Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2020 number 2

The article discusses the meaning of the concept of ontological proposition. Unlike the categories of being, matter, essence, and ontology, this concept, although is being discussed, still remains on the periphery of philosophical knowledge. The author proposes to consider the ontological proposition in its logical development: what is the proposition, how it develops through principles, logical procedures and the system of concepts. He analyzes precedents of generating various worlds through ontological propositions. The paper gives an overview of different ontological propositions, namely a religious one, those of natural science and mental activity, a phenomenological proposition, linguistic and technical ones. The author believes that ontological propositions play a key role in solving the question of the role of the future of various sciences and the development of new scientific subjects. The article proposes to link prospects for the development of sciences and scientific subjects to ontological propositions.

The article presents a method of moving away from skepticism, proposed in the concept of semantic contextualism (S. Cohen, K. DeRose, D. Lewis). We give proof of the compatibility of reliable knowledge with skeptical argumentation. The paper marks out methods to solve philosophical problems.

The article considers the problem of uncertainty within the full semiotic circle of representation of the contents of consciousness, which includes cognition as receptive semiosis and activity as projective one. The discourse presented in the article aims to describe in general terms the place and role of uncertainty at each stage of receptive and projective semiosis, and to show the semiotic nature of uncertainty in communication processes. The transcendental semiotics is applied as a method of reasoning. To represent cognition and activity processes, we use the smallest possible scheme which consists of stages of perception, reason and mind; cognition and activity are distinguished as receptive and projective directions of semiosis. Each stage of cognition and activity is considered as the implementation of pragmatic, syntactic and semantic rules. The result of the reasoning is that 18 types of uncertainty are distinguished and described. For reception stages, uncertainty is introduced as a situation of knowledge of ignorance; for projection stages it is introduced as a situation of ignorance of knowledge. We show that the use of the concept of uncertainty makes it possible to clarify and organize the description of representation procedures (including the least transparent stage of intellectual or reasonable representation requiring a well-developed metaphysics), which are carried out by the human mind in a general model form. Our conclusion consists in the following: we have substantiated the argument not as a rhetorical means of persuasion, but as a way to overcome the uncertainties of communication, based on a reflexive scheme of cognition and activity, as well as analytically confirmed the scientific progress of philosophical knowledge understood as a successive increase of certainty concerning the rules of semiosis used in reflection.

The article considers a popular trend in the philosophy of mathematics, according to which the semantic and cognitive features of mathematical knowledge can be adequately explained by analyzing mathematical practice, particularly natural language, within which mathematical thinking initially occurs. On the example of the analysis of T. Hofweber’s concept, which contrasts the semantic and syntactic characteristics of natural languages and formalized ones and claims an exclusively representative role to the latter, we show that this approach is limited by the elementary sections of arithmetic, as well as that underestimation of the role of formalized language in the development of mathematical knowledge is groundless.

The article draws a parallel between two non-traditional approaches to the construction of the fallacy theory; those are the approach which is developed in joint works by J. Woods and D. Walton and later in D. Walton's independent work "A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacies" (1995), on the one hand, and the one presented in a series of works on interrogative epistemology by J. Hintikka, on the other hand. We show that despite the difference in the premises which underlies these approaches, both of them tend to pragmatizing the concept of fallacy, which causes a similarity of the conclusions resulting from their application.

In recent years, there is a widespread discussion on the concept of ontic realism, which is a kind of structuralism with an ontological focus. The main thesis of this trend is that when a scientific theory is changed, the structure of connections and relations among objects is a more stable substance than the objects themselves. The aim of the article is to introduce a concept that can serve as a counterexample to this thesis, since the concept of entropy, which retains a nearly constant meaning, was included in the structure of scientific theories in quite different ways.

Problems of quantum physics are analyzed in the context of the modern situation in science, engineering and philosophy. The statement is formulated that the search for a satisfactory interpretation of the existing quantum theory is futile and the thesis is put forward that it is necessary to launch a scientific and philosophical program to build a new physical picture of the world on the basis of a unified quantum-classical theory.

There is no fundamental difference between natural and human sciences. Any science is a normative practice that makes it possible to describe, explain and predict phenomena. At the same time, there are obvious irreducible ontological differences among sciences and within them. Moreover, the ontology is not absolute, but depends on the context. Our contextual realism treats a theory as a Wittgensteinian rule for measuring reality (natural or social) in a context. Thereby, it allows for the consideration of all sciences from a unified point of view and explains the applicability of quantum theory to a number of social phenomena. Social realism is the contextual (“quantum”) realism. In particular, the hard problem of the philosophy of mind is eliminated within the contextual (“quantum”) realism.

The article focuses on weak methodological points of all hypotheses about the genesis of oil, which should be taken into account with a view to ensuring benefit for the development of geological knowledge, as well as for the philosophy and methodology of science. We show that successful results of laboratory studies on producing hydrocarbons, and in particular oil, from both organic and inorganic substances are not crucial for geologists, since they do not reflect the complexity of the processes occurring in the Earth interior. As methodological tools which make it possible to "reflect" all the deep processes of the Earth, geologists use a narrative presentation of data that describe and explain the process of formation of oil and gas fields. However, such geological narratives have a number of features that do not contribute to the development of hypotheses about the genesis of oil. The first feature of this kind is the writing of narratives on behalf of the "omniscient narrator", so it creates an effect of "referential illusion"; the latest in its turn makes geological narratives look as a completed study, to which there is nothing to add. The second feature is that narrative hypotheses about the genesis of oil look like a universal rule that ignores individual peculiarities of different types of geological structures in different parts of the Earth. For these reasons, we assume that it is necessary to abandon universal narratives and pass to hypotheses about the genesis of oil for each hydrocarbon field.

The article considers the concept of "normal science" by T. Kuhn in the context of S. Fuller's social epistemology. We study political, philosophical, and religious connotations of the concept, which originally belongs to the history of science. The paper shows that the analysis of Kuhn's main work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" actually confirms P. Feyerabend's judgement that it is an ideology behind the mask of history.