Aggregate human knowledge lies both in the field of science and outside it. In order to manage progress, it is necessary to confidently determine the properties of the scientific component in the aggregate knowledge.
At the same time, one must not underestimate the knowledge that lies beyond science.
What knowledge should be considered scientific?
The criteria of scientific nature in the world of modern research are not harmonized. The number of copyright concepts, sometimes opposite to each other, is very large. Therefore, to understand the signs of scientificness, it is necessary to study those constructs that are the least controversial.
As part of this installation, this article discusses three attributes of scientific knowledge. It should be:
- true;
- intersubjective;
- systemic.
Truth and knowledge
All knowledge is knowledge of a certain subject.
If knowledge corresponds to its subject, it is true.
However, knowledge outside science may also be true. It exists in pre-scientific, everyday and practical forms, as well as in the form of guesses, opinions.
Truth and knowledge itself are far from the same thing.
Truth is said when knowledge corresponds to reality, its content is reliable regardless of the knowing subject and exists insofar as it is objective.
Knowledge itself implies a variety of forms of recognition of truth. They vary depending on the sufficiency of the grounds for such recognition and can be faith, opinion, everyday practical knowledge, conclusions of science.
The latter not only report that some content is true, but also substantiate its truth. The justifications may include:
- logical conclusion;
- experimental result;
- proved theorem, etc.
For this reason, sufficient justification is a mandatory and basic requirement for scientific knowledge, in contrast to extra-scientific.
The criteria of science put forward on the site of the foundation of the sciences the formula of the principle, interpreting a sufficient basis.
Leibniz, who proclaimed this principle, showed that thought, in proof of its truth, must be justified by other thoughts, which, in turn, have already been proved in their truth.
Intersubjective knowledge
Science requires knowledge to be universal for humanity, universally binding and universally valid for any person.
For comparison: opinion as extra-scientific knowledge is individual and non-significant.
There is a boundary separating scientific knowledge in its truth and other modifications of knowledge.
Extra-scientific knowledge is personified. They certify the truth without sufficient reason, recognizing this as the norm.
The truths of science are recognized only as objective and sufficiently substantiated. They are universal and impersonal.
The intersubjectivity of scientific knowledge makes its reproducibility relevant. This means that all researchers who have studied the same object and put this study under the same conditions will get the same result.
If every (every, every) knowing subject does not confirm the invariance of his knowledge for all knowing subjects, it does not show reproducibility and is not scientific.
System knowledge
Systematic organization organizes both artistic, everyday, and scientific knowledge.
However, the systemic criteria of scientific nature differ in a number of features.
They are based on rational knowledge, which is generated by coherent reasoning. The basis of this reasoning is experimental data.
The specificity of rational knowledge is a strict inductive-deductive structure. It gives knowledge such validity, which confirms that it is true.
Scientific and extra-scientific knowledge: some clarifications
Scientific forms of knowledge do not abolish, do not abolish other forms, do not make them useless.
The distinction between rationally justified scientific and non-rational extra-scientific knowledge should lead to an understanding of the following important circumstances.
Extra-scientific knowledge is not fiction or fiction. It has its own means and sources of knowledge. Its standards and norms are different from the framework of rationalism, they are produced by very real intellectual communities.
Often extra-scientific knowledge is the forerunner of the scientific, as astrological for the astronomical, alchemical for the chemical, and carries the beginnings of the emergence of scientific truths. Such types of knowledge, lying in historical retrospective in relation to the sciences, are called esoteric. They may be called foreknowledge.
Research novelty
The criteria of scientificness, indicating in the study specific data, the content and meaning of transformations and additions, are called the scientific novelty of the study.
Scientific novelty is recognized when:
- research develops a problem not previously raised in science;
- the studied object has not been previously studied in science;
- regarding the object, new knowledge is obtained;
- the above conditions are met in any combination.
The interpretation of knowledge as new arises when the known data:
- changed fundamentally as a result of research;
- expanded and supplemented;
- clarified (specified).
Signs of reliable scientific criteria
Signs of science cease to be its criteria, if they are considered separately from each other.
So, truth is born not only within the limits of science.
Intersubjective can be not only science, but also, for example, mass delusion.
Systematicity, considered without regard to other signs of scientificness, lays the foundation for pseudoscientific reasoning.
And only the result of cognition, in which the above signs are simultaneously realized, characterizes scientific knowledge in its entirety.