about the world. They are obtained by a person in the course of his daily life and serve the purposes of orientation in the world and its practical development. It is known, for example, that a person needs to know that water boils when heated to 100 degrees, that it is unsafe to touch a bare electrical conductor, etc.
This type of knowledge includes not only the simplest knowledge about the external world, but also the beliefs and ideals of a person, folklore as a crystallization of the experience of knowing the world. Everyday knowledge “grasps” the simplest connections of existence lying on the surface: if birds began to fly low above the ground, it means there will be rain; if there is a lot of red rowan in the forest, then it means a cold winter, etc. However, within the framework of everyday cognition, people are able to come to deep generalizations and conclusions that relate to attitudes towards other social groups, the political system, the state, etc.
Everyday knowledge, especially of modern man, also includes elements of scientific knowledge. However, it develops spontaneously, and therefore combines not only common sense, but also prejudices, beliefs, mysticism, etc.
Mythological knowledge arose in ancient times as the consciousness of the race, when there was no individual person yet. It was, as it were, the dawn of human existence, when man was still living in a dormant state and the sober day of self-awareness had not yet arrived. Myth is basically an emotional and figurative perception of the world, a legend, a legend and a tradition. It takes place humanization forces of external nature, over which a person does not yet have control and which are incomprehensible and even hostile to him. Primitive myth was a belief in the supernatural, in gods as omnipotent and immortal, but still earthly beings. The world is an arena for the activity and rivalry of the gods, and man is primarily a spectator of their fights and feasts.
From ancient mythology, naive ideas have come down to us about how the world arose from dark Chaos, how Earth and Sky, Night and Darkness were born, how the first living beings appeared - gods and people. Legends have been preserved about the almighty Zeus and the Titan Ocean, about the guardian of the underground kingdom Tartarus, about the golden-haired Apollo, about the mighty Athena and other deities. There is also a legend about Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to people, but as punishment for this he was chained to a rock and doomed to severe torment.
The mythological way of thinking turned out to be very tenacious and manifested itself in numerous social myths. An example of this can be the myth of communism, which expressed humanity’s ancient dream of a “golden age” as a society of equality and social justice. Elements of myth-making also take place in the consciousness of modern Russian society. This is due to acute socio-economic problems and the natural desire of people to find quick and less painful ways and means of solving these problems.
Ancient myths left not only the figurative style of thinking and an emotionally charged worldview. They provided rich food for art and for the subsequent development of religious thinking.
Religious knowledge is thinking by dogma and includes a complex set of ideas about the world. Religion is based on belief in the supernatural - in God as the creator of the world. Religious thinking is based on supposedly unconditional truth dogmas. In Christianity, the main dogma is the position of the presence of the divine in the earthly, the creation of everything by God. In essence, religious knowledge is the knowledge of God. Within its framework, a religious picture was formed, which left a huge imprint on the worldview of people and the spiritual culture of mankind. From the standpoint of science, religion is, in the words of A. Whitehead, “a flight to the unattainable,” to the illusory. However, it would be completely unfair to consider religion merely as the embodiment of some kind of stupidity and ignorance. Religion is one of the most important forms of spiritual experience of humanity, which embodies the search of people for another, more human world than this earthly world.
Religion and mythology as forms of spiritual exploration of the world are very close. They arose as an expression of human weakness and therefore contain fiction and fantasy. However, religion in understanding the world and explaining its causes and foundations goes beyond limits of this earthly world. She mentally creates supernatural world and explains from this position the development of nature, society and man. In religion, rational thinking takes place, used to substantiate the idea of the existence of God in the world. On the contrary, mythology is, in the words of K. Marx, an “unconsciously artistic” processing of phenomena in the external world and social life.
