Theory is not just a reflection, but a reflection that replaces reality in order to build a specific activity. The content of the image depends on the function of activity orientation, on the mismatch between the scheme of action, on the one hand, and the situation of action, on the other. Fans of Z. Freud can identify subconscious motives and complexes in scientific concepts, and supporters of C. Jung will reveal the archetypes that have manifested themselves in the ideas and views of the authors of the theories.

With such a wealth of psychological methodologies, we can see the deeper foundations of theoretical disputes and constructions than the participants in scientific discussions themselves see. All this may well be applied to the concepts of psychology.

Subjective motives of psychological concepts.

One can arbitrarily argue about whether the “external acts through the internal”, as S. L. Rubinshtein believed, or the subject of the psyche builds images according to his own logic, as A. N. Leontiev believed. But today's psychologist should try to find out the motives for this discussion: why did A.N. internal activities, spoke about interiorization and exteriorization, and S.L. Rubinshtein denied these theoretical images and built others? Indeed, behind their concepts were real mechanisms for the emergence of these concepts, living human motives were realized.

A.N.Leontiev creates a theory of perception that differs sharply from Lenin's "theory of reflection". In Leontiev, the image is constructed according to the subjective logic of activity, which always provoked aggressive “theoretical” rejection in Lenin. Lenin's motives are understandable. If the image is not a direct copy of reality, but depends on the subject, then it is obviously dangerous to destroy the world based on the state of one's image of the world. Then one should look for the roots of the negation of society in the organization of the negating subject itself.

AN Leontiev wants to defend the subjectivity of the individual. But for this he makes a paradoxical move. He criticizes the law of "specific energies of the sense organs" by I. Muller precisely for confirming the fact of the subjectivity of sensations. Although the fact that sensation depends on the organ that receives the energy impulse can hardly be refuted. But how could it be otherwise, if the quality of sensation is perceived only in the central zone of the analyzer, and any influence, regardless of the nature of the impulse, is converted into an electrochemical current along the nerve. The whole variety of modalities of sensations arises on the basis of either electro-magnetic impulses (light, heat, taste, smells) or mechanical vibrations (sounds, touch). The variety of feelings is determined by the complexity of the subject, and not by the variety of influencing stimuli. The richness of our feelings is determined by the problems of regulation of our activity.

Criticizing I. Muller, A. N. Leontiev defends himself from criticism, for positions close to Muller. In the concepts and texts of A.N. Leontiev, many logical tricks and subtexts are hidden. Should have been able to get Lenin Prize for a theory opposed to the positions of Lenin. And we need to be able to see living human tricks behind theoretical constructions.

Confrontation of psychology and science. science ambitions.

The psychological approach allows us to evaluate not only the motives of theorizing, but also the principles of constructing theories expressed in the sciences. And here we immediately find ourselves in opposition to most of those views and requirements for the construction of theories, which form the basis of scientific theorizing. After all, the banner and creed of science is the elimination of subjectivity, the desire to present ideas and concepts as a "truly objective" view of reality. Therefore, the presentation of theories in science excludes the disclosure of those doubts and experiences that preceded the construction of theories. The scientist states the theory as a rigorous and complete construction of the abstract mind. He tries to completely hide the subjectivity of his constructions, the motives and emotions that filled the process and content of theorizing.

It should be noted that such “objective” theorizing is characteristic of the Western European civilization. And science itself, as a social activity regulated by principles, is a product of this civilization. Scientific activity as such arose on the basis of the motives of mastering the world, the conquest of nature by the mind and will of man. These motifs developed in the religious outlook. Judaism and Christianity represented man as similar to God the creator, and the world as created by the will of God, too similar to man. The values ​​of mastering the world, the conquest of nature by the will of man were not accepted Eastern religions. They are incomprehensible to Hinduism, Taoism or Buddhism. They are poorly accepted by Islam. Scientific activity is still imported to the East today along with the values ​​of Western civilization.

Scientific concepts formed on the motives of conquering the world. From the aggressive practice of conquering markets and territories, science has received and is receiving material support. Scientific activity is quite ambitious in its motives. The scientist seeks, with the help of his logic and his concepts, to master as much as possible everything that he undertakes to investigate. Either the world submits to the technology of science, or this technology is recognized as unusable. Then the weak logic and concept is replaced by a more powerful one that meets the maximum claims for mental mastery of the world. This is how the concepts of N. Copernicus and A. Einstein, Z. Freud and J. Piaget penetrated into the minds of people, displacing the theories of their predecessors. Schemes of science were the internalization of European actions to conquer nature, continents, social and physical processes.

