Crisis in modern epistemology

(Possible ways out)

Today, in the development of scientific knowledge, there is a process of formation of a socially-oriented epistemology. In certain respects, this thesis is not new, but at the same time, it requires a closer examination from a variety of points of view.

The reason is not only that this process fixes a far-reaching crisis in the epistemology of natural science, but also that a new possible way out has not yet been found.

By the time of the institutionalization of natural science at the beginning of the 19th century, the most serious signs of an epistemological crisis emerged.

First of all, these are the natural-philosophical views of Johann Goethe and his programmatic orientation to return to intuition as the initial principle and condition of scientific knowledge, later supported by Henri Bergson.

In the second half of the XX century, a paradoxical situation developed: the production of knowledge and information grew in society, various special concepts of knowledge, its processing and presentation were created while in philosophy, previously existing epistemological and epistemological concepts that did not correspond to new philosophical ideas and did not satisfy the needs of modern science were sharply criticized or categorically rejected.

One of the ways out of the emerging crisis of epistemological sciences was the introduction of the ideas of evolutionary epistemology (E.E.) into research in the philosophy of science.

E.E. — the phenomenon is quite complex and multifaceted. There are a lot of concepts here, and there is not one mainstream. First, it is necessary to disassemble it, analyze it using a method capable of producing results that can be used in the future when developing a new epistemological methodology of the XXI century.

Causes of the crisis:

1. Change of types of rationality and, accordingly, types of sciences.

In the history of the development of science, starting from the 17th century, three types of scientific rationality arose and, accordingly, three major stages in the development of science, replacing each other within the framework of a technogenic civilization:

1) classical science (in its two states, pre-disciplinary and disciplinary-organized science)

2) non-classical science

3) post-non-classical science

In the classical understanding of science, the image of an unchanging, static science dominated, absolutely true, indisputable, based on unshakable criteria of scientificity, undeniable by its progressive development. The process of cognizing objective reality presupposed a complete delineation of subject and object. It was believed that the characteristics of the subject did not in any way affect the results of cognition. The development of science was viewed as a process of accumulation of firmly established truths proved once and for all. In this situation, it was quite logical to consider the regulatory methodological principles as a direct reflection in the knowledge of the nature and patterns of the real world under study. At the same time, they were understood as unambiguous and, moreover, the only possible reflection of the fundamental characteristics of being.

The non-classical ideal of science was formed in the process of overcoming the crisis of methodological consciousness and the destruction of the unshakable criteria of the scientific character of classical science. Having begun in physics in search of a way out of a crisis situation at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, he gradually transferred to new areas of scientific activity. The formation of this new ideal of science consisted in the rejection of the classical concept of complete and unchanging knowledge as the personification of absolute truth.

In the post-non-classical ideal of science, the problem of substantiating the theoretical fundamental premises of science is presented in a different way. Their justification initially cannot be considered as complete and final, being determined by the historically achieved level of knowledge and social practice. From ideas about the unconditional truth of scientific knowledge, their autonomy and independence from other spheres of human activity, there is a transition to an understanding of the socio-cultural and personal significance of scientific knowledge.

Each stage is characterized by a special state of scientific activity aimed at the constant growth of objectively true knowledge. If this activity is schematically represented as a “subject-means-object” relationship, then the described stages of the development of science act as different types of scientific rationality.

The classical type of scientific rationality, focusing attention on the object, seeks to remove everything that relates to the subject, the means and operations of its activity in theoretical explanation and description. This is seen as a necessary condition for obtaining objectively true knowledge of the world. The goals and values ​​of science, which determine research strategies and ways of fragmentation of the world, at this stage, as at all others, are determined by the dominant worldview attitudes and value orientations in the culture. But classical science does not comprehend these determinations.

The non-classical type of scientific rationality takes into account the relationship between knowledge about an object and the nature of the means and operations of the activity. Revealing these connections is considered as condition for an objectively true description and explanation of the world. But the connections between intro-scientific and social values and goals are still not the subject of scientific reflection, although they implicitly determine the nature of knowledge.

The post-non-classical type of rationality expands the field of reflection overactivity. It takes into account the correlation of the knowledge gained about the object not only with the peculiarity of the means and operations of the activity but also with the value-target structures. Moreover, the connection between intro-scientific goals and extra-scientific, social values and goals is explicated.

The emergence of a new type of rationality and a new image of science should not be understood oversimplified in the sense that each new stage leads to the complete disappearance of the ideas and methodological attitudes of the previous stage. On the contrary, there is continuity between them. Non-classical science did not at all destroy classical rationality, but only limited its scope. For example, when solving a number of problems in celestial mechanics, it was not required to use the norms of the quantum-relativistic description, but it was enough to restrict oneself to the classical research standards.

2. The crisis of the descriptive function of science, the crisis of physicalism.

An explanation is considered the main and most essential aspect of scientific knowledge. Therefore, explanation occupies one of the central places in the philosophical studies of science.

In classical physics, the idea of explanation and description presupposes the characterization of an object “in itself”, without indicating the means of its investigation. And already in quantum-relativistic physics, as a necessary condition for the objectivity of explanation and description, the requirement is put forward to clearly fix the features of the means of observation that interact with the object (the classical way of explanation and description can be presented as idealization, the rational aspects of which are generalized within the framework of the new approach). The ideals and norms of evidence and substantiation of knowledge have changed.

In contrast to classical models, the substantiation of theories in quantum-relativistic physics presupposes explication in the presentation of the theory of the operational basis of the introduced system of concepts (the observability principle) and the clarification of the connections between the new and previous theories (the correspondence principle).

Radical shifts in the understanding of the world and the procedures for its study were accompanied by the formation of new philosophical foundations of science. The idea of ​​the historical variability of scientific knowledge, the relative truth of the ontological principles developed in science was combined with new ideas about the activity of the subject of cognition. It was considered no longer as distanced from the studied world, but as being inside it, determined by it.

There is an understanding of the fact that nature’s answers to questions are determined not only by the structure of nature itself but also by the method of posing questions, which depends on the historical development of the means and methods of cognitive activity. On this basis, a new understanding of the categories of truth, objectivity, fact, theory, explanation, etc. grew up. The “ontological subsystem” of the philosophical foundations of science also radically changed.

The explanation is the reduction of the unknown to the known, the unfamiliar to the familiar. In the general case, all classical physics, due to some visualization of mechanical processes, is easily perceived from this point of view; the only exception is gravity.

Modern physics is no longer so easily amenable to classical methods of explanation since neither relativistic physics nor quantum mechanics seem to reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar anymore. At the foundation of relativistic physics lies already the geometry of Riemann, while our perception is based on the geometry of Euclid. This means that the basic concepts of modern physics are already difficult to imagine.

In the case of quantum mechanics, the situation is even more problematic. It is impossible to imagine a quantum either as a particle or as a wave. Neither the Schrödinger equation nor the Heisenberg matrix representation is descriptive. The most famous and empirically validated theories do not admit models in the sense of traditional concepts of explanation.

Successfully confirmed empirically theories turn out to be almost always false, and most often because they contain terms that do not refer to real objects, laws or processes. How can one believe that the explanations of a successful theory are correct when it is entirely possible that the objects it accepts do not actually exist? K. Popper’s falsification is based on the crisis of explanation of classical physics and, accordingly, on the crisis of verification.