Artistic knowledge It is also one of the manifestations of man’s unscientific comprehension of the world. It represents “thinking in images” (V.G. Belinsky), embodied in various forms of art. The artistic image is in this case the main means of understanding the world. The purpose of art is to express a person’s aesthetic attitude to the world, to discover harmony and beauty in it. Artistic knowledge in art is carried out with the help of such concepts as beautiful and ugly, comic and tragic, sublime, base, etc. Fiction is considered to be the most important form of art. According to L.M. Leonov, it is the “anticipating conscience of society,” the subtlest tool for comprehending the spiritual world of man. It is not surprising that deep penetration into this world was achieved precisely in fiction - in the works of O. Balzac, F. M. Dostoevsky and other writers. Each type of art has its own means of understanding the world: sound in music, a plastic image in sculpture, a visually perceived image in painting, drawing in graphics, etc.
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In contrast to the scientific unscientific knowledge. These are myths, everyday experience, art.
The earliest way of understanding natural and social reality was myths.
2. MYTHS- this is always a narrative, and its truth was not subject to doubt, and the content was always in one way or another connected with the everyday life of people. Unlike science, which strives to explain the world and establish the relationship between cause and effect, myth will replace explanation with a story about the origin, creation of the universe or its individual manifestations.
3. Life practice, everyday life experience. Unlike science, where knowledge is an end in itself, and the process of cognition is specially organized, in life practice the process of obtaining knowledge and the knowledge itself are a by-product. Practical knowledge that arises during the accumulation of experience also has its own language: “by eye,” “a little bit,” “pinch,” etc. Most practical knowledge does not pretend to have theoretical justification and does without it. In the process of acquiring life experience, a person acquires not only practical knowledge, but also assessments and norms of behavior, and he acquires them without special effort, acting according to a model.
4. The increasing volume and complexity of people's activities aimed at meeting their needs led to the need to record knowledge and practice achievements in the form of descriptions. Moreover, such descriptions contained, as it were, the generalized experience of different people, sometimes even many generations, collected together. Such generalized practical knowledge formed the basis folk wisdom. Folk wisdom also has its own specific vocabulary. From generalized experience, unique aphorisms arose: “Strike while the iron is hot,” etc. This judgment was born from the observation that metal should be processed in a state where it is easier to influence. It means a call to do something in a timely manner while conditions are conducive to activity. Now it can mean an action not related to blacksmithing. Most of the provisions of folk wisdom, recorded in proverbs, sayings, riddles, are primarily associated with practical objective activity. . A distinctive feature of folk wisdom is its heterogeneity and inconsistency. This is due to the fact that it records the attitudes of different people to the same phenomena and actions. In the body of folk wisdom you can find directly opposite judgments on the same issue. For example: “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today” and next to it – “The morning is wiser than the evening”
5. Common sense– people’s views on the surrounding reality and themselves, spontaneously formed under the influence of everyday experience, and these views are the basis for practical activity and morality. First of all, common sense includes information acquired spontaneously, without special cognitive activity. This information is assimilated to the extent that a person masters the living, direct experience of his contemporaries, the skills of human life. Here common sense is the so-called natural thinking and is inherent in every healthy person. Common sense dictates that it is better not to do anything that could harm others or yourself. It is worth noting that common sense, being closely related to the experience of many people, is entangled in prejudices, misconceptions, persistent stereotypes, and ideas accepted by people of a certain era as absolute truths. Common sense is a rather conservative phenomenon and changes very slowly.
6. Art It is customary to call a specific form of social consciousness and human activity, which is a reflection of the surrounding reality in artistic images.
The subject of art is a person
Specifics of art:
Past art and spiritual culture present + creation of a new spiritual image
7. Parascience suffers from the vagueness and mystery of the information with which it operates. Parascience is distinguished by its claim to universality and exclusivity.
Unscientific knowledge
She does not strive for answers to the pressing questions of life; she categorically uses her formula, using it to explain the causes of a person’s problems. Although parascience sometimes contributes to the development of new scientific problems, it is characterized by avoidance of specific explanations and the desire to circumvent those facts that do not correspond to or contradict the methods used.
8. Social cognition- knowledge of society and the social processes occurring in it. Here the object and subject of knowledge coincide - society knows itself and the object and subject of knowledge is SOCIETY. People are the creators of social life and its changes, they also cognize social reality and its history. The inclusion of a person as a social being in social life, which he also studies, cannot but affect the process of cognition.
