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THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF COGNITION.

1. On the essence and meaning of knowledge. The subject and object of cognition

2.. Practice as the basis and purpose of cognition. Intellectual-sensuous contemplation and thought: the essence, levels and forms.

3. The problem of Truth. Absolute and Relative truth. On the criteria of true knowledge.

4. Practice as the basis and purpose of cognition.

5. The operations and modes of thought.

Epistemology and its subject matter. Mankind has always striven to acquire new knowledge. The process of mastering the secrets of the universe is an expression of the highest creative aspirations of human reason. Throughout the millennia of its development, man­kind has traversed a long and thorny path of knowledge from a limited and primitive grasp of the essence of being to an ever deeper and more comprehensive one. On that path, countless properties and laws of nature and social life have been discovered, and pictures of the world succeeded one another. Development of knowledge went hand in hand with the development of production, and with the efflorescence of the arts and artistic creativity. The human mind does not inquire into the laws of the .world out of mere curiosity (although curiosity is one of the ideal motive forces of human activity) but with the aim of practical transformation of na­ture and man to achieve the most harmonious order of life possible in the world. Human knowledge forms a highly complex system of social memory; its wealth is transmitted from generation to gener­ation, from people to people by means of social heredity, of culture.

Knowledge is thus socially determined. We obtain our knowledge of reality only in terms of assimilated culture. Before we continue the cause of previous generations, we must assimilate knowledge al­ready accumulated by mankind, constantly correlating our cognitive activity with it —such is the categorical imperative of developing knowledge.

Man began to ponder on what knowledge is, and what the ways for acquiring it are, already in remote antiquity, when he became aware of himself as something confronting nature. In the course of time, a conscious formulation of this question and attempts to solve it began to take coherent form, and that was when knowledge of knowledge itself evolved. Nearly all philosophers have analyzed epistemological problems in one way or another.

Epistemology evolved along with the emergence of philosophy as one of its basic branches. It studies the nature of human knowledge, the forms and laws of the transition from a superficial knowledge of things known as opinion to cognizing their essence, or true knowl­edge, and in this connection it considers the paths of attaining the truth and the criteria of the truth. But man would not have been able to know the truth as such had he not made mistakes, and epi-stemology therefore also studies the way man falls into error and overcomes delusions. Finally, the most burning issue in epistemology is, and has always been, that of the vital meaning of true knowl­edge of the world, of man himself and of human society. All these numerous questions, as well as those that arise in other sciences and in social practice, contribute to the extensive problem range of epistemology. Knowledge of the essence of things permits man to use them in accordance with his needs and interests, modifying avail­able things and creating new ones. Knowledge is the link between nature, human reason and practical activity.



Generalizing all the positive elements obtained by philosophical thought in the domain of epistemology, dialectical materialism raised epistemology to a fundamentally new theoretical level, linking it closely with socio-historical practice and dialectically interpreting cognitive ac­tivity as socially determined, practical transforming activity. Marxism believed that all ideas come from experience, that they are reflections of reality, either true or distorted. It substantiated the dialectical-materialist prin­ciple of reflection as the cornerstone of scientific epistemology. It is known as Lenin's theory of reflection.

The unity and diversity of the kinds of knowledge. Cognition is the process of selective and active functioning, refutation and continuity of progressive forms of accumulation of information historically succeeding one another. Knowledge is the result of the process of cognition of reality tested by socio-historical practice and verified by logic; this result is on the one hand an adequate reflection of re­ality in man's consciousness in the form of notions, concepts, judge­ments and theories (i.e. in the form of subjective images), and on the other, it is a mastery of all these and a capacity for acting on their basis. Its reliability varies, reflecting the dialectics of relative and absolute truth. In its genesis and mode of functioning, knowl­edge is a social phenomenon recorded in natural and artificial lan­guages.

Man's knowledge can have various forms —pre-scientific, everyday, artistic, and scientific, the latter functioning at different levels of assimilation of reality as empirical or theoretical knowl­edge.

The importance of everyday knowledge, which forms the basis for all the other forms of it, cannot be underestimated. It is based on common sense and everyday consciousness, and it is an important reference frame for people's everyday behaviour, for their relations with one another and with nature.

Scientific knowledge proper is marked by conscious interpretation of facts in the system of concepts of a given science, and it is incorporated in theories that form the high­est level of scientific knowledge. Being a generalization of reliable facts, scientific knowledge discovers the necessary and the law-gov­erned behind the accidental, and the general behind the individual and the particular. Artistic knowledge has certain specific features (e.g. the fact that a rich system of images functions here along with concepts) and plays an enormous and indispensable role in the overall cognitive process providing as it does an integral reflection of man's world and of man in the world, sharpening his ability for creative imagination and fantasy and shaping the aesthetic aspects of all activity, including cognition itself.