The meaning of physicalism is that, firstly, the researcher assigns an ontological authority to physics — this discipline acts as an authority regarding what is in the world, and its laws are assumed to be true in relation to all objects in space and time; secondly, physics is credited with epistemological authority: physics is the standard for obtaining objective knowledge about the world.

Most 19th century philosophers believed that Newtonian physics gave a true picture of the world. They saw in it a clear image of reality, in which everything is reduced to the position and impulses of material atoms (a mechanism). Provided that the positions and impulses of bodily particles available at a given moment are known, it was considered possible to precisely calculate from this, according to mechanical laws, all the past and future development of the world (Laplace determinism). The principles were considered absolutely true. In addition, physics was the oldest of the natural sciences, it proved its effectiveness in technology, while other branches of knowledge that developed later, in the 19th century, and above all history, did not yet show themselves.

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, this physicalist picture of the world was in great doubt — much that was previously considered absolutely reliable is now called into question.

Now there is no doubt that matter is not something simple, but, on the contrary, extremely complex, and its scientific comprehension is associated with considerable difficulties. It turns out that the position and momentum of a real particle cannot be calculated in any way, and, in any case, determinism in its Laplace form has become unacceptable. Does this mean that determinism is generally outdated, or can it be recognized in some other form, is an open question for the greatest physicists. The development of the theory of relativity and quantum theory, as well as other discoveries in physics, have called into question much that was believed to be true.

These revolutions in physics had a twofold effect on philosophy. The fact that physicists themselves no longer have a consensus on the extent to which it is possible to preserve mechanism and determinism deprives mechanism and determinism of the right to invoke the authority of physics. However, another consequence of the crisis in physics is even more important.

This crisis clearly showed that physicalist concepts and positions cannot be adopted by philosophy without special analysis, and physicalist conclusions cannot, from the point of view of philosophy, be regarded as a priori effective.

The development of mathematics at the end of the 19th century also led to a crisis that turned out to be no less profound and fraught with consequences than the crisis of physics. Among the many new discoveries in the field of mathematics, philosophy was particularly influenced by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries and the creation of set theory by G. Cantor (1845–1918).

Something that was previously taken without hesitation as simple premises of mathematics is actually not so reliable at all. At the end of the 19th century, “paradoxes” were discovered in set theory — contradictions that arose from obvious and simple premises and correct inferences. This was seen as a shock to the very foundations of mathematics.

In close connection with this crisis is a new revival of formal logic — in the form of so-called logistics, symbolic, or otherwise, mathematical logic. Thanks to logical and mathematical research, many old problems of philosophy again became relevant, so, in particular, the problems of the excluded third, the obviousness of axioms, philosophical grammar, and mainly the problem of universals.

3. Division of sciences into natural sciences and human sciences.

Another process was the program of revision of science and scientific knowledge, carried out by G. Rickert and W. Dilthey. The separation of the sciences of the spirit, for the first time in a hundred years after O. Comte, placed natural science within the rigid boundaries of permissible knowledge.

Classical epistemology is characterized by such features as a sceptical attitude towards the existence of the world and the possibility of knowing it — hypercriticism; recognition of the invariable norms of knowledge that lie at its foundation; subject-centrism, which is understood as the recognition of the absolute reliability of knowledge about the state of consciousness and the unreliability of the rest of the knowledge; finally, the recognition of only scientific knowledge as full value is science-centrism.

Non-classical epistemology rethinks and largely denies these principles, significantly expanding the very understanding of knowledge, the forms of its presentation and methods of study. The expansion is due to the identification of the fundamental significance of knowledge, its types and functions in many new areas of activity that were not developed or were not taken into account during the period of the dominance of classical science and epistemology. These are E.E., cognitive psychology, various types of cognitive sciences, including computer modelling and hypertext creation programs. For classical epistemology, scientific knowledge is knowledge understood primarily in the positivist spirit as natural science knowledge.

For a long time, humanitarian cognition was either “adjusted” to the ideals and norms of natural science or belonged to the sphere of “unscientific” cognition. The neglect of the problems of the humanities gave rise, in particular, to a radical postmodern epistemological project.

Many “obvious”, well-established ideas about the nature, specifics and structure of humanitarian cognition, on the one hand, and cognition in general, on the other hand, should be subjected to significant (if not to say radical) revision. Again, unexpectedly relevant are the search for answers to questions about the subject, methodological standards, ideals and norms of humanitarian knowledge. Last but not least, such a revision was stimulated by the “linguistic turn” in the philosophy of the 20th century, the modern philosophical obsession with language.

· The revision of the classical scheme of epistemological relations based on the opposition of subject and object provides for a new understanding of their relationship and interdependence. Revolutionary discoveries in various fields of the humanities of the second half of the 20th century led philosophical thought to the need to solve fundamentally new epistemological problems. They are associated with the analysis of linguistic and cultural prejudices and attitudes of the subject, the study of the mechanisms of their influence not only on the process and result of cognition but also on the specifics of the vision of its very objectivity.

· The main statements of the supporters of the point of view about the existence of fundamental differences between the sciences of nature and the sciences of man.

· Natural sciences try to discover common dependencies, human sciences investigate unique individual phenomena. This idea was formulated by G. Rickert at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it continues to be popular to this day, especially among historians.

· Natural sciences offer explanations of facts, human sciences can only provide an interpretation of human actions and their products, including texts and social institutions. The use of hermeneutical methods is a specific feature of the second type of sciences.

· Natural sciences can predict future events. Therefore, they are used to create all sorts of technical devices with which you can control the natural environment and utilize natural resources. Human sciences do not predict. Their only job is to provide understanding.

· Explanations formulated in natural science are not only and not necessarily empirical generalizations. The best ones come from theory. However, in the human sciences, it is rather difficult to make generalizations. It is even more difficult to construct theories in them, since sciences of this type study individual events localized in a certain area of ​​space and occurring at a certain time.

· Natural science can give an objective idea of ​​the investigated area of ​​reality. The natural sciences can control the objectivity of their results by experiment. Experiments that are practised in the human sciences (for example, in psychology) are not real, since, in the process of their implementation, communicative relations arise between the experimenter and the subjects under study. As a result, the obtained facts are largely generated by the intervention of the researcher and bear the imprint of the system of values ​​adopted by the latter, his social interests, political views and the place he occupies in the system of power relations.

· In addition, the subjects under study can accept the conclusions of the researcher regarding them, and this circumstance will change these subjects, i.e. will change the studied human and social reality. Therefore, it is impossible to talk about objective knowledge in the human sciences, since in this case the reality being investigated is generated by the very process of research.

The problem of prediction. Prediction is an open system. It seems that if there is an explanation for a fact, then future facts can be predicted. This view is consistent with the popular model of explanation as summarizing facts under general law. It is assumed that the formulation of predictions of future events is a hallmark of the natural sciences. In reality, however, predicting natural phenomena is not an easy task.

In some cases, it is simply not possible. It is easy to make predictions (with the help of knowledge of laws) if we are dealing with closed systems and with a limited number of factors influencing the ongoing processes. But such situations exist only in laboratory conditions and in some natural processes, such as, for example, in the motion of the planets of the solar system. Classical mechanics studied processes of this very type.

But when dealing with open, complexly organized systems at the point of their bifurcation, accurate prediction becomes impossible. In this case, you can only develop several scenarios of a possible future, not knowing which of them will be implemented.