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Natural prerequisite cognitive activity of a person are his certain psychophysical characteristics. Thanks to the presence of appropriate sense organs, a person has the ability to receive data that informs him both about the external world and the internal states of his own body. For example, visual, auditory and tactile sensations contain certain information about the outside world, and sensations of pain or thirst contain information about the state of the body.
Thanks to higher cognitive functions - first of all, the ability to think - a person is capable of creating and operating such abstract objects as concepts.
Perceptions and ideas are forms of cognition that occupy an intermediate position between sensory and rational forms of cognition. Sensations, perceptions, ideas and various forms of abstract theoretical thinking are general prerequisites for cognitive activity and they should be distinguished from specific ways of knowing the world, which are largely determined by socio-cultural factors.
The so-called “scientific knowledge” is only one of the special types of cognitive activity , which - like any other - has as its natural condition the marked mental characteristics of a person. Along with scientific knowledge, there is philosophical (metaphysical), religious, as well as everyday knowledge. From the point of view of knowledge of the criteria and goals of knowledge, all these types of knowledge differ significantly from each other, although in the process of historical development they are not absolutely separated from each other.
Before talking about special methods of scientific knowledge, it is necessary to understand what distinguishes scientific from other forms of knowledge. If the distinction between scientific and religious knowledge, as a rule, does not present any particular problem, then the situation with the distinction between scientific and everyday knowledge is somewhat more complicated. The fact is that, firstly, both everyday and scientific knowledge are largely associated with empirical, experimental comprehension of the world. Secondly, both of these forms of knowledge are largely practical and positive in orientation, i.e. exist in order to obtain information that can contribute to more effective activity in the external environment. This is especially clear when comparing everyday practical and applied scientific and technical knowledge.
In connection with the noted similarity of everyday and scientific knowledge there is an opinion that scientific knowledge is simply an improved form of ordinary knowledge and that science is, as it were, an improved form of common sense . It should be noted that in the historical-genetic aspect this is apparently true. In particular, in the history of science, the idea has been repeatedly expressed that, for example, geometry as a form of scientific and theoretical knowledge grew out of the actual practice of land surveying and that Euclid’s geometry, based on theoretical postulates, as its predecessor had the need and practice of changing land plots.
If we talk about the prehistory of modern forms of knowledge - that is, about the period when various forms of knowledge were still poorly differentiated from each other - then, apparently, The first predecessor of modern scientific knowledge should be considered ancient magical knowledge. Indeed, both primitive magical knowledge in the form of corresponding recipes, and modern developed scientific knowledge in the form of arbitrarily general theories, despite all the differences in the levels of abstraction between them, are ultimately called upon to solve the same problem. task : deliver information that allows you to effectively interact with the outside world and realize your inherent needs and goals. For example, a medieval blacksmith-artisan and a modern scientist, a specialist in the field of metallurgy, essentially solve the same problem. Interacting with the material under study, they both want to understand how it is structured, what properties it has and how it can be transformed in any desired direction. Although they use significantly different methods. In particular, among the knowledge, techniques and methods of interaction that the blacksmith uses, there may well be elements of ritual and magical knowledge. For example, the latter may think that the strength properties of the object he forges are somehow connected with his observance of some rituals, that the level of his, so to speak, “spiritual purity” can somehow influence the final success within the framework of a specific professional activity.
Thus, behind magical and scientific knowledge there is the same need or intention. Due to this commonality of scientific and magical knowledge, and also due to the fact that in the early period of human history it is difficult to differentiate between ordinary practical and magical knowledge, we can assume that in the historical and genetic aspect there is much in common between these forms of knowledge. If we talk about a more or less developed culture, then the difference between them becomes more noticeable. Moreover, the more highly developed the civilization, the greater the difference. In particular, this can be seen in the example of the theoretical knowledge of an ancient geometer or a medieval artisan, which even then represented a form of specialized knowledge that not everyone possessed. As for modern times, the difference between everyday practical knowledge, which is possessed by all adult members of society, and specialized knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is even greater.
