Social and humanitarian knowledge briefly. How are social sciences and humanities classified? Communication as information exchange
The social and human sciences mean a cycle scientific disciplines aimed at studying social phenomena. They study man in the sphere of his spiritual, mental, moral, cultural and social activities.
The object of social and humanitarian knowledge in the broad sense of the word is a set of social phenomena: social relations and the functioning of social institutions, social actions and interactions of people and their results, presented in monuments of material and spiritual culture, events and historical facts.
Just like the objects of other sciences, society exists independently of the will and consciousness of people. At the same time, there is a specific difference between the object of social sciences and humanities: If the processes physical world completely independent of human consciousness, then the processes occurring in society are associated with the activities of people. These processes are carried out only through the activities of people, their actions, which require volitional efforts of a person and are associated with his aspirations, desires, hopes, needs and goals (they are objective-subjective in nature).
The subject of social and humanitarian knowledge is a community of scientists or an individual. Scientific socio-humanitarian knowledge is carried out by specialists who have characteristic professional knowledge and skills.
Features of social and humanitarian knowledge:
As one of the areas of common scientific knowledge, social sciences and humanities have all the signs of science in general. But they also have their own specifics.
One of important features social sciences and humanities - the need to take into account the phenomenon of freedom in them. Natural sciences study natural processes. These processes just happen. Social sciences and humanities study human activity in the economic, legal, political, and artistic spheres. Human activity does not happen, but is accomplished. The processes of nature do not have freedom. Human activity is free. Therefore, it is less predictable than natural processes. In this regard, in the social and human sciences there is less certainty and more hypotheticality than in the natural sciences
The second feature of the social and human sciences is the need to study subjective reality. Natural sciences study material objects. Social sciences and humanities also explore material systems, that is, objective social reality. But an essential component of all objects of social sciences and humanities is subjective reality - human consciousness. Two factors make it difficult to study consciousness. The first of them is the sovereignty of consciousness. It consists in the fact that consciousness is directly given only to a given subject. For other people consciousness this person unobservable. For them, only external manifestations of consciousness are observed - human speech and actions. By them we judge the content of another person’s consciousness, but he can mask his true experiences. The second difficulty is that consciousness is not material, but ideal, that is, it does not have physical and chemical properties what material objects have, for example, properties such as charge, mass, weight, valency. Consciousness is disembodied and incorporeal; it is information, as it were, in its pure form.
Consciousness itself is given to man exclusively in the form of subjective internal experiences. It cannot be recorded with a device, it can only be felt. However, the noted difficulties in studying spiritual world people are not insurmountable. The study of the activities and speech of people, their brain processes allows science and philosophy to obtain certain knowledge about the composition, structure and functions of consciousness.
The third feature of the social sciences and humanities is high degree uniqueness of the objects being studied. Uniqueness is a unique set of properties inherent in this object. Each object is unique. Systems, processes (material and spiritual), events, phenomena, and properties - everything that can be studied - can act as objects of knowledge. The degree of uniqueness of social and humanitarian objects is much higher than that of natural or technological objects. For example, a physicist deals with two atoms, an engineer deals with two cars of the same brand, a lawyer or teacher deals with two people. However, there are more differences between the objects of social and humanitarian disciplines.
Since the objects and events studied by social and humanitarian disciplines are unique, it is necessary to use an individual approach in these sciences. In the natural and technical sciences it is not necessary, where the objects being studied are basically of the same type, and their differences can be abstracted from each other, since they are insignificant. But a lawyer, psychologist, teacher cannot abstract himself from the differences between people and their characteristics.
The fourth feature of social and humanitarian disciplines is the need to take into account the nature of the laws of functioning of the objects being studied. In nature, both dynamic and statistical laws operate; in social and humanitarian objects – as a rule, statistical laws. Dynamic laws are based on unambiguous causality, while statistical laws are based on probabilistic causality, in which a cause can give rise to one of several consequences. (Law of equality of action and reaction. Material bodies act on each other with forces equal in magnitude and opposite in direction)
Knowledge of dynamic laws allows for accurate (unambiguous) predictions, while knowledge of statistical laws opens up the possibility of only probabilistic predictions, when it is impossible to know which of the possible events will occur, but only the probabilities of these events can be calculated. In this regard, prediction in the social sciences and humanities is less accurate than in the sciences of nature and technology.
The fifth feature of the social sciences and humanities is the limited use of experiment in them. In many cases, the experiment is simply impossible to carry out, for example, in studying the history of a country where events have already occurred. It is impossible to conduct experiments in sociology when studying interethnic relations, or in demography when studying, say, population migration. It is impossible to resettle peoples and other social groups for experimental purposes, change their wages, living conditions, family composition, etc.