The experimental natural science of modern times could arise only under conditions of a certain understanding of nature and man’s attitude to it. This understanding is associated with the emergence of a special type of civilization, which can be called technological. Nature is interpreted as a simple resource of human activity, as a plastic material that allows unlimited human intervention. An experiment is a way of such intervention in natural processes in order to better understand their internal mechanisms. A person can, in principle, accurately predict natural processes, and therefore control and regulate them. But with this understanding of scientific thinking, the study of human meaningful actions looked like something alien to the very spirit of science. As a result, the opinion about the existence of a fundamental difference between the study of nature and the study of man and human relations has gained popularity.

4. Industrial boom — science is turning into technology. The problem of a pure experiment — the shift in the value scale of the classical scientist — the utility now overshadows the truth.

The rapid rise of technology as a factor in social transformations actualizes a complex range of worldview issues. What is technology as a phenomenon? What are the forms and limits of its impact on human existence? How is the social conditioning of technology manifested? Is it a blessing for humanity or is it fraught with unforeseen fatal predestination?

The idea of ​​technical mutations that have a multidimensional impact on the social process has long been recognized in modern philosophy and sociology. It is developed most consistently by D. Bell, J. Grant, and E. Toffler.

In his main works, E. Toffler promotes the idea that humanity is moving to a new technological revolution, that is, the First Wave (agrarian civilization) and the Second (industrial civilization) are replaced by a new one, leading to the creation of a super-industrial civilization. E. Toffler warns of new dangers, social conflicts and global problems that humanity will face at the turn of the century.

According to E. Toffler, the development of science and technology is carried out in jerks — waves. Why are we entering the so-called information age, he asks, today, and not a hundred years ago? Why couldn’t this process be “late” by another century? Modern researchers, answering these questions, refer mainly to external factors: the rapid growth of changes in general, a clear indication of the trend towards diversity in the economy and all social life.

The concept of “information society” is a kind of post-industrialism theory, the basis of which was laid by Z. Brzezinski, D. Bell, E. Toffler. Considering social development as a “change of stages”, the supporters of this theory associate its formation with the predominance of the “fourth”, information sector of the economy, following agriculture, industry and the economy of services. Capital and labour as the basis of industrial society are giving way to information and knowledge in the information society. The revolutionary action of information technology leads to the fact that in the information society classes are replaced by socially undifferentiated “information communities” (Y. Masuda).

First, according to E. Toffler’s definition, there was the First Wave, which he calls “agricultural civilization”. Civilizations rose and fell into decay, which, despite their external differences, had fundamental common features. Everywhere the land was the basis of the economy, life, culture, family organization and politics. Everywhere a simple division of labour prevailed and there were several clearly defined castes and classes: nobility, clergy, warriors, slaves or serfs. Everywhere power was rigidly authoritarian. Everywhere a person’s social origin determined his place in life. Everywhere the economy was decentralized, with each community producing most of what it needed.

Three hundred years ago, an explosion occurred, shock waves from which went around the whole earth, destroying ancient societies and giving rise to a completely new civilization. Such an explosion was, of course, the Industrial Revolution. The gigantic force released by it, spreading throughout the world — the Second Wave — came into contact with the institutions of the past and changed the way of life of millions.

By the middle of the XX century. the remnants of the First Wave were destroyed, and an “industrial civilization” emerged on earth. However, her domination was short-lived, for almost simultaneously with her victory, a new — the third in a row — “wave” began to roll over the world, bringing with it new institutions, relations, and values.

From about the mid-50s, industrial production began to acquire new features. In many areas of technology, the variety of types of technology, samples of goods, types of services has increased. The specialization of labour is becoming more and more fragmented. Organizational forms of management are expanding. The volume of publications is growing. According to E. Toffler, all this led to the extreme fragmentation of indicators, which led to the emergence of informatics.

This diversity, according to E. Toffler, really shakes the traditional structures of the industrial age. Capitalist society was based on mass production, mass distribution, mass dissemination of cultural standards. The relevance and importance of utility, i.e. successful interaction with nature, became more than obvious at the beginning of the last century.

For example, when looking at the history of the formation of chemistry. Even alchemy, the forerunner of chemistry, was focused on interfering with nature, transforming it into the desired form. Based on this fact, Sheppard proposes the following definition of alchemy: “Alchemy is the art of releasing parts of the universe from temporary existence and achieving perfection, which for metals is represented in gold, and for humans — in longevity and immortality. In this case, material perfection could be achieved only through some preparation … ”[1, pp. 68–72].

In the same vein, S. Meinel notes the fundamental importance of the idea of ​​usefulness for the success of chemistry as a science: “In the 18th century. awareness in chemistry as a science of its role and status was more and more influenced by utilitarian thought. Almost all authors have written papers mentioning the benefits they will bring … The most prominent representatives of this discipline have made utilitarianism their doctrine and have come up with tracts on the properties and preparation of food and the manufacture of industrial goods … paints and rust removal. The contribution that such propaganda of the practical significance of chemistry made to its spread … cannot be overestimated, although at the same time the historiography of chemistry only to a very limited extent speaks of the development of theories and the cognitive process … ”[2, pp. 154–160] … Even the task of chemistry as science was defined in a peculiar way: to make the gifts of nature more accessible for human use [2, pp. 158–159].

It is not for nothing that P. Feyerabend paid so much attention to the problem of usefulness in evaluating scientific theories. In particular, the idea of ​​utility has fully manifested itself in P. Feyerabend’s numerous attempts to equate the Western scientific tradition with other methods of cognition. One of the main objections was this: “It works!” Successful prediction and interaction with nature at all levels, from macroscopic to microscopic, is the trait that distinguishes the Western scientific tradition from any other.

1. Sheppard H.J. A Definition of Alchemy // Science in Europe 1500–1800. The Open University. 1991. V. 2.

2. Meinel C. Chemistry’s Rise of Status // Science in Europe 1500–1800. — The Open University. 1991. V. 2. P. 154–160.

Why biology?

Problem: unlike physics, where the explanation and description of an object have become more and more complicated — the microcosm and the macrocosm — in biology there is a period when the results of biological laboratory experiments are carried out to the “open areas” of national parks and just wild nature.

Here, first of all, it should be noted the study and observation of the life of primates. By the middle of the last century, through lengthy discussions, a person from a certain quasi-cultural environment, at times quite abstract, was placed in the world of wild nature. And since primates are our closest “relatives”, according to evolutionists, researchers have proved (ethology, ethnology, structural anthropology) that by studying the natural habitat of animals, you can understand a lot from how humans behave. Therefore, a trend arose in methodology, which specifically took up the study of the problems of the methodology of biology. This led to the construction of many biologized principles in scientific research.

Biology and biologized disciplines explain a lot about how humans behave. By the middle of the last century, after the collapse of the methodology of logical positivism with its desire to objectify and logicalize science and to cleanse its methodology of metaphysics, all researchers came to the conclusion that a scientist is a typical representative of human society. He can be manipulated like everyone else. He goes to the store, reads newspapers, he has a family, and institutes and laboratories take on the image of closed communities of individuals, where competition between individuals of this community begins to play a huge role.

Already with the appearance of the first laboratories of medieval alchemists and French academies, these tendencies were outlined. This has all happened before — but few of the methodologists attached decisive importance to this. These facts could be noted only in the biography of the researcher, in isolation from his work.