Practical everyday knowledge is based on many, as a rule, pre- and extra-reflective skills and techniques of activity, which are obtained either as a result of one’s own experience of interaction with objects of the external world, or are the results of borrowing the experience of the successful activities of others. Practical everyday knowledge is, to a large extent, the monotonous reproduction of the same type of repeated actions based on acquired skills and is not preceded by any reflection based on theoretical premises. The main goal of everyday knowledge is to obtain a practical, often vitally important result, and not to think in order to find a new solution to a problem .
Despite these peculiarities, everyday practical knowledge is not separated by an impassable gap from various forms of specialized and theoretical knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Different forms of this knowledge influence the content of ordinary knowledge and therefore it would not be possible to say that “common sense” remains the same at all times. In fact, it is changing quite a lot, and primarily due to the influence of other, including theoretical forms of knowledge, within the framework of which new meanings are being developed.
Once developed in the forms of specialized knowledge, these meanings - or rather, some of their elements - are then transmitted further and, ultimately, have no influence on the content of mass everyday practical knowledge. In particular, such types of modern everyday practical knowledge, such as computer skills or driving a car, could not arise regardless of the fact that corresponding complex technical devices had previously been created, which appeared as a result of the development of specialized scientific and technical knowledge. Such elements of general cultural and - within the framework of a developed civilization - everyday ideas, such as, for example, the knowledge that if a person falls ill with any illness of a somatic nature, then the reason for this should be sought in objectively existing pathogens or in the peculiarities of the course of physicochemical and physiological processes within the body, and not that it was “jinxed” and that a sorcerer was acting here, are the result of the translation to the everyday level of those meanings and ideas that were originally developed in the field of theoretical scientific knowledge. It would be impossible to come to an understanding of this with the help of everyday practical experience alone. As well as to the understanding that the cause of natural disasters is the result of a combination of physical and chemical causes, and not a consequence of punishment “from above” or the machinations of enemies.
It should be noted that although scientific knowledge has an impact on everyday experience, its role should not be overestimated. There is a huge number of techniques and skills of an everyday practical nature, the content of which either does not change at all for thousands of years or these changes are not of such a fundamental nature. In modern society, there are quite a lot of types of activities that are professionally engaged in by a huge number of people and which could well have been performed by, say, residents of Ancient Greece or Egypt. Although it cannot be said that the professional skills of any chariot driver, scribe or official in Ancient Rome are completely identical to those necessary for a modern car driver or office clerk, it is quite possible to assume that if the former suddenly found themselves in the place of the latter , then after short-term retraining they would be able to begin fulfilling the professional duties assigned to them.
Naturally, this is not true for all types of professional activities.
And this, first of all, concerns those related to the understanding and use of the results of modern scientific knowledge. In particular, the famous ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates would first have to study a school chemistry course, and then study for a long time at a specialized university before he could understand what, why and how modern doctors treat.
Non-scientific knowledge, its types and methods
The same could be said about Heron, the ancient engineer and creator of the first steam turbine, if, for example, he wished to work as a mechanical engineer in modern production.
Modern scientific knowledge has greatly advanced compared to its previous level. In order to correctly understand the content of this knowledge, special training is required. A person who more or less successfully uses common sense in the course of his daily activities often does not even imagine the dependencies and effects that are studied in modern sciences. Being consumers and users of modern complex technical devices, which are the practical results of the development of science, a huge number of people cannot even imagine on the basis of the use of what natural phenomena the functioning of these devices is based.
Thus, everyday practical and scientific knowledge have both common features and those on the basis of which they can be clearly distinguished from each other.
General The features of these types of knowledge are that:
1. The natural prerequisite for this knowledge is the same cognitive abilities of people, which remain practically the same for thousands of years;
2. Both ordinary and scientific knowledge include empirical forms of knowledge of the world;
3. These types of knowledge are characterized by a practical, positive orientation.
Difference between everyday practical and scientific knowledge is based on the fact that:
1. If the first type of knowledge is formed more or less accidentally as a spontaneous response to the demands of practice and often without even awareness of its content on the part of its bearers, then the emergence of the second type of knowledge is preceded by reflection, during which there is an awareness of relevant problems and a search for rational ways to explain them and solutions.