Conquering, ambitious motives were reflected in many basic ideas and principles of science. First of all, it is necessary to refer to them the logic of atomism and materialism in the form of sensationalism. Here the very possibility of conquering and dominating was justified. Sensationalism gave the status of reality only to that which had the opportunity to appear before sensations and denied the reality of insensible phenomena. The right of objects to exist was made dependent on the ability of people to perceive these objects. Man declared himself to be God, on whose ability to feel anything depended the very recognition of the reality of things. Such ambitions were absolutely alien to Eastern wisdom, which in every possible way emphasizes the limitations of a direct perception of things.

Atomism, on the other hand, made it possible to declare the beginning and basis of the world not God, Tao, spirit, or anything else immeasurable and not conquered, but small atoms. Everything complex was explained by simple things, and it was not difficult to master the simple. This opened up optimistic hopes for the possible power of man over nature to the Europeans. Atomism represents the formation of objects by analogy with the design of things by man. The whole world is made up of simple and unpretentious details. A living organism is synthesized from individual molecules. There is no fatal logic of self-development of the integrity of the world here. It is assumed that, in principle, a person will be able to construct anything from elements: clone people, build a “bright” future society, control nature. Everything complex is created from the small, and people can rule over a small source in the role of a controlling god-like subject.

Also eternal war materialism and idealism practically cannot be understood if you do not see motivation in its basis. The concept of “matter” in V. Lenin differs little from the Hegelian “absolute spirit” or the Eastern “tao”, except for one addition: “and is given to us in our sensations.” As for the rest, the characteristics of "spirit" and "matter" are similar. This is a reality, “outside of us and independently of us generating the world in its development”. But it is precisely the question of whether matter is “given” in sensations or not that gives us a position in relation to the world. Can we completely take it and conquer it, or are we weak and incapable? Can we destroy the world "to the ground", and then recreate it according to our plans? It is a matter of motivation and ambition, a matter of obedience or impudence.

In the theories of materialism and idealism, it is possible to study the children's "oedipal complex" with different form claims of philosophers to master the “mother”, one can see what is determined by the philosopher’s motives associated with the formation of a desire for power or, conversely, a tendency to preserve world order. It is curious to note that, according to the observation of a number of prichologists, among many Eastern peoples the "Oedipus complex" is not formed due to the special organization of the family. In a peculiar way, this is consistent with the absence in Eastern culture dispute between "materialism" and "idealism".

Concept- This speculative system, expressing a certain way of representing, understanding, interpreting any objects, phenomena, processes and presenting the leading idea and/or constructive principle, which implement a certain design in one or another theoretical knowledge practice.

The concept is the basic way of designing, organizing and deploying disciplinary knowledge, uniting in this regard philosophy(cm. ), theology and science(see) how core disciplines, established in the European cultural tradition (see). The concept proceeds from the attitudes towards fixing the limiting values ​​for any area (a “fragment” of reality) and the implementation of the widest possible “worldview” (based on “reference” to the value basis of cognition). In this sense, the concept expresses either the act of grasping, understanding and comprehending meanings in the course of speech discussion and conflict of interpretations, or their result, presented in a variety of ways. concepts(see), not deposited in unambiguous and generally significant forms of concepts. The concept has, as a rule, a pronounced personal beginning, is indicated by the figure of the founder (or founders, who are not necessarily real personalities, since mythical characters and cultural heroes can act as such, transcendent divine origin and so on), the only one who knows (knows) the original intention expressed in the concept.

The concept is associated with the development and deployment of some knowledge, which, unlike theory, does not receive a complete deductive-systemic form of organization and whose elements are not ideal objects, axioms and concepts, but concepts - stable semantic condensations that arise and function in the process of dialogue and speech communication. Conceptual aspect theoretical knowledge expresses, first of all, the paradigmatic “section” of the latter, sets its topic and rhetoric, that is, determines the relevant areas of application and ways of expressing systems of concepts (concepts) constituted on the basis of the deployment of the “generating” idea. Concepts, acquiring the propositional form of a theory, lose their conjugation with the correlativity of questions and answers that form a certain complex. Concepts do not correlate with objects, but with questions and answers expressed in speech, and semantic "general topoi" recognized by the participants in the dialogue.

The concept introduces into disciplinary discourses ontological, epistemological, methodological and (especially) epistemological assumptions that are not necessarily explicated in them (the way of disciplinary vision and the horizons of knowledge available within it), without which the subsequent more detailed study of the presented idea is impossible. In addition, it "ontologizes" and "masks" inside the original (basic) theoretical structure components of personal knowledge, non-rationalized, but necessary representations within it, “joining” together different in language design and genesis (origin) of the component, introducing a number of disciplinary metaphors for this purpose.