Scientific criteria: evidence (rationality), consistency, empirical (experimental, practical) testability, reproducibility of empirical material, general validity, consistency, essentiality.
Evidence in the social sciences and humanities is less rigorous than in the natural sciences. This is due to the lack of facts and reliable theoretical positions. For this reason, in the social sciences and humanities, compared to the natural sciences, intuition plays a more significant role, and many provisions of social science and humanities are introduced intuitively. Social sciences and humanities strive for the consistency of their knowledge, however, due to the versatility of the objects of study, the criterion of consistency is violated in them more often than in the natural sciences.
Empirical testability in the natural sciences is realized mainly through special testing experiments, while in the social and human sciences methods of observation, questionnaires, interviews, and testing predominate.
The reproducibility of facts in the natural sciences is established mainly by repeating experiments to obtain statistically reliable results. In the social sciences and humanities, when conditions exist, experiment is also used. In those areas of humanitarian knowledge where experimentation is impossible, analysis of evidence from many sources is used, for example in history, jurisprudence, and pedagogy. Many sources or many witnesses are analogous to many observations and large number experiments.
The general significance in the social sciences and humanities is much less than in the natural sciences. Manifold scientific schools and there are very many directions in these sciences, but there is a tendency towards their synthesis.
Seminar No. 1
Topic: Humanities: features, development and significance of humanitarian knowledge.
Question No. 1. Content and development of humanitarian knowledge. The process and reasons for expanding humanities knowledge.
Humanities- this is the immediate world human life, both past and present, and in some respects also future.
Humanitarian knowledge is the ability to navigate the world, in terms of what is happening, it is the ability to understand what is happening to us and why we need certain reforms, why we need certain innovations. Humanitarian knowledge changes a person’s consciousness, as it shapes his attitude to the world and allows him to look at it in a new way., because the method of self-determination organizes the whole life, and self-determination is a condition for a person to become successful.
The peculiarity of humanitarian knowledge is that it does not exist independently of a person, since a person himself develops it, rethinking what exists in the outside world, in culture (i.e. in all human experience). For example, he passes ideas or cultural values through his “I” - his individual, and then they become his own, his individual concepts. Individuality here serves as a criterion. Humanitarian knowledge speaks of what was created by man throughout his history, and not of what arose naturally.
The object of the humanities is the individual, more precisely, his spiritual, inner world and the associated world of human relationships and the world of spiritual culture of society.
The humanities include psychology (personality psychology, psychology of emotions, social psychology), civil history (here humanitarian knowledge is combined with social science), sociology, literary criticism, linguistics, etc. They study the spiritual world of man through text. A person always expresses himself (speaks), that is, he creates a text (even a potential one). Where a person is studied outside the text and independently of it, these are no longer the humanities (human anatomy and physiology, etc.
Humanitarian knowledge, just like natural scientific knowledge, strives to achieve truth, that is, to ensure that information about social phenomena is not simply accumulated, different ideas and views on the nature of man and society are not simply summarized, so that these ideas are not erroneous , were not delusions. It has always been important for humanity to understand itself, to understand a person, his actions and thoughts, the nature of his life and the changes that occur in it. Therefore, the problem of truth in humanitarian knowledge is of fundamental importance. Achieving truth in the humanities is achieved in many ways in specific, complex ways. The relationship between truth and error occurs in difficult conditions for a person to choose his life position. But the search for truth is concentrated primarily in humanitarian knowledge. And therefore, the formation of a worldview is greatly influenced by the level of a person’s humanitarian education. All humanitarian knowledge is permeated with worldview ideas.– history, jurisprudence, social psychology, sociology, etc. – is not just a collection of information obtained about the development of society and peoples, but at the same time their understanding from one point or another. The same completely applies to the sciences about man, for example, psychology, pedagogy. In society, a person always faces the problem of choice, and then humanitarian education, the level of this education creates the prerequisites for this choice to be made in the most civilized form, since humanitarian education allows a person not to start with clean slate, but to use conscious universal human experience.
Question No. 2. Science as a form of knowledge, its features and significance.
The science- a form of spiritual activity of people aimed at producing knowledge about nature, society and knowledge itself, with the immediate goal of comprehending the truth and discovering objective laws.
Classifications of sciences:
on the subject and method of cognition : natural, social and humanitarian, about cognition and thinking, technical and mathematical;
by distance from practice : fundamental and applied.
Functions of science:
cultural and ideological,
cognitive-explanatory,
prognostic,
social (social forecasting, management and development).
Scientific knowledge – special kind cognitive activity, aimed at developing objective, systematically organized and substantiated knowledge about nature, man and society.
The main features of scientific knowledge are the following:
1. The main task of scientific knowledge is the discovery of objective laws of reality - natural, social, laws of knowledge itself, etc.