2. If scientific knowledge always includes a theoretical component in the form of corresponding categories, hypotheses, models, laws, etc., then for everyday practical knowledge the presence of this component is uncharacteristic;
3. Scientific knowledge is always a specialized type of knowledge, within the framework of which only a limited circle of professional specialists have competence, while everyday practical knowledge is based on common sense, in relation to which the majority of representatives of the corresponding culture are more or less competent.
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Unified State Exam. Cognition
Topic 1. Cognition and its forms
It is human nature to want to understand the world around us. Cognition is the process of a person acquiring knowledge about the world, society and himself.
The result of cognition is knowledge.
Subject of knowledge - this is the one who is engaged in cognition as a type of activity, that is, a person, groups of people or the entire society as a whole.
Object of knowledge - this is what or who the process of cognition is aimed at. This can be the material or spiritual world, society, people, the person himself, knowing himself.
Epistemology – (Greek gnosis - knowledge, logos - teaching)
is a science that studies the features of the cognitive process.
Cognition has two forms (or levels).
Cognition, its levels and steps
There are two levels of knowledge: sensory and rational.
Sensory cognition - This is cognition through the senses: (smell, touch, hearing, sight, taste).
Stages of sensory knowledge
- Feeling - knowledge of the world through the direct influence of its objects on the human senses. For example, the apple is sweet, the music is gentle, the picture is beautiful.
- Perception – based on sensations, creating a holistic image of an object, for example, an apple is sweet, red, hard, and has a pleasant smell.
- Performance – creating images of objects that appear in a person’s memory, that is, they are remembered based on the impact on the senses that occurred earlier. For example, a person can easily imagine an apple, even “remember” its taste. Moreover, he had once seen this apple, tasted it, and smelled it.
The role of sensory cognition
- With the help of the senses, a person directly communicates with the outside world.
- Without sense organs, a person is not capable of knowledge at all.
- The loss of some sense organs makes the process of cognition more difficult. Although this process continues. Compensation sense organs is the ability of some sense organs to increase their capabilities in understanding the world.
Open lesson “Diversity of ways of knowing. Unscientific knowledge"
So, a blind person has more developed hearing, etc.
- With the help of feelings, you can obtain superficial information about the subject of knowledge. Feelings do not provide a comprehensive picture of the subject being studied.
Rational cognition – (from lat. ratio- mind) is the process of obtaining knowledge using the mind, without the influence of the senses.
Stages of rational knowledge
- Concept - this is a thought expressed in words and representing information about the properties of the subject being studied - general and specific. For example, tree- a general sign, birch- specific.
- Judgment – it is a thought that contains either an affirmation or a denial of something about a concept.
Example.
Birch is a beautiful tree. Its snow-white trunk with black specks and delicate foliage are associated with its home.
Inference is a thought containing a new judgment that arises as a result of generalizing information obtained from judgments about a concept. This is a kind of conclusion from previous judgments.
So, in our example, a new judgment can become a conclusion:
I really like this beautiful tree - birch.
For rational cognition it is characteristic abstract thinking, that is, theoretical, not related to feelings. Abstract thinking is associated with language and speech. A person thinks, reasons, studies with the help of words.
Verbal language - this is human speech, words, linguistic means with the help of which a person thinks.
Nonverbal language - this is the language of gestures, facial expressions, glances. However, even such a language is based on speech, because a person conveys thoughts with gestures.
Which of the two levels of cognition is the main one in human cognitive activity? Different views on this problem have led to the emergence of several philosophical views and theories on the essence of knowledge.
Sensationalism - this is a direction in philosophy, according to which the main way of cognition is the sensory perception of the world. According to their theory, a person will not believe in the truth until he sees, hears, or tries (Epicurus, J. Locke, T. Hobbes).