Thus, the concept is first of all introduced into the theoretical discourses of disciplines by their initial principles and premises (“absolute premises”, according to Collingwood), which determine the basic concepts-concepts and reasoning schemes, forming “fundamental questions” (“ideas”), in relation to which special statements built within these discourses receive their meaning and justification. R. J. Collingwood believed that a change in conceptual foundations (a change in the intellectual tradition of S. E. Tulmin) is the most radical of all that a person can experience, since it leads to the rejection of previously justified beliefs and standards of thinking and action, to change of initial concepts-notions that provide a holistic perception of the world. The concept, being a form of expression of discipline, is specified differently in philosophy, theology and science. The most adequate conceptual form proper is philosophy, which can be interpreted as discipline in the generation and substantiation of the concept (in which culture [itself] describes itself), the “production” of the basic concepts of culture, defining the “conceptual possibilities” of the latter. The disciplinary conceptuality of philosophy is fundamentally open into hyperspace.

In this regard, theology fundamentally “closes” its horizons through the mechanisms of dogmatization, respectively, its dogmas. The term “concept” itself is replaced here, as a rule, by the term “doctrine” that is close to it, but bearing emphasized religious connotations and emphasizing the element of explaining the essence of the dogma: in particular, to new converts, when it can take the form of a catechism - a teaching, an analogue of which can be found in most developed creeds. Thus, being a content-relevant concept, the doctrine in semantic relation focuses on the "immutability", "finiteness" of the grounds-prerequisites that are not subject to relativization (which happens periodically in philosophical concepts). In turn, the emphasis on “learning” is also implicit in the notion of a concept as such. This aspect of it is explicated when the concept of doctrine is transferred beyond theology and religion, in particular to the area of ​​ideological and political discourses (for example, the communist doctrine), in order to specifically emphasize the element of "dogmatics" in the concept (hence the derivative concepts - "doctrinaire", "doctrinalism"). "). In classical disciplinary discourses, there was a strong tendency to identify the concept of "concept" with the concept "theory". Sometimes they denoted "incomplete", "non-rigorous" and the like theory precisely in order to emphasize its "incompleteness", "non-strictness" and so on.

In non-classical science, the concept of a concept, as a rule, began to be reduced to a fundamental theoretical (conceptual) scheme (which includes the initial principles, laws universal for a given theory, basic semantic categories and concepts), and / or to an idealized (conceptual) scheme (models, object) of the described area (introducing, as a rule, a structural-organizational cut of the subject field, onto which interpretations of all statements of the theory are projected). Thus, the concept is reduced to a preliminary theoretical organization of “material” within a scientific theory, which in its full “expansion” acts as its implementation (including “translating” the original basic concepts into constructs - see). However, in science, the concept can also be an independent form of knowledge organization, especially in socio-humanitarian knowledge (for example, the dispositional concept of personality or the concept of social exchange in sociology), "replacing" theory.

The emphasis on conceptuality in scientific knowledge implicitly actualized the socio-cultural and value-normative component in it, shifted the focus from “cognitive”, “logical”, “intrasystemic” in theory to “praxeological”, “semantic”, to its “discovery” outside, which actualized the problems of socio-cultural historical conditioning scientific knowledge generally. This was explicitly recognized in the postclassical methodology of science (see) and in the sociology of knowledge (concepts and / or concepts: “personal knowledge” and “scientific community” by M. Polanyi, “thematic analysis of science” by J. Holton, “research program” and Lakatosa, D. Vloor's "strong program", T. Kuhn's "paradigm" and "disciplinary matrix", A. Koire's "interdisciplinary unity", S. E. Tulmin's "disciplinary analysis" and "intellectual ecology" and others). The concept was also associated with the symbolization of personal perceptual experience through imagination (S. Langer), through metaphor (X. Blumenberg), or through a system of tropes (X. White). On the whole, postclassical methodology has strongly shaken the notion of theory as highest form organization and structuring of scientific knowledge, and the idea of ​​the possibility of overcoming its "hypothetical nature", thereby rehabilitating the concept as an independent form of knowledge. In the methodology of socio-humanitarian knowledge, there were even attempts to substantiate the fundamentally conceptual nature of the latter.

In modern postmodernism (J. Deleuze, F. Guattari), philosophy is understood as the "creativity of concepts" opposed to the concepts of science. Concepts, understood as the core of a concept, are considered by them as “something internally present in thought, a condition for its very possibility, live category, an element of transcendental experience," as "fragmentary unities that do not fit together because their edges do not converge," teaching us understanding, not knowledge, like an "archipelago of islands" of meaning.

