Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2020 number 3

The paper analyzes the specifics of modern science, which is due to the development of megascience and the active dissemination of scientific knowledge in society. Megascience is the science of huge teams of scientists using the expensive equipment. Research in this field is a collective activity carried out by the collective subject of scientific knowledge. To some extent, it can be identified with the core of a research team. It includes highly professional scientists responsible for the implementation of the project. An active penetration of science into the life of society resulted in the formation of citizen science and counter-expertise practices. In these two areas, the collective subject of scientific knowledge also emerges. In the case of citizen science, it is similar to the collective subject of megascience and includes scientists managing the project. In the case of counter-expertise, the collective subject may include both groups of non-scientists and professional scientists. In counter-expertise, scientists no longer take the lead in the collective subject of knowledge. They are the same participants in joint research activities as other social groups.

We assert that M. Kush's «sensitive relativism» may be «favorably» interpreted or modified as contextual realism. We also conclude that neither absolutism nor relativism is an unequivocally epistemically virtuous or vicious position («stance»). Genuine epistemic virtues, namely tolerance, open mind, intellectual humility, courage and autonomy, curiosity, the pursuit of truth and knowledge, and others, are inherent in Wittgenstein's non-metaphysical (contextual) realistic position. Unlike realism, relativism, as well as dogmatism and absolutism, lacks a genuine commitment. The persistence of relativism is not due to the fact that it is a stance, but due to its critical attitude to absolutism and dogmatism. The ambiguous analysis of the epistemic merits and vices of relativism carried out by M. Baghramyan and M. Kush is because they lacked the analysis of the concept of reality.

The article discusses changes in the principle of falsification in the course of interdisciplinary interaction of theories. We show that for closely related disciplines the falsification principle works without restrictions and that counterexamples discovered in one field result in a revision of theoretical positions in neighboring fields. However, for sufficiently distant fields, the revealed counterexamples do not bring to a revision of the theory and are behind the scenes.

The article analyzes a common view that philosophy of science is useless for science. We show that the question of the benefit that philosophy of science could provide to its object, i.e. science, is put similarly to the question of the benefit that science could provide to its object, i.e. the nature under study. The expected neutrality of nature towards the one who studies it is projected on the attitude of science to philosophy which studies it. But nature responds to our efforts to study it by forcing us to reconsider our ideas of a controlled benefit. Whether this not the case of relations between science and philosophy of science? When science shows disregard of philosophy it breaks in the territory of philosophy and thus demonstrates its non-neutrality towards philosophy, allowing for a productive dialogue of the parties concerned.

The paper analyzes a method of explication of detection and explication of intensionality of mathematical discourse by means of possible worlds semantics. Although there is an idea about extensionality of mathematics, mathematical results, particularly Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem, essentially depend on how the meaning of mathematical terms is interpreted. The authors show that this difficulty can be overcome by means of possible worlds semantics. At the same time, the thesis is substantiated that Kripke’s possible worlds semantics does not solve the mentioned problem because it assumes extensionisonalization of the intensional content. Whereas Hintikka’s possible worlds semantics and his concept of impossible possible worlds are a fruitful approach for discovering and explaining the intensionality of mathematical discourse.

The article presents a porismatic model of the development of scientific knowledge and shows its applicability to the reconstruction of the emergence of scientific, logical and mathematical theories. It demonstrates how the porismatic model can be used in reconstructing the emergence of one of the important applied branches of mathematics which is operational calculus.

The article dealing with foundations of Łukasiewicz’s causal model of logical fatalism defines a relation of global transitivity. This relation means that in a succession of causes, each new event is the cause for all following events. We substantiate that Lukasiewicz's interpretation is not quite adequate for describing fatalism, since it does not take into account the influence of background factors, which may be neutral with regard to the occurrence of new events or prevent them, but they do not necessarily contribute their occurrence. We show that the solution of the problem of logical fatalism on the basis of ineffability of the smallest number following one half through real numbers proposed by Lukasiewicz has an ad hoc character. Thus, in Robinson's non-standard analysis, hyper-real numbers are closer to positive numbers than real numbers, so the unknown number equals the sum of one half and a hyper-real number.

The article discusses the basic approaches to modeling weak artificial intelligence. The concept of intelligent agents is one of the promising approaches proposed by M. Minsky. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct his ideas regarding principles of consciousness and principles of creating artificial intelligence. The article considers the basic notions of the concept, the structure of consciousness and the structure of memory. Minsky's concept is classified from a philosophical perspective. The conclusion is made that in the ontological terms, with regard to the structural analysis, the concept is a set of approaches of connectionism and elementarism, while with regard to the system analysis, it is a set of a network model and a hierarchical one. Methodologically, the concept is based on the approach of reductionism and the approach using a computer metaphor.

The article considers a hypothesis about rapid geological processes, which, according to the group of scientists, cause electromagnetic emission from rocks and the output of plasmoids (electromagnetic systems) to the Earth's surface. The hypothesis, developed at the end of the Soviet period by researchers from Tomsk, is a specific object of philosophical and methodological study not only in the field of general philosophy of science, but also in the field of philosophy of geology. It integrates results of laboratory research (registration of electromagnetic emissions from some rocks and minerals when heated), eyewitness field accounts and our own observations of electromagnetic systems in the atmosphere, as well as results of geological area studies. The main methodological problem of the hypothesis is the impossibility to prove accurately the direct cause-effect relationship among its three mentioned components. The purpose of the article is to analyze the possibility of using alternative methods of verification and legitimation for a considered hypothesis, and it is necessary to raise the question of the boundaries of scientific discourse as such in this regard.

August 2020 marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Sergei Snegov, a science fiction writer, philosopher, physicist, and astronomer. Milestones of autobiography are interpreted by the writer as chimeras and mirages.