Rationalism - this is a direction in philosophy, according to which the source of knowledge is reason, since feelings do not always provide correct information about the subject or only superficial information (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel)
There is also an intuitive way of understanding the world. Intuition - this is insight, instinct, the ability to predict events and phenomena without explanation or understanding the source of knowledge.
The modern point of view is that both sensory and rational cognition play an important role in human life. We experience the world with both feelings and reason.
Material prepared by: Melnikova Vera Aleksandrovna
Science and non-scientific forms of knowledge.
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Knowledge is not limited to the sphere of science; knowledge in one form or another exists beyond the boundaries of science. The emergence of scientific knowledge did not cancel or abolish or make other forms of knowledge useless. A complete and comprehensive demarcation—the separation of science from nonscience—has never been successful until now.
The words of L. Shestov sound very convincing that “apparently, there are and have always existed unscientific methods of finding truth, which led, if not to knowledge itself, then to its threshold, but we have so discredited them with modern methodologies that we cannot we dare to think about them seriously"
Each form of social consciousness: science, philosophy, mythology, politics, religion, etc. - correspond to specific forms of knowledge. There are also forms of knowledge that have a conceptual, symbolic or artistic basis. In the most general sense, scientific knowledge is the process of obtaining objective, true knowledge. Scientific knowledge has a threefold task associated with the description, explanation and prediction of processes and phenomena of reality.
6.4. Unscientific knowledge
In the development of scientific knowledge, revolutionary periods alternate, the so-called scientific revolutions, which lead to a change in theories and principles, and periods of normal development of science, during which knowledge deepens and becomes more detailed. Scientific knowledge is characterized by objectivity, universality, and claims to be universally valid.
™ Science as a special type of activity and as a specific type of knowledge
™ Science as a social institution
™ Science as a special sphere of culture
Forms of non-scientific knowledge
™ Para-science usually deals with phenomena that are not well understood at present, but exist. The future of such concepts is uncertain (examples: astrology, alchemy, telekinesis, torsion fields, ufology)
™ Quasi-science- concepts that coincide with science in a number of ways, but they are false, they only maintain the appearance of science (T.D. Lysenko’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, quasi-medicine, quasi-history)
Forms outside scientific knowledge
™ Religion — worldview, a set of moral norms and a type of behavior determined by the belief in the existence of an “other”, supernatural world and creatures - spirits, gods or God, who intelligently created and are creating all material and spiritual forms of existence, as well as a set of rituals and magical actions (cult), providing human connection with otherworldly forces And relevant (church) organizations and associations of believers.
™ Morality, along with law, is an important normative regulator of relations between people.
Morality and science: the problem of the humanistic content of cognitive activity (“Rousseau’s problem”). Can science help people solve global problems of our time?
™ Art is an integral part of spiritual culture. If science is a refined way of understanding the world, then art fulfills the same mission in the sphere of human experience of the world. In works of art, the world appears to a person as figuratively mastered, meaningful, and aesthetically processed.
™ Philosophy is a form of rational-theoretical knowledge of the world, which brings it closer to science. The subject of philosophy is the universal, universal connections and relationships of the world, such that permeate the main spheres of reality. The subject of specific sciences is individual “slices” of reality.
— Philosophy and science, general : following the ideal of rationality, i.e. achieving certain, well-founded, systemically organized, objectively true, open to change knowledge.
But: the science impersonal and intersubjective .
Philosophical knowledge is personal and subjective.
— Art: personally and subjectively, is a way of mastering reality.
But: involves an emotional assessment
™ Bertrand Russell on Philosophy, Religion and Science “Philosophy, as I will understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculation about subjects about which exact knowledge has hitherto been unattainable; but, like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or revelation. All exact knowledge...belongs to science; all dogmas, insofar as they exceed exact knowledge, belong to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, under attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions that most interest speculative minds are such that science cannot answer them, and the self-confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing ... "
(B. Russell. History of Western Philosophy. Vol. 1)
Concepts of the relationship between philosophy and science
™ Transcendentalist: “Philosophy is the queen of sciences”
™ Positivist: “Science is its own philosophy”
™ Anti-interactionist: “For a philosopher, it’s philosophical, and for a scientist, it’s scientific.”