Under the influence of poststructuralist and postmodernist discourses (especially the concept of "rhizome"), there has recently been a tradition of using the term "theory" instead of the term "pattern"(derived from English pattern; from Latin patronus - model, role model, pattern, style, pattern, pattern), close in content and semantic characteristics to the concept of concept and interpreted as connatative to the concepts of "insight", "basic intuition", " speculative vision”, which in any case emphasizes two aspects: 1) the “instantaneity” of “grasping” and 2) its “integrity”. In this respect, the concept of pattern goes back to the methodological analyzes of Collingwood (later developed from other grounds in post-positivism), who substantiated the impossibility of a completely rationalistically constructed transition from some “absolute premises” (visions) to others, which would require the introduction of the idea of ​​a “super-absolute premise”.

In the same vein, in relation to patterns, they say that:

• pattern can be criticized constructively only from another pattern, in which great importance has a fight scientific communities for dominance;
• the pattern is not so much substantiated as "imposed" on the "material", on the "subject field";
• the pattern is rather not even “chosen” for any rationalized reasons, but rather “preferred”;
• the pattern "provokes" the replacement of the discourse of "truth" with the discourse of "authenticity", legitimizing itself through the ritualization and canonization of the basic initial cultural property, and thereby "bringing oneself" out of the scope of the principle of falsification (due to the "incommensurability" of patterns).

Patterns, "nesting in the mind", in culture, provide stability, repeatability, fixability of the "natural configuration" (appearing behind the layer of the phenomenal) and "semantization" (distinguishing semantic units) that provide a vision of the world. Thus, in the postmodern perspective, partitions are removed between various disciplinary and conceptual discourses, moreover, between the practices (disciplines) of the body and knowledge. In this regard, the phenomenon of conceptual art that arose back in avant-garde practices, which transferred to the field of artistic creativity a form of conceptuality that was initially alien to art and removed its opposition to the “body” and “life practices”. In concept art work of fiction(text) began to be understood as a way of demonstrating concepts used in disciplinary cognitive practices.

As a result of this analysis, a very stable idea of ​​the structure of scientific knowledge gradually developed, which in the philosophy of science is called the standard concept of science. Apparently, it is shared by most scientists, at least representatives of the natural sciences. In the 1920s - 1930s. a significant contribution to the detailed development of this concept was made by the philosophers of the Vienna Circle.

The Vienna Circle is a group of philosophers and scientists who united around a philosophical seminar organized in 1922 by M. Schlick, head of the Department of Philosophy of Inductive Sciences at the University of Vienna. The problems of the philosophy of science were at the center of the circle's members' interests. It included such well-known philosophers, physicists, mathematicians as R. Carnap, O. Neurath, K. Gödel, G. Hahn, F. Weissmann, G. Feigl, regularly participated in discussions G. Reichenbach, A. Ayer, K. Popper, E. Nagel and many other prominent intellectuals. The ideas of the greatest philosopher of the 20th century had a significant influence on the views of the members of the circle. L. Wittgenstein. In the vague spiritual atmosphere of that time, the Vienna Circle defended " scientific understanding peace" (that was the name of the circle's manifesto, published in 1929) and was the ideological and organizational center of logical positivism. The members of the Vienna Circle emigrated to England and the USA, where they contributed a lot to the development of research in the field of the philosophy of science.

According to the standard concept, the world of phenomena studied by science is considered as existing in reality and in its characteristics independent of the person who knows it.

In cognition, a person begins by discovering - on the basis of observations and experiments - facts. Facts are regarded as something to be found in nature - they exist in it and are waiting for their discovery, just as America existed and was waiting for its Columbus.

Although the world is very diverse and constantly changing, the standard concept holds that it is permeated by unchanging uniformities that bind facts. Science expresses these uniformities in the form of laws varying degrees community. There are two main classes of laws: empirical and theoretical.

Empirical laws are established by generalizing the data of observations and experiments; they express such regular relations between things that are observed directly or with the help of fairly simple instruments. In other words, these laws describe the behavior of observed objects.

Along with the empirical, there are more abstract - theoretical laws. The objects they describe include those that cannot be directly observed, such as atoms, genetic code etc. Theoretical laws cannot be deduced by inductive generalization of observed facts. It is believed that this is where creative imagination scientist - for a while he must break away from factuality and try to put forward some speculative assumption - a theoretical hypothesis. The question arises: how can one be convinced of the correctness of these hypotheses, how can one choose from among many possible one that should be considered as an objective law of nature? Verification of scientific hypotheses for reliability occurs by logical derivation (deduction) from them of more specific provisions that can explain the observed regularities, i.e. empirical laws. Theoretical laws are related to empirical laws in much the same way that empirical laws are related to facts. This standard model can be depicted using the following diagram.

