Knowledge is the basis of our existence in this world, created by man according to the laws formed by human society. Huge amounts of information of various kinds have become our heritage, thanks to the discoveries of our ancestors.
Knowledge and skills - this is what the system orientates us to, into which we find ourselves almost immediately after birth. And it is wonderful that we can use ready-made data, drawing our conclusions on their basis.
But what is knowledge? The definition of social studies and other concepts that accompany this interest us in our article. We hope that the information collected will help to consciously approach the problem of knowledge and accept their significance in the life of a modern person.
What is knowledge? Social Science Definition
One of the sciences of all phenomena related to the social life of a person is social studies. It gives us a clear definition of the term. So, in accordance with the terminology of social science, knowledge is the result of cognitive (in other sources - cognitive) human activities.
In addition, knowledge is a certain form in which formulated conclusions and fixed facts exist, are systematized and stored for the purpose of transmission and use.
Knowledge and knowledge
In addition to the immediate question, what is knowledge (the definition of social studies we have given above), it is worthwhile to understand the related concepts. The most relevant for a full consideration of the issue we consider the concept of knowledge.
Cognition is a process through which a person receives this or that knowledge. Facts about objective reality are reflected in the human mind, taking its place there. The subject of knowledge is man himself, and the object is that array of facts about phenomena and objects of reality, collected and presented in a certain form.
Characteristics of Knowledge
The decoding of the concept of "knowledge" is engaged not only in social science, but also in philosophy, psychology. So, in modern philosophy, disputes over what information is knowledge are still relevant.
According to the current opinion of modern thinkers, in order to go into this category, information must have some signs, namely, be true, confirmed and trustworthy.
As you can see, all the criteria are very relative and subjective. This is the reason for the openness of this issue to modern sciences, which include issues of social science.
Classification of knowledge
Knowledge is an extensive category of social science. Therefore, a broad classification of this concept is inevitable. It includes many different criteria, some of which are obvious, while others are the result of the thought of philosopher researchers.
So, one of the obvious classifications of knowledge is by medium, in other words, by the location of knowledge. As we can imagine, they are stored in the memory of people, print media, all kinds of electronic media, in databases and others.
A more interesting, in our opinion, classification of knowledge is based on the degree of scientificness. According to it, knowledge is scientific and unscientific. Each species has its own subspecies.
So, scientific knowledge can be empirical (obtained as a result of one's own observations, cognition) and theoretical (perception as truths of abstract models of world data - tables, diagrams, abstractions, analogies).
There are more varieties of unscientific knowledge, and they themselves are interesting as categories. Unscientific knowledge includes those that are data on elementary everyday things - ordinary practical. Pseudo-scientific knowledge - those that operate with well-known scientific hypotheses that have not yet found confirmation or refutation. Pseudoscientific knowledge is what we call prejudice, delusion, speculation. There are also quasi-scientific ones (instilled with theories, but not confirmed by facts), anti-scientific ones (utopian, undermining the notion of reality), parascientific ones (which still have no opportunity to find confirmation).
Questions on social science consider a small part of the types of knowledge. However, for the purpose of self-education, it is interesting to know about existing theories and divisions of information arrays accumulated by mankind.
Conclusion
We examined in our article one of the fundamental definitions of the science of social science - knowledge. So what is knowledge? The definition of social science tells us that this is the result of a person’s cognitive activity , as well as the form in which this result is stored and transmitted.
The current classification of knowledge is very broad and takes into account many criteria. And our everyday and professional knowledge, and exclusively scientific facts, and utopian hypotheses - all these are separate types and subspecies of knowledge.
We hope our article has been interesting to you.