™ Dialectical: Philosophical foundations of science.
4. The problem of demarcation of science and criteria for scientific knowledge.
Problem of demarcation(lat. demarcatio- differentiation) - the problem of finding a criterion by which one could separate theories that are scientific from the point of view of empirical science from non-scientific assumptions and statements, metaphysics, and formal sciences (logic, mathematics). The problem of demarcation is also a problem of definition boundaries of science, separating it from other ways in which a person can express his thoughts, feelings and beliefs (art, literature and religion).
The boundaries of science are often arbitrary, historically variable, and difficult to define analytically. Even after more than a century of dialogue between philosophers of science and scientists in various fields, despite some basic agreement on the basics of scientific methodology, a number of modern philosophers and historians of science have rejected this idea of distinction as pseudo-problem. There is now much more agreement in the philosophy of science on particular criteria than on the general criterion of demarcation between science and non-science.
· A similar problem was also outlined by Averroes, declaring the duality of truth: there is the truth of religion and there is the truth of reason (science).
· The importance of the problem intensified during the scientific revolution of the 17th century - science relies on experience and reasoning, and religion on faith and authority.
· Positivism affirms the following criteria of science: relativism (science puts forward hypotheses and does not claim absolute truth), empiricism (scientific theories are based on experience), pragmatism (scientific knowledge is useful).
· Karl Popper put forward the concept of falsifiability - scientists should allow the possibility of refuting their theories based on experimental facts.
Neopositivism
The neopositivists were the first to abandon the study of the problem of the emergence of new knowledge and initiated the study of the logical and methodological foundations of scientific knowledge. Thus, it was the ideas of neopositivism (1920-1950) that had the greatest influence on the scientific worldview and the concept of science in the 20th century. Among the main representatives of neopositivism (or logical positivism) were L. Wittgenstein, B. Russell, R. Carnap, G. Frege, A. Tarski, K. Popper (early period).
Neo-positivists believed that the purpose of science is “to form a base of empirical data in the form of facts of science, which must be represented in a language that does not allow ambiguity and inexpressiveness.” In this regard, Wittgenstein identified 5 provisions:
1. Language is the essence of thinking.
2. There is only one world - the world of facts and events.
3. A sentence is a picture of the world, since it has the same logical form with the world.
4. Complex sentences consist of elementary sentences that relate directly to facts.
5. The highest is inexpressible.
Thus, logical positivists considered scientific knowledge only such knowledge that corresponds to the world of facts and events (described by the natural sciences). Consequently, the possibility of philosophy as theoretical knowledge of ideological problems was rejected, which was expressed in the non-recognition of philosophy as science, the opposition of science and philosophy (metaphysics). “The truth of philosophical propositions cannot be substantiated because they are meaningless” (Carnap).
It is logical that the main demarcation problem in neopositivism was the search for criteria that would allow drawing the line between science and philosophy, thus separating scientific knowledge from non-scientific knowledge. As such a criterion, neopositivists proposed the principle of verification (from Lat. verus- true, facio- I do), expressed in the possibility of testing, confirming any theoretical provisions by comparing them with experimental (empirical) data. Thus, according to the participants of the “Vienna Circle”, scientific knowledge can be represented in the form of a triangle, at the base of which (the foundation of a unified science) are protocol sentences that reflect reality.
Heading to the top, sentences are combined and compiled into a generalization (definitions). At the very top there is a generalization that describes a single science. This method of constructing scientific knowledge is called induction.
For all its strengths, the verification principle was subjected to severe criticism, during which its serious flaws were discovered. For example, we cannot reliably make a universal proposition such as “All crows are black,” since it is unrealistic to count all the crows in the world and check their color. The black crows we saw (two, ten, thousand) do not prove that there is not at least one white one. Moreover, the “paradox” of positivism lies in the fact that the principle of verification itself cannot be verified and thus cannot be considered scientific.
Karl Popper
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