From facts and empirical laws no direct way to theoretical laws, empirical laws can be deduced from the latter, but the theoretical laws themselves are obtained by conjecture. This form of knowledge is also called the hypothetical-deductive model of theory.

The standard concept of scientific knowledge reflects well the views of the scientists themselves. To confirm this, we will cite an excerpt from the work of the outstanding naturalist and thinker V.I. Vernadsky "Scientific thought as a planetary phenomenon" (1937 - 1938).

"There is one fundamental phenomenon that determines scientific thought and distinguishes scientific results and scientific conclusions clearly and simply from the statements of philosophy and religion - this is the universal validity and indisputability of correctly drawn scientific conclusions, scientific statements, concepts, conclusions. Scientific, logically correct actions, have such force only because science has its own definite structure and that in it there is a field of facts and generalizations, scientific, empirically established facts and empirically obtained generalizations, which, in their essence, cannot be really disputed. Such facts and such generalizations, if and created at times by philosophy, religion, life experience or social common sense and tradition, cannot be proved by them as such. Neither philosophy, nor religion, nor common sense cannot establish them with the degree of certainty that science gives ... Close connection philosophy and science in discussion general issues natural science ("philosophy of science") is a fact which, as such, has to be reckoned with, and which is connected with the fact that the naturalist, in his scientific work often goes beyond the limits of exact, scientifically established facts and empirical generalizations without stipulating or even realizing it. Obviously, in a science constructed in this way, only a part of its statements can be considered universally binding and immutable.

But this part embraces and penetrates a huge area of ​​scientific knowledge, since scientific facts belong to it - millions of millions of facts. Their number is steadily growing, they are brought into systems and classifications. These scientific facts constitute the main content of scientific knowledge and scientific work.

They, if properly established, are indisputable and universally binding. Along with them, systems of certain scientific facts can be singled out, the main form of which is empirical generalizations.

This is the main fund of science, scientific facts, their classifications and empirical generalizations, which, in its reliability, cannot cause doubts and sharply distinguishes science from philosophy and religion. Neither philosophy nor religion creates such facts and generalizations.

Along with it, we have in science numerous logical constructions that connect scientific facts with each other and constitute the historically transient, changing content of science - scientific theories, scientific hypotheses, working scientific hypotheses, the reliability of which is usually small, fluctuates to a large extent; but the duration of their existence in science can sometimes be very long, can last for centuries. They are eternally changing and essentially differ from religious and philosophical ideas only in that their individual character, a manifestation of personality so characteristic and vivid for philosophical, religious and artistic constructions, fades sharply into the background, perhaps due to the fact that they are nevertheless based, connected and reduced to objective scientific facts, are limited and determined in their origin by this feature.

1 Vernadsky V.I. Philosophical thoughts of a naturalist. M., 1988. S. 99, 111 - 112.

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863 - 1945), one of the founders of biogeochemistry, after graduating from St. Petersburg University in 1885, studied geological collections in European museums and universities. From 1890 to 1911 he taught at Moscow University, then worked at the Academy of Sciences. Throughout its scientific activity Vernadsky was deeply interested in the problems of philosophy and the history of science. In the development of science, he saw decisive factor the formation of the noosphere - such a stage of civilization, at which the rational activity of a person acquires planetary significance. His works "Philosophical thoughts of a naturalist" (M., 1988), "Selected works on the history of science" (M., 1981), "Works on world history science" (M., 1988).

In the above fragment, Vernadsky emphasizes the idea that, due to the special structure and connection with empiricism, scientific knowledge differs significantly from philosophy, religion, and, one might add, other forms. human thinking. It relies on facts, carefully analyzes and generalizes them. This gives scientific knowledge a special certainty, which is not found in other forms of knowledge. Vernadsky was not, like the members of the Vienna Circle, a positivist. He highly valued philosophical, religious and humanitarian thought and recognized their great influence on science.

Structure scientific explanation

Scientists not only establish facts and generalize them, but also try to answer the questions: "Why did these facts take place?", "What caused this particular event?". In doing so, they use the method of science, which is called explanation. In a broad sense, explanation usually means that we explain something incomprehensible through the understandable or well-known. In the philosophy of science, explanation is treated as the most important procedure scientific knowledge, for which more stringent schemes have been developed.