2. Science carries out the study not only of objects used in today's practice, but also of those that can become the subject of practical development in future. Science deals, among other things, with predicting the future;
3. Science is characterized by objectivity, since the main goal of scientific knowledge is objective truth.
4. An essential feature of cognition is its systematic nature. Knowledge is transformed into scientific knowledge when the description and generalization of facts are brought to their inclusion in the theory;
5. Scientific knowledge is characterized by strict evidence, validity of the results obtained, reliability of the conclusions;
6. Verifiability of knowledge through experience and practice.
7. Use of scientific equipment.
There are two levels of scientific knowledge: empirical and theoretical.
The empirical level of scientific knowledge is characterized by direct research of actually existing objects. At this level of research, we are dealing with direct human interaction with the natural or social objects being studied; the process of accumulating information about the objects under study is carried out through observations, measurements, and experiments.
The primary systematization of the obtained factual data in the form of tables, diagrams, graphs, etc. is also carried out here. The theoretical level of scientific knowledge is characterized by a predominance rational moment - concepts, theories, laws and other forms and “ mental operations
" There is no practical interaction with objects. The theoretical level is a higher level in scientific knowledge. The results of theoretical knowledge are hypotheses, theories, laws.
Question No. 3. Humanities: concept, types, specifics, meaning. Humanitarian sciences
- disciplines that study man in the sphere of his spiritual, mental, moral, cultural and social activities. To date, the problem of classifying the social sciences and humanities has not been resolved. Some authors do not divide sciences into social and humanities, others do. The difference lies in the subject of study. For social sciences, this is society as a whole or its spheres (political, legal, economic, etc.). For the humanities, the subject of study is man and the spiritual products of his activity.
In this regard, social sciences include social philosophy, history, sociology, economics, jurisprudence, and political science. The humanities can include cultural studies, religious studies, art history, psychology, linguistics, pedagogy, philosophical anthropology
. The similarities between the social and human sciences are very great, so we can talk about the social and human sciences as a single science.. Natural sciences study natural processes.
These processes just happen. Social sciences and humanities study human activity in the economic, legal, political, and artistic spheres. Human activity does not happen, but is accomplished. The processes of nature do not have freedom. Human activity is free (not absolutely, of course, but relatively). Therefore, it is less predictable than natural processes. In this regard, in the social sciences and humanities there is less certainty and more unpredictability. 3) 2) high degree of uniqueness of the objects being studied.
Uniqueness is a unique set of properties inherent in a given object. Each object is unique. limited application of the experiment . In many cases, the experiment is simply impossible to carry out, for example, in studying the history of a country where events have already occurred. It is impossible to conduct experiments in sociology when studying interethnic relations, or in demography when studying, say, population migration. We cannot resettle peoples and other social groups for experimental purposes, change their wages, living conditions, family composition, etc.
The importance of the humanities very large. They not only broaden their horizons, but also accumulate experience and skills. Studying social -humanist science, a person joins society, gets to know it, and forms his attitude towards others. By delving into the study of at least one of the humanities, a person reveals himself and his potential. Humanities education helps a person find himself, defend his right to self-realization, self-determination, creates his cultural field, that is, takes on the burden of problems of ideological, general cultural, spiritual and intellectual development
personality. Question No. 4. general characteristics social worldview. Role
scientific study – This is a system of views on the objective world and man’s place in it, on man’s relationship to the reality around him and to himself, as well as beliefs, ideals, principles of cognition and activity, and value orientations formed on the basis of these views.
The classification of worldviews considers three main types of worldviews from the point of view of its socio-historical features:
Mythological type of worldview formed during the times of primitive people. Then people did not recognize themselves as individuals, did not distinguish themselves from the world around them, and saw the will of the gods in everything.
Paganism is the main element of the mythological type of worldview. Religious type of worldview
just like mythological, it is based on belief in supernatural forces. A huge number of moral norms (commandments) and examples of correct behavior keeps society within certain limits and unites people of the same faith. Disadvantages: misunderstanding of people of other faiths, hence division along religious lines, religious conflicts and wars. Philosophical type of worldview
It has
social and intellectual character. The mind (intelligence, wisdom) and society (society) are important here. The main element is the desire for knowledge. Worldview plays a significant role in a person’s life: it gives a person guidelines and goals for his activities; allows people to understand how best to achieve their goals, equips them with methods of cognition and activity; makes it possible to determine the true values of life and culture.
Nowadays society in its past and present is studying a whole complex of social sciences: spheres of public life. For example, history can be classified as both a science and a social science.
All three classification methods divide these sciences into social and humanities.
Classification by subject of study:
Social sciences are sociology, jurisprudence, political science, etc., where the subject of study is human society, “society”.
The humanities are philosophy, history, where man is considered as a subject of moral, intellectual, social and cultural activity. Both as an individual and in the context of society.