The place of metaphysics after physicalism was taken by biology. Physicalism has exhausted itself because the principles of scientific research have been pushed to the extreme where the next step is to completely deny the creative imagination and hypothesis as such. During this period, works began to appear that investigated the social, cultural, economic, political, gender reasons for the adoption of certain hypotheses by scientists, the reasons for their “thematic” preferences. All these studies began to rely on a biologized methodology.

Separately, the work of such methodologists as K. Popper, Art. Tulmin, T. Kuhn, I. Lakatos, P. Feyerabend and J. Holton.

Representatives of one of the main trends in the philosophy of science of the last century — post-positivists — foresaw a possible crisis to one degree or another in their works, therefore some of them already outlined in their main works the use of the ideas of E.E.

Hence the confusion, for example, among researchers who still analyze when exactly K. Popper, as the founder of E.E., began to use the ideas of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to model the processes taking place in science. Therefore, these researchers dealt with the topic of socio-economic and political reasons for the adoption of hypotheses or theories by scientists. viewed it in the context of the environment and the struggle for survival. The principle of biologization of methodological research has become one of the reasons that the above-mentioned researchers began to show a keen interest in alternative sources of knowledge to science, in other words, in parascience. K. Popper admitted that the most diverse branches of knowledge, up to mythological beliefs, can become the prerequisites for the advancement of hypotheses. J. Holton has already developed his theory of “thematic analysis” a priori based on the fact that the adoption of certain methodological orientations by scientists is influenced by a variety of areas of knowledge. P. Feyerabend is the brightest representative of this trend — he introduced the principle of methodological anarchism. T. Kuhn, Art. Tulmin and I. Lakatos — introduced research on the history of science into the analysis and construction of methodology.

Since about 1900, scientists have been convinced that the core of human nature is given from birth — especially in the part that determines individual and group differences. But by the 1930s and 1940s, an increasing number of scientists shared the opinion about the overwhelming importance of the environment and believed that culture would provide a clue to human nature.

The aggressive policies of the time (fascist and nationalist claims that the key to social problems lies in innate racial characteristics) only strengthened the belief in the importance of culture. Communism proceeded from the need for economic equality, which is based on the same biological origin of man, and therefore, research on the theory of evolution received such a development in the USSR. Until the 1970s, the majority in the West was of the view that understanding human actions is impossible without knowledge of culture and the laws of social development. Today, a large number of works have been created in which the priority of biology and heredity in the understanding of society and individuals is affirmed. Another factor in the biologization of sciences was the attraction of biological categories for the interpretation of cultural phenomena.

The speculative reconstructions of the anatomical, psychological and social evolution of mankind, characteristic of the 19th century, led to the fact that at the beginning of the next century, evolutionary ideas were compromised in the eyes of many humanitarians.

The works of E. Durkheim in sociology, B. Malinovsky in social anthropology and F. de Saussure in linguistics dealt with modern structures and processes and excluded the evolutionary dimension.

However, the human sciences continued to be influenced by at least two mainstream ideas of the 19th century. First, belief in the value of empirical methods held its ground. Secondly, biology and the human sciences continued to be linked by the functionalist attitude — that is, explanation through the relationship of parts to the whole: for example, the interpretation of individual actions of people through their lifestyle in general or their position in society. This explanatory scheme reconciled broad philosophical notions of integrity with concrete empirical research and the search for objective methods.

In the middle of the century, the emphasis on the cultural origin of human nature persisted, because was associated with hopes for improvement in society through the “correct” social policy. During this period, politics in countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden was determined by the Social Democrats, whose task was to take care of public welfare. At the same time, the fear of biological explanations for human differences — a legacy of the Third Reich — silenced theories about a different, non-cultural origin of differences between people almost completely.

Finding a basis for human action outside of politics, to provide a solid foundation for human nature is an aspiration, already attractive, found support in the rhetoric of objective biological observation.

In the XIX century. the study of animals and plants has become an academic discipline. The study of animals and plants in the natural environment, as well as the study of the individuality of animals, especially domestic animals, became extremely popular, and researchers began to obtain results from comparing animal habits and human behaviour. The zoo and garden became a place where the interests of scientists and the public came together.

In the 1940s, a new science — ethology — combined natural history, with its patient study of animal behaviour in the wild, and university laboratory science. Then, in the 1970s, a group of evolutionary scientists came up with the idea of ​​sociobiology, a discipline that called for the combination of natural selection, ethology, and human knowledge; they set out to incorporate the human sciences into biology. Sociobiologists believed that the unity of knowledge, the absence of which in the human sciences is so obvious, can be achieved only by consistently pursuing the idea of ​​the unity of man and evolving nature — in other words, rethinking culture from the standpoint of biology.

Ethology has its roots in the period before the outbreak of the First World War. Although the model of scientific biology was then dictated by laboratory research, individual scientists strove for less analytical, more direct knowledge of wildlife. In England, Julian Huxley conducted a field study of bird behaviour. Oskar Heinroth, the former director of the Berlin Zoo in the 1920s, criticized the very idea of ​​zoos and highlighted the difference between animal behaviour in the wild and artificially shaped behaviour in captivity. Both researchers placed primary value on the “natural” behaviour of animals. The desire to know the “natural animal” found parallels in morality and the aesthetic dominant of society, which gave preference to the natural over the artificial.

This opposition sounded with particular force in the industrial-urban era. O. Heinroth’s colleague Jacob von Uckskühl, director of the Hamburg Zoo between 1925 and 1944, introduced the concept of Umwelt — a world accessible to the sensory and motor capabilities of an animal. He understood the study of animals as a creative recreation of their world by scientists. Similar ideas were developed by the Danish Nicholas Tinbergen and the Austrian Konrad Lorenz. They developed rigorous ways of observing animals unaware of human presence, clarified the concept of instinct, and began research on inherited patterns of behaviour.

Two forms of “naturalized epistemology” emerged — evolutionary and genetic. Nature-centred epistemology, the integral parts of which are intuition and aesthetic experience of nature, is considered as the epistemological foundation of the future “new paradigm” of biology and natural science in general. This new theory of knowledge of the science of the future will be offered by the philosophy of nature. Biology acts as a natural science basis for the philosophy of nature. But this is new biology that has undergone a certain internal (“paradigmatic”) development and has developed under the influence of the strongest humanization trends of recent decades. This, in turn, presupposes the formation of a new epistemological system, a system that would make it possible to describe natural and social processes as natural-social processes in an evolutionary context. problems of modern science — not only biology but also physics, chemistry, technical sciences — lead to the idea of ​​the biospheric level of human life.

Where does such a variety of currents and directions come from?

Here everything already depends on the science itself, which underlies many methodological searches — biology, and social biology, in particular. Animal sociology, comparative psychology, socioecology, socioetology, genetics, ethology, experimental psychology. Through intensive field research, many theories have been developed that interpret and integrate an abundance of facts. Social biology is theoretically quite strict, and in some sections so much that it has reached the level of formalization. As such, theoretical social biology, as a unified theory, still does not exist. There are two very important reasons for this.

The first reason — the historical relationship of social biology with sociology and social philosophy — is a result of the expansion of evolutionary sociology. And this has left such an indelible imprint on the problems of sociobiology that until now its central problems remain the problems of biosocial evolution and social organization.

But it is precisely these questions that are fundamental both in the positive philosophy of O. Comte and in the evolutionary sociology of H. Spencer, and even earlier — the most important in the social philosophy of the 18th century.

