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Common sense contra scientific knowledge: The point of misunderstanding
Section 16. Philosophy
Chernyakova Natalia Stepanovna, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Professor, Northern People Institute E-mail: Cherns2011@yandex.ru
Common sense contra scientific knowledge:
The point of misunderstanding
Abstract: It's asserted in the article that the answer to the question, why science was emerged in the history of humanity, demands from common sense to go beyond the bounds of the unconsciously learned allegations and to understand that there are so deep levels and so laws of nature and society that can't be known without the use of special tools and methods of science.
Keywords: common sense, science, knowledge.
No matter how profound and overwhelming the impact of scientific knowledge on modern society is, one of the most persistent illusions of social consciousness remains the idea that humanity could get knowledge produced by science without any science. Even among undergraduate students we can meet some ones who believes that the laws of nature and society can be opened either in ordinary practice by acting at random and correcting errors, or in a prophetic dream. To dispel this illusion is necessary if we want to keep science as a special cultural phenomenon.
Undoubtedly, even the most distant from science people isn't wrong in the fact that any kind of human activity includes elements of cognition, carrying certain information about reality. The history of the origin and development of man as a socio-cultural creature is the history of the formation of man as a thinking, intelligent, capable of knowing the logic of things and to follow this logic (laws) in the process of practical and spiritual obtaining of the world. Thanks ability of thinking, which reveals the essential properties and relationships between phenomena of reality even at the level of ordinary consciousness in everyday practical activity, man has learned to make fire, to create and improve tools, to domesticate animals, to cultivate the land, to build houses, and much more.
It follows that cognitive activity as a specific form of the relationship of subject and object isn't limited to the science, which is only one of the forms of the historical development of knowledge, and that scientific knowledge as the result of scientific researches doesn't exhaust by itself the totality of the knowledge produced by humanity. On the contrary, humanity has indeed a lot of vital knowledge accumulated long before or regardless of scientific knowledge.
It's just this undeniable fact of human history that makes it possible to ask: Why were people need to invent a special form of knowledge of the world, which over two
thousand years was rapidly moving away from everyday life, like the galaxy, inhabited by strange ideas and theories, encrypted in incomprehensible formulas?
Anyhow self-evident the answer to this question may seem to philosophers, historians and methodologists of science, it can't be received on the ordinary level, because it demands from all inquirers to exceed the bounds of the unconsciously learned allegations. The question will arise again and again, until it becomes clear that there are so deep levels of the nature and so laws of development of the phenomena of reality that can't be known without the use of special tools and methods.
If watching every day for thousands years sunrises and sunsets people were able, eventually, to understand the structure of the Solar system, scientific knowledge of this problem, carried out by astronomers, wouldn’t be needed to humanity. If the ability to count on one's fingers would give an opportunity to calculate squares, planet's orbits or trajectories of flying objects, neither mathematics nor physics as branches of scientific knowledge would be needed to people. In other words: if the essence and laws of natural and social phenomena were knowable in the processes of economical, magical, artistic, religious, political or any other kind of human activity, science as a special kind of cognitive activity would be excessive.
However, there are such aspects of reality, such levels of entities, such regularities that can't be known by any other — non-scientific — way, even if an arbitrarily large expenditure of human force would be applied for an arbitrarily long period of time (which, in itself, is incompatible with the duration and nature of human life, and therefore — is obviously impossible condition).
No set of non-scientific knowledge reflects those aspects of reality, knowledge of which is extracted in the process of scientific cognition, because, in contrast to all the other forms of knowledge, science, since the first targeted observations
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Section 16. Philosophy
of astronomical objects and phenomena of nature and to nowadays sophisticated experiments, continuously moved along the path of creating its own — special-scientific — basis of its existence and development. The practical interaction with the object of cognition in the process of controlled observation and experiment is no one of the scientific methods only, but an expression of just the very essence of the scientific attitude to cognition and its fundamental differences from all the other kinds of cognitive activity.
Knowledge of single, separate, specific parties and properties of reality, actually produced by people during everyday practical and spiritual obtaining of the world, will always be fundamentally different from scientific knowledge, since it has neither the inter-subjectivity (because there are no universal means for its expression, preservation and transfer), nor the ability to penetrate the regularities of the phenomena of reality (because it would be necessary to go beyond the ordinary practice). Meanwhile, all of the elements of scientific knowledge have properties that ensure the achievement of the main goal of scientific knowledge — inter-subjective knowledge of the essence and laws of development of the phenomena of reality.