But in this division between the humanities and social sciences there is no unity. For example, in the English classification the sciences include such disciplines as languages, religion, and music. In the Russian classification, they relate directly to culture.
Classification by method of explanation
Social sciences use a generalizing method aimed at identifying patterns, in this they are similar to the natural sciences. Objects of study are subject not only to description, but more to evaluation, and not absolute, but comparative.
The humanities use individualizing descriptive methods. Some of the humanities use only descriptions, while others also use assessments, and absolute ones at that.
Classification by research programs used
IN social sciences ah – naturalistic program. Here there is a clear distinction between the subject and the object of study. The researcher deliberately contrasts himself with the object of study - society as a whole or the economic or legal sphere. According to E. Durkheim, the essence of the naturalistic method is viewing what is being studied as a thing. Thus, existing patterns are identified and described from the outside. The main purpose of this method is explanation.
In the humanities there is a culture-centric program. In this program, culture is viewed as an independent reality, separated from nature. The researcher himself can simultaneously be the subject and object of study, study, analyze and describe the subject, descending to the individual, to his worldview, values, in contrast to the naturalistic program, where concepts are described in general.
Chapter I. Social and humanitarian knowledge and professional activity
Science and philosophy
Man and society in early myths and first philosophical teachings
Philosophy and social sciences in New and Modern times
From the history of Russian philosophical thought
Activities in the social and humanitarian sphere and professional choice
Conclusions to Chapter I
Questions and assignments for Chapter I
Getting ready for the exam
Chapter II. Society and man
The origin of man and the formation of society
The essence of man as a problem of philosophy
Society and public relations
Society as a developing system
Typology of societies
Historical development of humanity: search for social macrotheory
Historical process
The Problem of Social Progress
Freedom in human activity
Conclusions to Chapter II
Questions and assignments for Chapter II
Getting ready for the exam
Chapter III. Activity as a way of human existence
Human activity and its diversity
Conclusions to Chapter III
Questions and assignments for Chapter III
Getting ready for the exam
Chapter IV. Consciousness and cognition
The problem of the world's cognition
Truth and its criteria
The variety of ways to understand the world
Scientific knowledge
Social cognition
Knowledge and consciousness
Self-knowledge and personality development
Conclusions to Chapter IV
Questions and assignments for Chapter IV
Getting ready for the exam
Chapter V. Personality. Interpersonal relationships
Individual, individuality, personality
Age and personality development
Personality orientation
Communication as information exchange
Communication as interaction
Communication as understanding
Small groups
Group cohesion and conformity behavior
Group differentiation and leadership
Family as a small group
Antisocial and criminal youth groups
Conflict in interpersonal relationships
Conclusions to Chapter V
Questions and assignments for Chapter V
Getting ready for the exam
Chapter I. SOCIAL AND HUMANITIES KNOWLEDGE AND PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY
§ 1. Science and philosophy
You, of course, understand what they are academic subjects, like physics and history, biology and chemistry, are built on the basis of sciences that have the same names. And the word “social science” (“social science”) means not just one science, but a whole complex of sciences that study society and man. The knowledge that these sciences provide is called social and humanitarian (note that humanitarian knowledge also includes a whole complex of philological sciences: linguistics, linguistics, etc.).
NATURAL SCIENCE
AND SOCIAL AND HUMANITIES KNOWLEDGE
At first glance, everything looks simple. Natural sciences study nature, social sciences study society. What sciences study humans? It turns out that they are both. His biological nature They study the natural sciences, and the social qualities of man - social ones. There are sciences that occupy an intermediate position between the natural sciences and the social sciences. An example of such sciences is geography. Do you know that Physiography studies nature, and economics studies society. Ecology occupies the same position.
This does not change the fact that the social sciences differ markedly from the natural sciences.
If the natural sciences study nature, which existed and can exist independently of man, then the social sciences cannot understand society without studying the activities of the people living in it, their thoughts and aspirations. Natural sciences study objective connections between natural phenomena, and for social it is important to discover not only objective interdependencies between various social processes, but also the motives of the people who participate in them.
Natural sciences, as a rule, provide generalized theoretical knowledge. They characterize not a separate natural object, but general properties the entire collection of homogeneous objects. Social sciences study not only the general features of homogeneous social phenomena, but also the features of a separate, unique event, the features of a single socially significant action, the state of society in a given country in a certain period, the politics of a particular statesman and so on.
In the future, you will learn much more about the features of the social sciences. But for all their specificity, social sciences are an integral part of big science, in which they interact with other subject areas (natural, technical, mathematical). Like other areas of scientific research, social sciences have the goal of comprehending the truth, discovering the objective laws of the functioning of society, and trends in its development.