The use of data from the sciences about nature and society in philosophy and sociology, as well as the idea of ​​society as an integral social organism, was perceived and developed by the English thinker Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). In the works “Social Statics”, “Foundations of Sociology”, he developed an organic approach to society, drawing an analogy between a biological organism and society. He also interpreted the evolution of society by analogy with the evolution of a living organism and understood it as a natural process. Proceeding from the organismic approach, G. Spencer analyzed the role of the constituent parts of society, social institutions, showed their interrelation, revealed the movement of society as a movement from simple to complex, as a social pattern. G. Spencer is the founder of the organic school in sociology.

The essence of the organic theory of society lies in the fact that it solves the fundamental and urgent problem of the interaction of biological and social factors in the development of society. G. Spencer viewed society as a single system of interdependent natural — biological — and social factors. He believed that only within the framework of a holistic social-natural organism is the true meaning of any social institution and the social role of each subject manifested.

Social evolution is the progressive development of society along the path of its complication and improvement of the activities of social institutions. It shows the objective conditionality of social evolution by the needs of people. From the point of view of G. Spencer, in the process of social evolution, the importance of the collective activity of people and various kinds of social institutions increases.

Through the representative of social philosophy Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), the ideas of H. Spencer began to be actively used by all thinkers of the West. G. Spencer recognizes the importance of indirectly accepted premises of all knowledge, which are the concentration of human experience in the course of evolution. These prerequisites in relation to each person appear as a kind of a priori. For H. Spencer, scientific knowledge turns out to be a procedure for identifying similar signs of phenomena and discarding dissimilar ones. He believed that after Charles Darwin biology ousted mathematics, becoming a leading and exemplary science. Spencer transfers many of the provisions of the biological theory of evolution to society, developing the point of view of social Darwinism, which had many followers. Spencer’s methodological approach to social processes is structural and functional.

The second reason is that, despite all the fidelity to philosophical problems, social biology began to orient itself rather early on the theory and methodology of natural science. This striving, quite understandable for the era of the triumph of positive science, was that underwater rock against which all attempts to create a “natural” theory of social biology are broken.

What are the consequences of the crisis?

The consequence of the crisis was the search for a new methodology. The research was carried out in two directions — this is synergetics and biologization of methodology in general.

As a result of the latter — the emergence of such disciplines as E.E., sociobiology, etc. Although it is usually believed that E.E. formed in a “conscious form” by the mid-70s as a result of the activities of K. Popper and D. Campbell, this is far from the case.

By the end of the last century, energeticists and Machians began an active movement in this direction (and all with the same reliance on H. Spencer and C. Darwin as modern evolutionary epistemologists, starting with K. Lorentz); moreover, at the beginning of the century, a direction with a similar name was even emerging — the evolutionary theory of knowledge.

So E.E. as an attempt to respond to the challenge made by G. Rickert and W. Dilthey, she began her active and conscious life simultaneously with the appearance of this challenge itself.

The concepts of the evolutionary cognitive model originated in antiquity and have passed through the centuries. However, it becomes a paradigm of natural science in the 19th century, after the epoch-making works of outstanding evolutionary scientists J. B. Lamarck, C. Darwin, and others, acquiring in the 20th century a steady tendency towards transformation into a cultural phenomenon. From a fundamental idea of ​​biology, it is transformed into an evolutionary way of thinking.

As a result, along with the evolutionary leading in the second half of the XX century, there are two more cognitive models — systemic and self-organizing. The systemic cognitive model appears as a way to implement a holistic approach to the world in modern culture in terms of taking into account the most complex and diverse differentiated knowledge achieved in modern science.

At the beginning of the last century, the problem arose of studying objects that represent a whole complex of interconnected objects. Often these complexes consisted of material and non-material objects. Once the problem of study has arisen, then first it is necessary to develop a methodology, i.e. interconnected means of analysis, and then directly study the complexes of these objects. Here you can give examples with the problems of management and organization of entire industrial complexes, the management of the communist economy, or, at least, the problem of urbanization. These and many other things set very serious tasks for the science of the beginning of the last century. Research objects with a high degree of complexity, self-organization and self-development began to appear. Part of this problem of finding a new methodology by the mid-1900s was the search for a method that could provide adequate and pragmatic answers. Systems analysis has become one of these methods.

The history of the system approach

Most systems theories deal with systems of any order of complexity. If before the beginning of the twentieth century, production developed more or less independently of science, then already at the turn of the century, production becomes science-intensive. By this time, it became necessary to study complex systems such as social life, man-machine systems and the like. Such traditional disciplines as sociology, biology, economics, psychology, engineering design did not provide an adequate description of these processes. The systems approach was a kind of generalization of knowledge about systems in each of the disciplines.

In the history of the emergence of system analysis, three stages should be distinguished:

1. The “pre-systemic” period, when scientists, philosophers, thinkers used some methodological techniques, which later began to be used in the theory of systems analysis. This period refers to the emergence of the term “system”, which appeared in Ancient Hellas 2000–2500 years ago and originally meant: combination, organism, device, organization, system, union. It also expressed certain acts of activity and their results (something put together; something put in order). Initially, the word “system” was associated with the forms of socio-historical being. Only later did the principle of order, the idea of ​​ordering, transfer to the Universe.

2. The second period — the emergence of the method, which later came to be called “systemic”. The end of the second period can be considered 1954 when L. f. Bertalanffy organized the Society for General Systems Theory. During this period, four prominent thinkers from different countries develop the fundamental basis for subsequent systems analysis.

Ferdinand de Saussure. Its main idea is that linguistics will then become a science when it will study not physical objects, but will study some other formations, which it calls structures. F. de Saussure called this set of meaningful features of sound a “phoneme”. Linguistics used to be concerned with sounds, and new linguistics must study roles, positions; then one figure differs from another not in the bodily sense, but in the functional one.

M. Petrovich, who, being a mathematician, studied various kinds of mathematical models and compared them with each other. In the theory of “general phenomenology” M. Petrovich singles out the main types of functions and types of processes of dissimilar phenomena, believing that, by clarifying the functions of elements, it is possible to explain the mechanism (structure) of the phenomenon, and from the generality of mechanisms, to conclude about the generality of the course of processes (as well as vice versa), and on the similarity of functions — on the similarity of structures. M. Petrovich singled out 5 or 6 roles, which he finds in completely different areas. Accordingly, the analogy of processes is considered. As a result of his research, he comes to the conclusion that “there is a structural analogy between all natural phenomena.” Structures are interesting regardless of the things on which they are implemented.

A. Bogdanov developed another version of the methodology of the systems approach, which he called “tectology”. “Tektos” — from the Greek. builder, organizer; tectology is the science of construction, organization. The problem arises of constructing a general theory of construction or organization. To do this, you need to create the science of how to organize everything. In “Tectology” A. Bogdanov develops a conceptual system, general concepts of any organization. An organization is stable when it has a skeleton. But the skeleton is not biological, but tectological, in the sense of structure. A. Bogdanov thinks of tectology as a further generalization of mathematics. A large number of such examples are contained in the two-volume work Tectology. There you can find a general tectological law: “the stability of the whole depends on the smallest relative resistances of all its parts at any moment.” “Tectology” is a kind of “organizational” version of the construction of a general theory of systems.