Just for achieving this purpose special objects of scientific researches, that doesn't coincide with the objects of nonscientific practical or cognitive activity, are separated; special scientific tools and means of studying the object are created; special scientific methods of verification/falsification the truthfulness of the results of scientific researches are developed; the whole system of scientific knowledge (including scientific facts, hypotheses, theories), empirical and theoretical validity of which doesn't remain unchanged in the process of development of scientific knowledge, is continuously improved; special scientific procedures of presentation, discussion, storage, inheritance, etc. of scientific knowledge are invented; the system of institutions, organizing and serving the production and broadcasting of scientific knowledge and the reproduction of scientific personnel, exists.
Both types of Being — natural and social — can be the objects of scientific knowledge that (l) studies natural processes independent from the will and consciousness of man as the subject of history, (2) relies on a special practical interaction with the studied object — experiment and observation, (3) forms the empirical basis, the content ofwhich may be interpreted independently from the adopted hypotheses, (4) creates a theoretical model of the studied object, which reveals its essence at the level of quantitative laws, enabling to predict new empirical dates.
As a special form of cognitive activity, the purpose of which is the systematic disclosure of essence and laws of the natural phenomena by using specially created material and ideal means and methods, scientific knowledge is emerging at the stage of civilization in the 3rd Millennium BC, acquires sustainable features to the middle of the 1st Millennium BC in Ancient Greece, but aware itself as the special form of knowledge, different from any other form
of cognitive activity, not before 17th century in the Western culture of the New time.
The complexity of social forms of organization of science in the 20th century, due to the development of material and technical base of the scientific knowledge and the needs of social production in the effective use of scientific knowledge, gave rise to the myth, widely spread in public, about “multiple targets” of science. It seems to common sense that science is committed to a variety of goals: from economic benefit to the simplicity of the solutions of ecological problems, — and among these goals the pursuit of Truth isn't on the first place. In almost every University textbook or online resource one can find today the assertion (more or less strictly formulated) that knowledge has ceased to be the ultimate objective for modern science.
Meanwhile, science is committed not to the economic effect or to the decision of ecological problems per se, but to the obtaining of knowledge about the ways and means of achieving economically efficient policy and environmentally sound production. A scientific idea by itself, even developed to the level of formal theory, can't make a profit or improve human environment. No any result of a social activity is the direct result of scientific cognition, except of the results of scientific experimental activity in the field of science itself. Even speaking of science as a direct productive force, we must not forget that any kind of practical activity is based on the results of scientific research only in some degree. However, not these results are responsible for economically inefficient activities, but individuals whose actions may remain quite unscientific, even when in science there are knowledge the application of which leads to the achievement of the desired economic effect.
The only own goal of science has always been and will forever remain gaining knowledge about the world. Knowledge, only knowledge and nothing, but knowledge — that is the product of scientific cognition, whatever nonscientific objectives society tries to impose on science or in whatever own sins aspires science to blame.
The goal of any scientific research is to obtain new knowledge about certain phenomena of reality. Only this goal expresses the essence of scientific knowledge, since all that is already known can't be the object of scientific research, which is, primarily, a process of obtaining, receiving, producing ofscientific knowledge and only then — oflearning, assimilation, storage and so on of already received knowledge. Therefore, the key feature of scientific activity is its focus on solving scientific problems.
Scientific study exists only there and then, where and when scientific problems are set and solved. The presence of the problem field, in which there is at least one problem, is an essential feature of scientific research, so it's no exaggeration to say: where there is no scientific problems — there is no scientific research. The reason of this is that just through scientific problem as a form of perception of an object of inquiry this object appears before the subject of cognition
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as unknown. It is this specific difference of a scientific problem from any other form of perception of an object of the study scientists mean, calling scientific problems “the knowledge about ignorance”.
If from a logical point of view the problem is a variation of the question as a special form of thought which expressed the requirement to get missing (i. e., missing at the disposal of the cognizing subject) information about the object, from the epistemological point of view, the question turns into a scientific problem then and then only when the answer isn't contained in the available system of knowledge. This means that none of the questions, the answers to which can be found within already existing system of scientific knowledge, are scientific problems. And conversely, the perception of the object of research in problematic form determines the novelty of results produced in the process of scientific research, since
the solution to any scientific problem carries new knowledge about the object.
In conclusion we ought to say that science can't and shouldn't perform functions, which at different stages of human history was performed and continue to be performed by common sense, myths, religion, art, or philosophy.
Area of moral, economic, political and any other responsibility of science as socially organized process is the production, development and improvement of intersubjective knowledge about such aspects and laws of the world, which can't be known in any other forms of cognition, and the fundamental value, which is expressed the ultimate objective and the meaning of science, is the Truth. Burden of such responsibility is sufficient to ensure and justify the importance of the role that science has to play in human culture.
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