CLASSIFICATION
SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
Exist various classifications these social sciences. According to one of them, social sciences, like other sciences, depending on their connection with practice (or distance from it) are divided into fundamental and applied. The former find out the objective laws of the surrounding world, and the latter solve the problems of applying these laws to solve practical problems in production and social areas. But the boundary between these groups of sciences is conditional and fluid.
The generally accepted classification is based on the subject of research (those connections and dependencies that each science directly studies). From this point of view, the following groups of social sciences can be distinguished:
historical sciences(National history, General history, archaeology, ethnography, historiography, etc.);
economic sciences(economic theory, economics and management national economy, accounting, statistics, etc.);
philosophical sciences(history of philosophy, logic, ethics, aesthetics, etc.);
philological sciences(literary criticism, linguistics, journalism, etc.);
legal sciences(theory and history of state and law, history of legal doctrines, constitutional law, etc.);
pedagogical sciences(general pedagogy, history of pedagogy and education, theory and methods of teaching and education, etc.);
psychological sciences(general psychology, personality psychology, social and political psychology, etc.);
sociological sciences(theory, methodology and history of sociology, economic sociology and demography, etc.);
political science(policy theory, history and methodology political science, political conflictology, political technologies, etc.);
cultural studies
(theory and history of culture, museology, etc.).
In the specialized class, special attention is paid to historical, sociological, political, psychological, economic, legal, legal sciences and philosophy. Features of history, economics and law are revealed in independent courses. The essence of philosophy, sociology, political science, social psychology is discussed in this course.
SOCIOLOGY, POLITICAL SCIENCE, SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY AS SOCIAL SCIENCES
In the broadest sense sociology - is a science that studies society and social relations. But society studies different sciences. Each of them (economic theory, cultural studies, theory of state and law, political science) studies, as a rule, only one sphere of society’s life, some specific aspect of its development.
The modern sociological encyclopedia defines sociology as a science of general and specific social laws and patterns of development and functioning of historically defined social systems, about the mechanisms of action and forms of manifestation of these laws in the activities of people, social groups, classes, and peoples. The word “social” in this definition means the totality of social relations, that is, the relationships of people to each other and to society. The social is understood as the result of the joint activity of people, which manifests itself in their communication and interaction.
Sociology is the science of society as an integral system, of the laws of its formation, functioning and development. She learns social life people, social facts, processes, relationships, activities of individuals, social groups, their role, status and social behavior, institutional forms of their organization.
The idea of three levels of sociological knowledge is widespread. Theoretical level represent general sociological theories that reflect general issues structure and functioning of society. On level of applied sociological research Various methods are used: observation, survey, study of documents, experiment. With their help, sociology provides reliable knowledge about specific processes occurring in society. Middle-range theories(sociology of the family, sociology of labor, sociology of conflicts, etc.) are the connecting link between general sociological theories and applied research that provides factual information about the phenomena of reality.
Sociology in general is directed towards modern life. It helps to understand and predict processes occurring in society.
Political science (political science) is a generalization of political practices, political life society. She studies politics in its relationships with other areas of public life. The subject of political science is power, state, political relations, political systems, political behavior, political culture. Political science studies the relations of various social, ethnic, religious and other community groups to power, as well as relations between classes, parties and the state.
There are two interpretations of political science. In the narrow sense political science is one of the sciences that studies politics, namely general theory politics, exploring the specific patterns of relations between social actors regarding power and influence, a special type of interaction between the rulers and the ruled, the managers and the governed. The theory of politics includes various concepts of power, theories of the state and political parties, theories international relations and etc.
In a broad sense political science includes all political knowledge and is a complex of disciplines that study politics: the history of political thought, political philosophy, political sociology, political psychology, the theory of state and law, political geography, etc. In other words, in this interpretation, political science acts as a single, an integral science that comprehensively studies politics. She relies on applied research, which use various methods, including those existing in sociology and others social sciences.
Political science allows you to analyze and predict the political situation.
Social Psychology, as you saw in the classification of branches of social science, belongs to the group psychological sciences. Psychology studies the patterns, features of the development and functioning of the psyche. And its branch - social Psychology- studies patterns of behavior and activity of people determined by the fact of their inclusion in social groups, as well as the psychological characteristics of these groups themselves. In its research, social psychology is closely related, on the one hand, to general psychology, and on the other - with sociology. But it is she who studies such issues as the patterns of formation, functioning and development of socio-psychological phenomena, processes and states, the subjects of which are individuals and social communities; socialization of the individual; individual activity in groups; interpersonal relationships in groups; the nature of the joint activities of people in groups, the forms of communication and interaction that develop in them.
Social psychology helps solve many practical problems: improving the psychological climate in production, scientific, and educational teams; optimization of relations between managers and managed; perception of information and advertising; family relationships, etc.