The term “general systems theory” was proposed by the Austrian biologist (!) Ludwig von Bertalanffy, which contributed a lot to the fact that this theory is most often associated with his name. In order to solve a number of problems in biology, L. von Bertalanffy built a theory of biological organisms on the basis of a generalization of the provisions of physical chemistry, kinetics and thermodynamics. This theory is called the theory of open systems. Then a further generalization was required, called general systems theory. The idea of ​​such a theory was expressed in 1937 at the Philosophical Seminar of Charles Morris in Chicago. But even then there were no suitable conditions for the adoption and development of OTS — theoretical knowledge was not popular with biologists. The new paradigm was able to make its way only after the Second World War. Then the “Society for Research in General Systems Theory” was organized, which began to publish yearbooks. L. von Bertalanffy identified analogies between different phenomena — like M. Petrovich and A. Bogdanov. He himself calls his method empirical-deductive. Just like M. Petrovich, but unlike A. Bogdanov, he widely uses the mathematical apparatus of differential equations, although only for illustrations, and not as a general method for solving problems. With the help of differential equations, L. von Bertalanffy succeeded in giving a formal expression of such important properties of systems, which he called system parameters, such as integrity, sum, mechanization, growth, competition, finality, equifinality in behaviour, etc. Differential equations make it possible to describe the behaviour of the system as if “from the inside”. From the outside, a system can be viewed as a “black box”, and its relationship with the environment and other systems can be depicted in the form of block diagrams and diagrams using the concepts of entry and exit. L. von Bertalanffy built only one of the possible variants of the OTS.

3. The third period is characterized by the emergence of a large number of systemological schools and directions. Several theories have been proposed: W. Ross Ashby, J. Clear. M. Mesarovich, Den Chzhulong and A. Uemov’s Parametric OTS.

All of them are united by one common task: “The study of logical consequences from the fact that systems have certain properties should be the main content of any general theory of systems, which can never be limited to only a descriptive classification of systems.”

In 1948 N. Wiener’s “Cybernetics” was published, in 1950 — “Investigation of operations” by Morse and Kimbell and the article “Theory of open systems” by L. f. Bertalanffy. In 1951 L. f. Bertalanffy published General Systems Theory. The first book on systems analysis was published in 1956 by Kahn and Mann. In 1957, Guda and Makola’s “System Engineering” was published. One of the first books on problem-solving was published in 1955 — “The Art of Problem Solving” by E. Khadneta. K. Boulding’s article “General theory of systems — the skeleton of science”, developing the ideas of L. f. Bertalanffy, was published in 1956. One of the first attempts to formalize the theory of problem-solving and OTS was undertaken in 1960 by M. Mesarovich. At this time, powerful institutions of cybernetics arose in Kyiv and Tbilisi. The 60s — 70s saw the growth of systems research in the former USSR. In a number of cities (Moscow, Kyiv, Odesa, Tbilisi, Novosibirsk), centres of systems research have emerged. At this time, the Odessa seminar on Parametric OTS appeared, the organizer and leader of which, since 1967, was A.I. Uyomov.

From the history of the formation of evolutionary epistemology.

The emerging “naturalistic turn in epistemology” became significant and powerful.

The main directions are the evolutionary theory of knowledge by K. Lorentz, G. Vollmer, naturalized epistemology by W. Quine, genetic epistemology by J. Piaget, evolutionary theory of science by K. Popper and St. Toulmin, the radical constructivism of E. Glazersfeld, “biolinguistics” by N. Chomsky and St. Pinker.

E.E. uses numerous ideas and theories of natural sciences in solving philosophical, theoretical and cognitive problems of epistemology. Evolutionary biology, psychology, the chemistry of catalysis, cosmogony — this is not a complete list of disciplines used in this direction. The subject of E.E. is the evolution of cognitive structures, the mechanisms of the growth of knowledge. Within the framework of E.E., at least two directions can be distinguished.

The first one examines the evolution of human cognitive abilities.

The second is the consideration of biological evolution as a model for the development of science. These are the concepts of such methodologists as K. Popper, Art. Tulmin, T. Kuhn, I. Lakatos, P. Feyerabend and J. Holton.

The fundamental assumption of E.E., which acts as a kind of common denominator of the schools and directions available here, boils down to the following thesis: people, like other living things, are a product of evolutionary processes and their thinking abilities, their knowledge and cognition are guided by the mechanisms of biological evolution. Because of this, the study of evolution turns out to be tantamount to understanding the phenomena of knowledge and cognition.

In its most general form, the theory of evolution was formulated by Charles Darwin in the second half of the 19th century. In the works “The Origin of Man” (1871) and “Expression of Emotions in People and Animals” (1872) Charles Darwin attempted to extend his theory of evolution to the human race. He showed that since humans descend from the animal kingdom, they are physically, intellectually and even socially the product of organic evolution. Our appearance, our various forms of behaviour, our thoughts and desires, our language, self-awareness and morality — all this ultimately goes back to the processes of survival and reproduction. Thus, Charles Darwin actually laid the foundations of evolutionary psychology.

This evolutionary approach to human consciousness was later taken up by other 19th-century evolutionists. Among them, one can single out such thinkers as K. Linnaeus, who placed man among the primates in the hierarchical system of the world proposed by him; C. Bonnet, who put forward the idea of ​​transformism, arguing about the possibility of transforming some forms into others; J. Lamarck is the creator of the first evolutionary concept, which, although it did not explain evolution in terms of its driving forces, still had a completely definite and complete image; this also includes the concept of geological evolutionism by C. Lyell. By the middle of the 19th century, evolutionism as a certain view of development was accepted by almost all researchers.

Already in the 20th century, a large number of scientific concepts appeared that use the theory of evolution as an important theoretical basis. Their uniting principle is the reliance on “concrete scientific data” and approaches (biology, ethology, psychology, linguistics, etc.) that were used to solve philosophical, in particular epistemological, problems. The active use of the ideas of evolution to solve just such problems is associated with the activities of K. Lorentz (1903–1989), J. Piaget (1896–1980) and C. Popper (1902–1994).

In 1941. K. Lorenz published an article “Kantian doctrine a priori in the light of modern biology”, which gave a new impetus to the active use of the ideas of the theory of evolution in various fields of knowledge. The scientific sphere of interest of K. Lorenz is ethology, and some experts call his research program “bio-epistemology”. K. Lorenz was mainly engaged in cognogenesis (the process of gradual change and the origin of cognitive structures), “i.e. evolution of structures and processes of cognition ”, and, first of all, the evolution of perception and concept. Quite complex structures must precede human cognition as a condition for its possibility. It is quite natural to assume that man possesses these structures from birth as a biological being. A person has a cognitive apparatus, which alone allows him to gain experience from interaction with the outside world.

But where does the cognitive apparatus come from? Each human individual possesses it from birth, and the species as a whole acquires it in the process of evolution. Here is the key to understanding E.E. This key is trial and error as a means of making adaptation progress. According to K. Popper, “the growth of knowledge is the result of a process very similar to Darwinian natural selection … This interpretation is applicable to animal knowledge, pre-scientific and scientific knowledge.”

K. Lorenz expresses his understanding of a priori forms in the concept of open-source software. An open program is a form that encompasses a specific learning process, providing the very plasticity that makes it possible to adapt to changing conditions and to new habitats. This program contains the entire set of responses and reactions to specific environmental conditions, and, therefore, learning only narrows their range, leaving only reactions adapted for a given environment, which thereby represent “knowledge” about this specific environment.