The most famous model of explanation was developed by K. Popper and K. Gempel. It was called explanation through "embracing laws".

Karl Popper (1902 - 1994) - the most famous philosopher of science of the 20th century, was born in Vienna. At the University of Vienna, he studied first physics and mathematics, and then philosophy. Until 1937 he worked in Vienna, participated in the discussions of the Vienna Circle, criticizing its program provisions. In 1934, Popper's main work on the philosophy of science, "Logic scientific research". During the war years, in exile, Popper wrote the famous book " open society and his enemies" (published in Russian in 1992), directed against totalitarianism and defending liberal values. Since 1946, professor London School economy and political science, together with his students and followers, developed an influential trend in the philosophy of science - critical rationalism. Criticism Popper considered the main method of science and the most rational strategy for the behavior of a scientist. Among his other famous works are "Objective Knowledge" (1972), "Realism and the Purpose of Science" (1983).

Karl Hempel (1905 - 1997) studied mathematics, physics and philosophy at various universities in Germany, and since the 1930s has become one of the leaders of neo-positivism. In 1937 he emigrated to the USA, where he greatly contributed to the development of the philosophy of science. Hempel is best known for his work on logic and the methodology of explanation. His book "The Logic of Explanation" (1998) was published in Russian, which includes his most important articles on the methodology of science.

According to Popper and Hempel, all sciences use a common methodology for explanation. In order to explain facts and events, one must use laws and logical deduction.

The basis, the basis of the explanation is one or more general laws, as well as a description of the specific conditions in which the phenomenon being explained takes place. From this basis, it is necessary, with the help of deduction (logical or mathematical inference), to obtain a judgment that explains this phenomenon. In other words: in order to explain any phenomenon, it must be brought under one or more general laws, applying them in certain specific conditions.

Here is one example that allows you to explain the logic of this method. Suppose you left the car in the yard overnight and in the morning saw that its radiator had burst. How to explain why this happened? The explanation is based on two general laws: water at a negative temperature turns into ice; The volume of ice is greater than the volume of water. The specific conditions here are as follows: at night the temperature dropped below zero; you left the car on the street without draining the water from the radiator. From all this we can conclude: at night the water in the radiator froze, and the ice tore the radiator tubes.

Popper and Hempel argued that such a model is suitable not only for explaining, but also for predicting facts (and scientists often predict events that have not yet been observed in order to then discover them in observation or experiment). So, in our example, we could not wait until the morning, but, remembering the laws of physics known from school, anticipate a radiator breakdown and drain water from it in time.

It is believed that the explanation through "covering laws" is the main one in the sciences of nature. However, scientists also use other methods, and in some sciences, primarily in history and the humanities close to it, the applicability of this explanation scheme in general raises a question, since there are no general laws in these sciences.

Criteria for the demarcation of science and non-science

In the above excerpt from the work of V.I. Vernadsky, attention should be paid to the fact that the scientist emphasizes the significant differences between scientific knowledge and the constructions of philosophy, religious thought, and everyday knowledge. In the philosophy of science, the problem of distinguishing between science and non-science is called the problem of demarcation (from the English demarcation - delimitation) and is one of the central ones.

Why is she important? Science enjoys well-deserved prestige in society, and people trust knowledge that is recognized as "scientific". They consider it reliable and reasonable. But it is likely that not everything that is called scientific or claims to be scientific actually meets the criteria of being scientific. These can be, for example, precocious, "low-quality" hypotheses, which their authors pass off as a completely benign product. These may be the "theories" of people who are so engrossed in their ideas that they do not heed any critical arguments. These are outwardly scientific constructions, with the help of which their authors explain the structure of the "world as a whole" or "the entire history of mankind." There are also ideological doctrines that are created not to explain the objective state of affairs, but to unite people around certain socio-political goals and ideals. Finally, these are the numerous teachings of parapsychologists, astrologers, "non-traditional healers", researchers of unidentified flying objects, spirits Egyptian pyramids, Bermuda Triangle, etc. - what ordinary scientists call parascience or pseudoscience.

Can all this be separated from science? Most scientists consider it important, but not too much difficult question. Usually they say: this is not in accordance with the facts and laws modern science does not fit into the scientific picture of the world. And, as a rule, they are right. But supporters of the above teachings can bring counter arguments, for example, they can recall that Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, was at the same time an astrologer, that great Newton seriously engaged in alchemy, that the famous Russian chemist, academician A.M. Butlerov ardently supported parapsychology, that the French Academy fell into a puddle when, in the 18th century. declared unfeasible projects for the movement of steam engines on rails and unscientific evidence of meteorites falling to the ground. After all, these people say: "Prove that our theories are wrong, that they do not agree with the facts, that the evidence we have collected is wrong!"