SPECIFICITY OF PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
"What do philosophers do when they work?" - asked the English scientist B. Russell. The answer to a simple question allows us to determine both the features of the philosophizing process and the uniqueness of its result. Russell answers this way: the philosopher first of all reflects on mysterious or eternal problems: what is the meaning of life and is there any at all? Does the world have a purpose, does it lead somewhere? historical development? Is nature really governed by laws, or do we just like to see some kind of order in everything? Is the world divided into two fundamentally different parts - spirit and matter, and if so, how do they coexist?
And here is how the German philosopher I. Kant formulated the main philosophical problems: what can I know? What can I believe in? What can I hope for? What is a person?
Similar questions human thought set a long time ago, they retain their significance today, so with good reason they can be attributed to eternal problems of philosophy. In each historical era, philosophers formulate these questions and answer them differently.
They need to know what other thinkers thought about it in other times. Of particular importance is the appeal of philosophy to its history. The philosopher is in continuous mental dialogue with his predecessors, critically comprehending them from the perspective of his time. creative heritage, offering new approaches and solutions.
The new philosophical systems created do not cancel previously put forward concepts and principles, but continue to coexist with them in a single cultural and cognitive space, therefore philosophy always pluralistic,
diverse in its schools and directions. Some even argue that there are as many truths in philosophy as there are philosophers.
The situation is different with science. In most cases, it solves pressing problems of its time. Although the history of the development of scientific thought is also important and instructive, it does not have any meaning for the scientist researching current problem, just as much of great importance, as the ideas of predecessors for the philosopher. The provisions established and substantiated by science take on the character of objective truth: mathematical formulas, laws of motion, mechanisms of heredity, etc. They are valid for any society and do not depend “on either man or humanity.” What is the norm for philosophy is the coexistence and certain confrontation of different approaches, doctrines, for science - special case development of science, which belongs to an area that has not yet been sufficiently explored: there we see both the struggle of schools and the competition of hypotheses.
There is another important difference between philosophy and science - methods of developing problems. As B. Russell noted, philosophical questions cannot be answered through laboratory experiments. Philosophizing is a type of speculative activity. Although in most cases philosophers build their reasoning on a rational basis and strive for logical validity of conclusions, they also use special methods of argumentation that go beyond formal logic: they identify opposite sides the whole, they turn to paradoxes (when, with logical reasoning, they come to an absurd result), aporia (unsolvable problems). Such methods and techniques allow us to capture the inconsistency and variability of the world.
Many concepts used by philosophy are extremely generalized and abstract. This is due to the fact that they cover a very wide range of phenomena, so they have very little common features inherent in each of them. Such extremely broad philosophical concepts covering a huge class of phenomena include the categories of “being”, “consciousness”, “activity”, “society”, “cognition”, etc.
Thus, there are many differences between philosophy and science. On this basis, many researchers consider philosophy as completely special way comprehension of the world.
However, we must not lose sight of the fact that philosophical knowledge is multi-layered: in addition to these issues, which can be classified as value-related, existential(from the Latin existentia - existence) and which can hardly be comprehended scientifically, philosophy also studies a number of other problems that are no longer focused on what should be, but on what exists. Within philosophy, relatively independent areas of knowledge have been formed quite a long time ago: the doctrine of being - ontology; the doctrine of knowledge - epistemology; the science of morality - ethics; a science that studies beauty in reality, the laws of the development of art, - aesthetics.
Please note: in brief description These areas of knowledge we used the concept of “science”. This is no coincidence. Analysis of issues related to these sections of philosophy most often proceeds in the logic of scientific knowledge and can be assessed from the standpoint of true or false knowledge.
Philosophical knowledge includes such important areas for understanding society and man as philosophical anthropology - the doctrine of the essence and nature of man, of the specifically human way of being, as well as social philosophy.
HOW PHILOSOPHY HELPES UNDERSTAND SOCIETY
The subject of social philosophy is the joint activities of people in society. A science such as sociology is important for the study of society. Your generalizations and conclusions about the social structure and forms social behavior History makes a man. What new does philosophy bring to the understanding of the human world?
Let's consider this using the example of socialization - the assimilation by an individual of values and cultural patterns developed by society. The sociologist will focus on those factors (social institutions, social groups) under the influence of which modern society the process of socialization is carried out. The sociologist will consider the role of family, education, the influence of peer groups, means mass media in the acquisition of values and norms by the individual. A historian is interested in the real processes of socialization in a particular society of a certain historical era. He will look for answers to questions such as: what values were instilled in a child in a Western European peasant family in the 18th century? What and how were children taught in the Russian pre-revolutionary gymnasium? And so on.