If the cognitive apparatus can be a more or less effective means of cognition, then, according to K. Lorentz, it is itself more or less accurate “knowledge” about the possible environment, “cognition” of which provides. The human cognitive apparatus, which ensures the production of more and more adequate hypotheses (geometry, Newtonian dynamics, theory of relativity), is in a sense a stronger “knowledge” about the world than each of these hypotheses since it contains them, as well as possible future discoveries. And the very “cognitive apparatus” of the species, quite in a Darwinian way, can be considered a certain “hypothesis” in the sequence of “hypotheses” produced in the evolutionary process, a “hypothesis” which, competing with other “hypotheses”, can be “falsified” together with its carrier.

The next stage in the history of the application of the theory of evolution in epistemology was the activity of the Swiss psychologist J. Piaget. He worked in the field of genetic epistemology and the operational concept of intelligence. In contrast to the cognogenesis of K. Lorentz, the genetic epistemology of J. Piaget studies psychogenesis, “that is, cognitive ontogenesis of an individual ”. It is impossible to understand the specifics of Piaget’s approach if one does not take into account that psychological works are only one of the elements of the system, which he called genetic epistemology, which includes, in addition to psychological, biological, scientific and methodological works.

Like the “evolutionists”, J. Piaget is interested in the question of the origin of human knowledge. In particular, discussing the problem of constancy of perception (preservation of the perceived sizes and shapes of objects regardless of their position and orientation in space), J. Piaget writes: “If the real evolution of perceptual structures is confirmed, then it is impossible to evade either the problem of their formation or the influence of experience on the process of their genesis”. Noting that the principles of conservation are a necessary condition for any rational activity, Piaget denies them a priori and conducts an experimental study of the formation of these principles in ontogenesis. The fundamental divergence of views of J. Piaget and supporters of E.E. lies in the fact that his true knowledge is not a hypothesis or a trial in a sequence of trials and errors generated by nature. The constancy of perception, the principle of conservation, the concept of a natural number is not hypotheses, but true reflections of the structures of the subject’s activity in the external world.

To describe the processes of learning and gaining experience, Piaget uses models describing the approximation to the final structures, i.e. to such structures that have completion. The transition to final causality dictates a different interpretation than in evolutionary epistemology of the a priori that provides this process of gaining experience: instead of the “open program”, a fundamentally unstructured instance is put — the general ability to generate knowledge structures such as geometry and arithmetic.

If in biological evolution there is a genetic fixation of results, then in the process of intellectual development, achievements are fixed with the help of formal systems. And the successes of individual individuals in understanding the nature of movements in space are consolidated by the formal apparatus of a three-dimensional group of movements, reflecting the possible actions of an individual in space. The process of acquiring infinite information “hides” in a system of concepts such as balancing, which cannot be more precise because they must “cover up” the process of infinite growth.

The third representative of the first stage of development, E.E. was K. Popper. The so-called “younger generation” of representatives of this trend “belong to Art. Tulmin, J. Holton, S. Pepper, et al.

In the history of the formation of the ideas of the theory of knowledge, two tendencies can be traced. One part of epistemological concepts traces rather favourable conditions for the emergence of the desire for knowledge. For example, R. Descartes and G. Leibniz. They believed that most of our ideas are correct because people were created by an intelligent being — God — and are able, in the light of such ideas, even to construct the world in their consciousness.

The second trend was not so supportive of the human capacity for cognition. K. Popper belongs to the second trend. They are characterized by the idea that the price of any knowledge is an error. To eradicate it from the knowledge system requires painstaking work, or science equipped with a critical method. And the knowledge obtained as a result cannot be considered in isolation from the “conditions for its receipt.”

The philosophical and methodological concept of K. Popper was formed under the influence and in contrast to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. In contrast to his ideas, K. Popper believes that our mind is not a clean slate board on which experience fixes its impressions. According to the philosopher, there are always some theoretical premises, the so-called false a priori, that shape our thoughts and actions. K. Popper admitted that we cannot say for sure whether the theory is true, since it is not derived from experience. He adhered to A. Tarski’s concept of truth. It follows from these premises that theory does not coincide with empirical reality. It becomes a product of our own production. When creating a theory, we can use quite a variety of sources, up to myths and metaphysics.

Science is not a derivative of our mind, it is able to say something about reality. K. Popper believes that this is possible due to the principle of falsification. Like the principle of verification put forward by the positivists, Popper’s falsification is intended to serve as a demarcation criterion between scientific and unscientific knowledge. The scientist must constantly subject theories to the most rigorous tests. Those that do not stand up to the test should be discarded, and those that do serve to create the following theories. But the preservation of these theories is temporary because there is always the possibility that a new test, a new empirical fact, will be able to “refute” it.

Thus, the opinion of those researchers who believe that K. Popper’s gnoseological constructions in the field of the theory of knowledge from the very beginning of his work proceeded in line with the ideas of the theory of evolution, seems to be quite justified. In light of this, the question of which of the versions of the theory of evolutions K. Popper uses and to what extent he substantiates this remains unresolved.

The philosopher himself believes that in the process of modelling his new theory of knowledge, which is focused on problems and hypotheses, in contrast to the old subjective theory of knowledge, he applies the theory of evolution in its neo-Darwinian version.

K. Popper’s decisive turn to the development of the ideas of evolution can be seen in the lectures “dedicated to H. Spencer (Oxford, 1961) and Arthur Compton (Washington, 1965)”. In these lectures, the philosopher shows and clarifies the far-reaching structural similarity between the theory of the growth of scientific knowledge and Darwinism. In subsequent works, his theory of evolutionary epistemology received a more complete development.

K. Popper believes that the process of adaptation of living organisms to the environment is comparable to the advancement of hypotheses explaining empirical material. Those hypotheses that successfully explain the empirical material survive, and those that fail to explain the empirical material are eliminated. They do not survive in the evolutionary terminology of Charles Darwin. No organism can fully adapt to environmental conditions, and the theory is not completely true. There is always the possibility of its refutation. Thus, there is no complete certainty that the theories are true, they are “plausible”. K. Popper believes that all theories are the successors of the previous ones, i.e. just as in evolutionary theory, all organisms are the successors of previous generations. Such a view allows us to understand the essence of the theory and the roots of its origin, moving deeper into history, “down to mythological beliefs.”

K. Popper formulates his presentation of the theory of evolution in the main 12 theses and the fundamental problems of E.E. in 5 theses. In theses 7–8 of his evolutionary theory, the philosopher formulates a scheme according to which theories and organisms go through a selection process:

P1 — TS — EE — P2,

where P1 is the original problem; TS — trial solutions; EE — error elimination; P2 is a new problem. The nature of the scheme presented here allows K. Popper to talk about the emergent (creative) essence of evolution and to take into account the possibility of developing such regulators for eliminating errors “which do not eliminate the organism itself.”

It should also be noted that knowledge for K. Popper is any form of adaptation or adaptation of all living things to environmental conditions. K. Popper emphasizes that knowledge has a genetically programmed expectation. This is not necessarily “conscious knowledge.”

K. Popper considered Darwinism to be a metaphysical research program, i.e. such a theory that cannot be falsified. A number of researchers believe that there are two options for applying the ideas of evolution in E.E. The first is the so-called strong option: representatives of this trend believe that the evolution of scientific knowledge is an integral part of the evolution of living things. The second option, the so-called weak, uses the theory of evolution to model cognitive processes. It includes K. Popper.