On the potential of knowledge: optimism, scepticism, and agnosti­cism. Is the world knowable in principle? That is a question which human thought has been concerned with for centuries, and it is not a scholastic one. Indeed, the universe is infinite, while man is finite, and the cognition of that which is infinite is impossible within the boundaries of his finite experience.

Three principal positions have become clearly differentiated in the attempts to answer this question: optimism, scepticism and ag­nosticism. The optimists assert that the world is in principle knowable, the agnostics, on the contrary, reject this possibility. As for sceptics, they do not reject outright the knowability of the world but question the validity of knowledge.

The subject and object of cognition. The world exists for us only as it is given to the knowing subject. The concepts of subject and ob­ject are correlative. The subject is a complex hierarchy, of which the foundation is the entire social whole. In the final analysis, the highest producer of knowledge and wisdom is the entire mankind. Its development has produced smaller communities —the separate peoples

The subject and his cognitive activity can only be adequately understood in their concrete historical aspect. Scientific knowledge assumes not only the subject's conscious attitude towards the object but also towards himself, towards his activity, i.e. a realization of the conditions, devices, norms and methods of research.

From the standpoint of cognitive activity, the subject does not exist without an object, and the object does not exist without a sub­ject.

The object is seen as the real fragments of being that are subjected to study. The subject mat­ter of research are the concrete aspects at which the questing thought is targeted.

It is a well-known dictum that man as the creator and subject of history creates the necessary conditions and premisses for his his­torical existence. It so appears that the object of socio-historical knowledge is not only cognized but also created by people: before it becomes an object, it must be shaped by them. In social cognition, man deals with the results of his activity and thus with himself as a practically acting being. As a subject of cognition, man finds himself at the same time in the position of its object. Social cognition is in this sense man's social self-consciousness: he discovers for himself and studies his own historically created social essence.

2.Practice as the Basis and Purpose of Cognition

The unity of theory and practice. The principal form of the mani­festation of human life is activity—sensuously objective, practical, and intellectual, theoretical. Man is an active being rather than a passive spectator at the "pageant" of life. He continually influences things around him, lending them forms and properties necessary to satisfy the historically evolved social and personal needs. It is in the transformation of the world that man lends definiteness to his way of life.

Practice is the material, sensuously objective and goal-directed ac­tivity of men intended to master and transform natural and social ob­jects, and constituting the universal basis, the motive force of the de­velopment of human society and knowledge, \ Practice designates not only, and not so much, the sensuously objective activity of a separate individual as the total activity and experience of the entire mankind in its historical development. Practical activity is social both in its content and in the mode of its realization. Contemporary practice is a result of world history, a result that embodies infinitely varied re­lations between men and nature and among men in the process of material and non-material production. Being the principal mode of man's social existence and the decisive form of his self-assertion in the world, practice acts as a complex integral system incorporating such elements as need, goal, motive, separate actions, movements, acts, the object at which activity is directed, the instruments of achieving the goal, and finally the result of activity. In practice, somebody always does something to create something out of some­thing with the help of something for some purpose.

Social practice forms a dialectical unity with cognitive activity, with theory. It performs three functions in relation to the latter. First, it is the source and the basis of cognition, its motive force; it provides the necessary factual material for it, subject to generaliza­tion and theoretical processing. It thus feeds cognition as soil feeds trees, and does not let it become divorced from real life. Second, practice is a mode of application of knowledge, and in this sense it is the goal of cognition. Scientific knowledge has a practical meaning only if it is implemented in life: practice is the arena in which the power of knowledge is applied. The ultimate goal of cog­nition is not knowledge in itself but practical transformation of re­ality to satisfy society's material and non-material needs through harmonizing its relationship with nature. Third, practice is the crite­rion and measure of the truth of the results of cognition. Only that knowledge which has passed through the purifying fire of practice can lay claims to objective ness, reliability, and truth.

We can thus say that practice is the basis for the formation and development of cognition at all its stages, the source of knowledge and criterion of the truth of the results of the cognitive process.

The main kinds of practice are the material-production activity and social-transforming activity of the masses (the latter includes people's activity in the social, political and cultural spheres of so­ciety's life). Natural-scientific and social experiments are special kinds of scientific practice.

The feedback mechanism permits the implementation of correc­tive influences of theoretical and practical activity on each other, which ensures the role of practice as the criterion of truth.

Inasmuch as practical activity is conscious, the mental, spiritual element is undoubtedly part and parcel of it. The position of isolating the material and practical activity from the intellectual and theoretical one is hostile to dialectical materialism. These kinds of activity form an indissoluble unity. To resort to the dry language of categories, a part is not the whole, and substituting the one for the other is fraught with theoretical-methodological and worldview errors.


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1114


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