What about the social philosopher? The focus of his attention will be on more general problems: why is the socialization process necessary for society and what does the process of socialization give to the individual? Which of its components, despite the variety of forms and types, are sustainable, that is, reproduced in any society? How does a certain imposition of social institutions and priorities on an individual relate to respect for his inner freedom? What is the value of freedom as such?
We see that social philosophy is turned to the analysis of the most general, stable characteristics; it places the phenomenon in a broader social context (personal freedom and its boundaries); gravitates toward value-based approaches.
Social philosophy makes its full contribution to the development of a wide range of problems: society as an integrity (the relationship between society and nature); patterns of social development (what they are, how they manifest themselves in social life, how they differ from the laws of nature); the structure of society as a system (what are the grounds for identifying the main components and subsystems of society, what types of connections and interactions ensure the integrity of society); meaning, direction and resources of social development (how do sustainability and variability relate to social development, what are its main sources, what is the direction of socio-historical development, what is expressed social progress and what are its boundaries); the relationship between the spiritual and material aspects of the life of society (what serves as the basis for identifying these aspects, how they interact, whether one of them can be considered decisive); man as a subject of social action (differences between human activity and animal behavior, consciousness as a regulator of activity); features of social cognition.
We will look at many of these problems later.
Basic concepts: social sciences, social and humanitarian knowledge, sociology as a science, political science as a science, social psychology as a science, philosophy.
Terms: subject of science, philosophical pluralism, speculative activity.
The structure of modern scientific knowledge form two types of sciences: 1) natural, or sciences about nature; 2) social and humanitarian, or spiritual sciences, the object of study of which is man and society.
This division of sciences, proposed by the German philosopher, is based on V. Dilthey(1833-1911), lies the difference between the objects of natural science and social and humanitarian types of knowledge. Subsequently, German philosophers V. Windelband(1848-1915) and G. Rickert(1863-1936) made a distinction between natural science and social-humanitarian types of knowledge based on the methods they used. According to V. Windelband, natural science uses the nomothetic method (Greek nomos - law; tetio - establish), i.e. law-establishing; Social and humanitarian knowledge is characterized by the idiographic method (Greek idios - special, unusual; grapho - I write), i.e., describing the singular, individual. Natural science, V. Windelband believed, has as its goal the identification and formulation of general laws expressing stable and repeating connections between phenomena; Humanitarian knowledge (primarily history) sees its goal in recording and explaining specific, individual facts. According to G. Rickert, natural sciences There is a generalizing (generalizing) method, with the help of which the researcher selects from the diversity of nature only repeating facts that indicate the presence of constant, stable connections between phenomena. Accordingly, in spiritual sciences an individualizing method is used, which consists in recording and explaining individual phenomena. Considering these methods as complementary, German philosophers, however, believed that the nomothetic, or generalizing, method in the European cultural tradition is perceived as a universal method of scientific knowledge, and its use acts as a criterion for the scientific nature of cognitive activity in general.
The authority of the natural sciences and the spiritual sciences, as well as the interpretation of their specific features, varies in the classical, non-classical and post-non-classical types of scientific rationality. Classical European science historically formed as experimental and mathematical natural science; she absolutized the generalizing method, considering it as the only method of scientific knowledge. Classical natural science was characterized by a focus on searching for a single, universal law of existence, embracing particular laws and expressing the presumption (assumption) of the universal harmony of nature. The law discovered by I. Newton acted as such a universal law of the universe universal gravity, which formed the basis of the classical mechanistic picture of nature. The very idea of the individual, individual, unique, not fitting into the framework of rigid laws, was rejected by classical natural science, declaring it the prerogative of the humanities, which - precisely because of this circumstance - were practically denied scientific status. Thus, the differences between the natural scientific and social-humanitarian types of knowledge are considered in the classical type of scientific rationality as differences, respectively, between scientific and non-scientific knowledge.
The absolutization of the natural scientific ideal of rationality, characteristic of classical science, with its desire to reduce (reduce) the diversity of real life to a finite number of the most general laws that fix repeating connections between phenomena, found its expression in the expansion natural scientific methods into social sciences and the formation of a nomothetic tradition in them. The mechanistic methodology of classical natural science was considered as a universal scientific methodology suitable for explaining not only nature, but also man and society. Emergence and disciplinary organization in the 19th century. such social and humanitarian sciences as sociology and psychology were associated with an orientation towards the natural scientific ideal of rationality, i.e. with the desire to explain social and humanitarian reality by analogy with natural reality, by seeing in it cause-and-effect relationships fixed in laws. An example of this, in particular, can be the Marxist interpretation of history, which tried to see the action of universal laws in the historical process and consider history in the form of a strictly determined, invariant cause-and-effect relationship of events.
The features of humanitarian knowledge can be most clearly demonstrated when it is compared with the classical type of natural science knowledge. The differences between natural science and social and humanitarian types of knowledge are due, firstly, to the specifics of the object scientific research; secondly, the relationship of the cognizing subject to the cognized object; thirdly, the research methodology.