If scientists undertook to prove it, they would not have had the strength, patience, or time. And here philosophers of science can come to the rescue, who offer a significantly different strategy for solving the problem of demarcation. They may say, “Your theories and evidence cannot be said to be true or false. Although they look like scientific theories on the surface, they are actually not constructed. They are neither false nor true, they are meaningless, or ", to put it mildly, are devoid of cognitive significance. A scientific theory may be erroneous, but at the same time it remains scientific. Your "theories" lie on a different plane, they can play the role of modern mythology or folklore, can positively influence the mental state of people, inspire they have some hope, but they have nothing to do with scientific knowledge."

The first criterion by which one can judge the meaningfulness of a particular concept or judgment is the well-known requirement of Hume and Kant to correlate this concept with experience. If in sensory experience, in empiricism, it is impossible to indicate any objects that this concept means, then it is meaningless, it is an empty sound. In the 20th century, the positivists of the Vienna Circle called this requirement the principle of verifiability: a concept or proposition has meaning only when it is empirically verifiable.

When a parapsychologist, astrologer or "healer" with an intelligent air speaks about "biofields", "powers of the Cosmos", "energetics", "auras" and other mysterious phenomena, then one can ask him: is there, in fact, something empirically fixed, somehow observable, what is behind these words? And it turns out that there is nothing of the kind, and therefore, all these words are meaningless, they are meaningless. They behave in this pseudo-scientific language like perfectly meaningful words, in fact, they are empty words, a set of sounds devoid of meaning. As such, they should not enter the language of rationally thinking people who recognize the importance of science. An analogy can be drawn here. Imagine that someone got himself military uniform, learned to wear it gallantly, salute and turn around. He behaves everywhere like a military man, rides a tram for free, gets acquainted with girls, introduces himself as a cadet. But an experienced foreman will drive this swindler out of action, despite the fact that his behavior outwardly resembles that of a military man. In the same way, in order to maintain the purity of the series of scientific knowledge, it is necessary to “expel” from them all concepts that do not satisfy the mentioned criterion of scientificity.

AT contemporary literature in the philosophy of science, one can come across assertions that the criterion of verifiability is crude and imprecise, that it too narrows the scope of science. This is true, but with the caveat that in very many situations this criterion allows, as a first approximation, to separate scientific judgments from speculative constructions, pseudoscientific teachings and charlatan appeals to the mysterious forces of nature.

The verification criterion starts to fail in more subtle cases. Take, for example, such influential teachings as Marxism and psychoanalysis. Both Marx and Freud considered their theories to be scientific, and so did their numerous followers. It cannot be denied that many of the conclusions of these teachings were confirmed - verified - by empirical facts: by the actually observed course of socio-economic processes in one case, by clinical practice - in another. Nevertheless, there were many scientists and philosophers who intuitively felt that these theories could not, without reservations, be included in the category of scientific ones. K. Popper tried to prove this most consistently.

While still a student, he was deeply interested in Marxism and psychoanalysis, collaborated with the creator of one of the variants of psychoanalysis, A. Adler. But soon Popper began to have doubts about the scientific nature of these teachings. “I found,” he writes, “that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler were under the impression of some points common to these theories, in particular, under the impression of their apparent explanatory power. These theories seemed capable of explain almost everything that happened in the field they described.The study of any of them seemed to lead to a complete spiritual rebirth or revelation, opening our eyes to new truths hidden from the uninitiated.Once your eyes were once opened, you will see confirming examples everywhere: the world is full of verifications of a theory. Everything that happens confirms it. Therefore, the truth of a theory seems obvious, and those who doubt it look like people who refuse to accept the obvious truth, either because it is incompatible with their class interests, or because of the inherent them depression, not understood until now and in need of treatment ".

1 Popper K. Logic and the growth of scientific knowledge. M., 1983. S. 242.

Reflecting on this situation, Popper came to the conclusion that it is not difficult to obtain verifications, empirical confirmations of almost any skillfully crafted theory. But genuinely scientific theories must withstand more serious scrutiny. They must allow risky predictions, i.e. such facts and consequences must be deduced from them, which, if they are not observed in reality, could disprove the theory. The verifiability put forward by the members of the Vienna Circle cannot, according to Popper, be considered a criterion of scientificity. The criterion for demarcation of science and non-science is falsifiability - the fundamental refutation of any statement related to science. If a theory is constructed in such a way that it cannot be refuted, then it stands outside science. It is the irrefutability of Marxism, psychoanalysis, astrology, associated with the vagueness of their concepts and the ability of their supporters to interpret any facts as confirming their views, that makes these teachings unscientific.

True science should not be afraid of refutation: rational criticism and constant correction with facts is the essence of scientific knowledge. Based on these ideas, Popper proposed a very dynamic concept of scientific knowledge as a continuous stream of assumptions (hypotheses) and their refutation. He likened the development of science to the Darwinian scheme biological evolution. Constantly put forward new hypotheses and theories must undergo strict selection in the process of rational criticism and attempts at refutation, which corresponds to the mechanism natural selection in biological world. Only the "strongest theories" should survive, but they cannot be regarded as absolute truths either. All human knowledge is conjectural in nature, any fragment of it can be doubted, and any provisions should be open to criticism.

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

Novosibirsk State Technical University

in the discipline "Philosophy"

"The role of the concept

in the development of human knowledge"

Faculty: AVTF

Group: AM-711

Student: Malakhov S.A.

Introduction 3

1. Concept concept 3

2. Conceptualization as a way to create concepts 4

3. Features of the concept in various disciplines 5

3.1. Peculiarities religious concepts 5

3.1.1. Main features of theology 5

3.1.2. Causes of the dogmatism of religious concepts 6

3.1.3. Ways to protect religious concepts from destruction 6

4. Features of scientific concepts 8

4.1. Science concept concept 8

4.2. The role of concepts in the development of science 9

4.3. The struggle of scientific concepts in the development of science 10

4.4. Interaction of scientific concepts 10

5. Features of philosophical concepts 11

Conclusion 12

Introduction

In modern scientific literature concept concept has become very popular. New concepts appear in almost all areas of human knowledge - modern concepts of economics, pedagogy, psychology can be an example.

However, in order to better understand the limits of applicability of concepts in different areas, it is necessary to understand the very concept of a concept more deeply. The study of the features of the concept in various disciplines, such as science, religion, philosophy, allows us to more accurately determine its role and place in the structure of human knowledge.

This essay is devoted to the role of concepts in the development of knowledge about nature and society.

1. Concept concept

Considering the role of the concept, first of all, it is necessary to dwell on the very concept of the term "concept".

"Newest philosophical dictionary» ed. A.A. Gritsanova gives the following definition of the concept:

“CONCEPT (lat. conceptio - understanding, single idea, leading thought) is a system of views that expresses a certain way of seeing (“point of view”), understanding, interpreting any objects, phenomena, processes and presenting a leading idea and (and) constructive principle, realizing a certain idea in one or another theoretical knowledge practice. The concept is the basic way of designing, organizing and deploying disciplinary knowledge, uniting in this respect science, theology and philosophy as the main disciplines that have developed in the European cultural tradition.

The conceptual aspect of theoretical knowledge expresses, first of all, the paradigm "section" of the latter, sets its topic and rhetoric, i.e. determines the relevant areas of application and ways of expressing systems of concepts (basic concepts) constituted on the basis of the deployment of the "generating" idea. The concept proceeds from the attitudes towards fixing the limiting values ​​for any area (“fragment” of reality) and the implementation of the widest possible “worldview” (on the basis of “reference” to the value basis of cognition).

It has, as a rule, a pronounced personal beginning, marked by the figure of the founder (or founders, who are not necessarily real historical personalities, since mythical characters and cultural heroes, a transcendent divine principle, etc., can act as such), only knowing (knowing) the original plan.

The concept introduces into disciplinary discourses ontological, epistemological, methodological and (especially) epistemological assumptions (the method of disciplinary vision and the horizons of cognition available within it) that are not necessarily explicated in them, without which the subsequent more detailed study (“unwinding”) of the presented idea is impossible. In addition, it “ontologizes” and “disguises” within the original (basic) theoretical structure the components of personal knowledge, non-rationalized, but necessary representations within it, “joining” components of different linguistic design and genesis (origin) to each other, introducing for this purpose a series of disciplinary metaphors.

Thus, concepts first of all introduce into the theoretical discourses of disciplines their initial principles and premises (“absolute premises”, according to Collingwood), which determine the basic concepts-concepts and reasoning schemes, forming “fundamental questions” (“ideas”), in relation to which special statements built within these discourses receive their meaning and justification. Collingwood believed that a change in conceptual foundations is the most radical of all that a person can experience, since it leads to the rejection of previously justified beliefs and standards of thinking and action, to a change in the initial concepts, concepts that provide a holistic perception of the world" [ http://slovari.yandex.ru/dict/phil_dict/article/filo/filo-362.htm?].