The starting point of agreement of the concepts of E.E. and genetic epistemology is the question of the Kantian a priori. According to Kant, human knowledge becomes possible due to certain conditions: a priori forms of sensibility and pure concepts of reason, which are available before any experience and make possible the growth of knowledge about the empirical world. Representatives of both branches of epistemology indicate that in phylo- and ontogenesis, a person is faced with the gradual development of knowledge and the cognitive apparatus of individuals and species. At the same time, the ability for such development is directly or indirectly compared with the Kantian a priori, and, therefore, the question of the origin and development of a priori forms seems to be completely legitimate.

Evolutionary epistemology in the XXI century

After post-positivism, the development of E.E. went in two main directions. Firstly, along the line of the so-called alternative model of evolution (K. Waddington, K. Hulkweg, K. Hooger and others) and, secondly, along the line of the synergetic approach.

K. Waddington and his supporters believed that their view of evolution makes it possible to understand how such highly structured systems as living organisms, or conceptual systems, can self-organize through control actions and create a stable dynamic order. In light of this, the analogy between biological and epistemological evolution becomes more convincing than the models of the development of scientific knowledge based on the traditional theory of evolution.

Today E.E. remains undeveloped. D. Campbell with the key thesis “Evolution is a process of cognition.” There is a book by the author in Russian, but it does not take into account the specifics of D. Campbell’s theory as one of the founders of E.E. This book includes a number of D. Campbell’s most important works in the field of methodology and research methodology. The content of the volume can be divided into three parts: 1) general methodological problems of the relationship between qualitative and quantitative knowledge in the social sciences; 2) a description of the specifics of the main models and plans for experimental and quasi-experimental research; 3) some applied problems of the methodology of the social sciences, first of all, the problems of evaluating the effectiveness of the programs offered to practice.

One of the followers of K. Popper — G. Vollmer (1943) should also be highlighted. In the work “Evolutionary theory of knowledge: innate structures of knowledge in the context of biology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy and theory of science”, the thinker appears before us as a supporter of hypothetical projective realism. Cognition is an adequate reconstruction of external structures in the subject. We do not just reproduce the external world, but we recreate it. Subjective and objective structures should not coincide but approach the objective ones. Cognition is useful in terms of human adaptation to the environment. It is the knowledge that increases the chances of reproduction. Moreover, the internal reconstruction of the external world is isomorphic to what is in the external world. The evolution of scientific knowledge is the continuous advancement and refutation of hypotheses. But E.E. made a Copernican revolution in epistemology — it took and removed a person from the process of perception. Man is the result of evolutionary processes, he does not stand in the centre of the universe, he is just one of the elements of the universe, his position is evolutionarily determined. The next point is that scientific knowledge and experimental knowledge are not synonymous. Scientific knowledge is not biologically determined. We are free to hypothesize.

E.E. continuation in sociobiology, the development of which is associated with the name of E. Wilson (1929). Sociobiology is the systematic study of the biological foundations of all forms of social behaviour. The approach itself was not invented by E. Wilson, but he tried to interpret social behaviour on the basis of new biological data. If we consider reason only as an adaptive function, then there can be no purely humanitarian knowledge. If everything is based on biological nature, then it is obvious that humanitarian knowledge can only exist on top of biological. Using brains to solve our problems, we need no more knowledge about their work than knowledge about hardware when using a computer program. E. Wilson introduced the concept of a human biogram — a matrix of human behaviour encoded into it. Biograms of the same race is similar. Groups of individuals of the same race can exchange individual deviations from a common biogram, creating a single biogram. The development of human society is guided by the internal logic of biological, and by no means conscious evolution. E. Wilson introduces the concept of “cultural genes”, which contains a kind of epigenetic code, due to the action of which it becomes possible to recognize the “epistemological meaning” of any kind of knowledge, which means that it becomes possible to define specifically similar or specifically different features of certain theories. Developing an evolutionary-epistemological view of the process of implementing knowledge, E. Wilson introduces the concept of “epigenetic rules”, which are, in fact, biological constructs that make possible both the development of human intelligence and simply the ability of a person to learn. E. Wilson was impressed: he was going to reform ethics, the humanities and social sciences, as well as human biology, all on the basis of a “truly evolutionary explanation of human behaviour.” Like many naturalists and social scientists in the 19th century, E. Wilson believed that the knowledge acquired in evolution, which, in a modern language, he called the knowledge of genetic strategies, underlies all science and serves as a guide to action for the general welfare.

“Genes keep culture on a leash. This leash is quite long, but it will inevitably restrain values ​​in accordance with their influence on the genetic pool … Human behaviour — as well as the deeper emotional response-ability that prompts and guides us — is a cyclical device through which human genetic material was and will be kept unchanged. It is impossible to prove that morality has a more important final purpose ”.

M. Ruse can be considered a representative of yet another branch. He has an essay, “Can Sociobiology Help Evolutionary Epistemology?” He replied that epistemology needs Darwinism. Of course, humans differ from animals because of their culture, but not much. The rudiments of morality can still be found in animal communities. And the mind is nothing more than one of the tools in the struggle for ecological survival. And how does the transfer of biological principles that determine the development of human culture take place? It is a cultural genus — a unit of cultural information. It is passed down from generation to generation within the same culture. A scientific theory can also be described by several cultural genes. From the point of view of cultural genes, various scientific theories can be compared. A person or society that has mastered the principles of mechanics will be more successful in mastering the environment than those who have not mastered it. But one should not think that the equations of mechanics will be very useful to the researcher stuck in the jungle. In man, there is a restrictive principle (epigenetic rule), which was formed evolutionarily. There are two types of such rules. The first type of rule is sensory filtering rules. Secondary epigenetic rules — the second type — when we transform the “waves” entering our brain, and partially discard them. Secondary epigenetic rules are the result of our body’s adaptation. In the process of evolution, our brain has been formed in such a way that it perceives precisely a cause-and-effect relationship. Therefore, the presence of cause-and-effect relationships in science and the desire for simplicity — are inherent in us by evolution. M. Ruse tries to deduce science from biological foundations. It turns out the same evolutionary approach to science but much more biologized. The modern position, however, believes that science is related to biology more indirectly. Thus, starting with a connection with psychology, epistemology eventually became firmly associated with biology.

E.E. — education is very complex and multifaceted, especially since each of the methodologists we study has imposed the concept of evolution on its own, already formed, theory of the development of science. The representatives of post-positivism that we have considered are only a stage in the formation of the main ideas of E.E. But the trend itself in the methodology of science did not disappear.

Conclusions

The incredible boom in information technology at the turn of the century led to a distraction from the crisis in cognition. Without having developed a unified theory of knowledge, scientists were distracted by technologies and their significance for the individual and the person today. This is certainly a very important issue. There was no such technological leap in the previous stages of history.

But the crisis of rationality led to a crisis of cognition. This led to the fact that the process of cognition itself was adopted on the basis of conventionalism. Therefore, everyone focused on new technologies. But the rapid development of technology and the “silence” of the crisis in epistemology led to a catastrophe. Only in the last 10 years has it become fashionable again to talk about the ecological crisis. Scientists around the world have come together again to tackle this problem. But the old problem — the crisis and the foundations of knowledge — does not find a place there. But it is precisely the neglect of this problem (partially or completely) to the current situation.

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Hоltоn G. Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1973, p. 221.

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