1. Nature as an object of natural scientific knowledge is not created by man, does not need him for its existence, and exists independently of his will and consciousness. In this sense, we can say that nature as an object of study is an objective reality, that is, existing without humans, reality. In the natural world there are laws of existence, laws of existence, which man has no power to change, but can only cognize.
Society, the social world, which is the object of social and humanitarian knowledge, is created by the person himself in the process of intersubjective interaction, i.e. communications, and exists thanks to the constant reproduction of acts of communication. At the same time, in the process of intersubjective interaction, socially significant acts of communication give rise to social institutions(an example of such an institution is the rule of law), which, being the result human activity, begin to be perceived by a person as having the property of objectivity, that is, independence from him. The social, as it were, “envelops” a person, including him in the sphere of its energetic influence.
Thus, the object of classical natural science knowledge is nature as objective, non-human reality; the object of knowledge of social sciences and humanities is society as subjective-objective reality, that is, on the one hand, as a reality created and maintained by a person in the process of intersubjective interaction, on the other hand, as an objective reality, perceived by a person as opposing him.
2. The features of the objects of natural science and humanitarian knowledge determine the second difference between them: the relationship of the knowing subject to the cognizable object. In classical natural science, the relationship between the scientist and the object of research is characterized by a certain distance between them. Here the scientist confronts the world of observable objects as a reality external to him, which he influences using various tools and determining the conditions of the experiment. A natural scientist is never an immanent (integral) part of the object being studied, but observes it from the outside.
In the social and human sciences, the scientist (observer) is not distanced from the object of his research. This is due to the fact that the researcher of social relations himself is their participant, that is, he is included directly or indirectly in the objects and processes that he studies. Consequently, scientific observation in the social and humanities is carried out from within the cognizable object, which is played by society, state, nation, etc. Accordingly, the socio-political, national, confessional and other attachments of the researcher largely determine the choice scientific problems, strategy and even the results of their research. Therefore, social and humanitarian knowledge, in contrast to natural science, very often turns out to be influenced by one or another ideology shared by the researcher.
So, natural science knowledge is characterized distance cognizing subject from the cognizable object, and social and humanitarian knowledge, on the contrary, is inclusion cognizing subject into a cognizable object.
In addition, in classical natural science, nature is viewed as an object that passively lends itself to the boundless cognitive activity of the subject. In social and humanitarian knowledge, the object of knowledge directly or indirectly reveals itself as an active subject. Hence, cognitive activity the subject in the social sciences is fundamentally limited and associated with the self-revealing activity of the “object”.
Thus, the cognitive relationship in natural science, being subject-object, has monologue character; cognitive relationship in the social and human sciences, being subject-subjective, has dialogic character.
3. The classical natural scientific method of cognition as a research method is characterized by reductionism, that is, reducing the variety of observed phenomena to a finite set of the most general laws that would make it possible to predict the regular course of any processes in the future. Classical natural science sought to catalog the world, while everything individual, situational, that did not fit into the principles of cataloging accepted by the researcher, was considered as non-existent, as an error that could be neglected. IN natural science knowledge The main role is played by a monological explanation of reality in its cause-and-effect conditionality. The humanities, on the contrary, as already noted, are characterized by an appeal to reality in all its completeness and inexhaustibility individual manifestations. Here the main significance no longer belongs to a monological explanation, but to an understanding that “grasps” in the process of research individual characteristics the phenomenon being studied.
Thus, if the most important thing for natural science is the generalizing explanation repeating facts, then for society - knowledge - discriminating understanding social phenomena.
An important feature of understanding, which distinguishes it from explanation, is the inherent human ability for transformation, imagination and intuition, with the help of which the interpreter (the subject of understanding) achieves an understanding of the spiritual world of the Other. To interpret the goals, intentions, motivations of the authors of the texts, as well as any actions of people as conscious beings, it is necessary to understand them (to stand in the place of the Other). The situation is completely different in nature, where blind, unconscious forces operate and where, therefore, there is no deliberate activity as such. It is for this reason that in natural science the main attention was paid to issues of explanation, because they are not associated with the analysis of goal setting and motivation. Explanatory knowledge should not be opposed to understanding. They complement each other. Knowledge is always textual and bears general character, understanding is contextual and therefore has an individual character. But scientific communication includes both the general and the individual.
In non-classical and especially in modern post-non-classical science, a critical revision of the features of classical natural science knowledge was carried out, which led to the emergence of a tendency to remove the strict division between the natural science and humanitarian types of knowledge. Within the framework of synergetics as the leading direction of post-non-classical science, a program for bringing together natural science and humanities types of knowledge is substantiated, which creates ample opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue.