Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2021 number 3

The article assesses the consistency of Descartes’s efforts to substantiate his conclusion about the reality of the existence of God. The conclusion is made that the doubt in the recognition of God’s existence expressed by Descartes as a conditional one allows us to evaluate it not only as just conditional against his own recognition of the unconditional certainty of the real existence only of his self. The article reveals the lack of credibility in Descartes’s arguments in favor of recognizing the reality of the existence of God, since the philosopher formulated them by considering only the idea of God and referring to God as the most perfect being. Attention is drawn to the fact that Descartes considered God to be incorporeal and at the same time followed the Christian doctrine that the corporeal world is the creation of such a god. It is shown that this inconsistency in developing the image of God occurs not only in Descartes, but also in the Bible. Since, in substantiating his conclusion about the reality of God’s existence, Descartes relies not on the statement of the objective situation concerning the recognition of the legitimacy of such a conclusion, but just on his subjective value preferences, the author notes that this conclusion cannot be recognized as valid.

Epistemic internalism, coherentism, relativism, skepticism, coherentism, and fundamentalism have unacceptable practical and political potential consequences. Therefore, they should be treated as false epistemological theories. These theories are based on false premises of modern philosophy. They all absolutize, i.e. decontextualize, something in one form or another. The externalist knowledge-first epistemology is free of these shortcomings. Contextual realism is the metaphysics of knowledge-first epistemology.

The article deals with the criticism of the style of discourse adopted in social epistemology as an intermediate discipline in the structure of the humanities. It is shown that it weakens the requirements for logical rigor and coherence of the text. As an example, the author considers a part of the text of “Kuhn vs. Popper” - the book by S. Fuller, one of the founders and main representatives of social epistemology, in which the figures of T. Kuhn, M. Heidegger and R. Rorty are arbitrarily placed in a single narrative. The inconsistency and ad hoc nature of the new argumentation criteria introduced by Fuller legitimizing the conclusions of social epistemology are demonstrated with specific examples.

The article provides a methodological analysis of the problem соnceming the formation of the scientific community as an institution. Various examples from the history of philosophy show the formation of scientific communities from informal seminars and circles to mature institutional forms. The main criteria are marked out which indicate the process of the formation of the scientific community as an institution. It is also shown that the issue of scientific communities should be closely related to the problem of the ethos of science. The author describes how ideas about the ethos of science have changed in the works of R. Merton and T. Kuhn. The role of the behavioral and social models of the ethos of the scientific community in its formation as an institution is considered. Without the ethos of science, the formation of the scientific community as an institution is impossible as a matter of principle.

The article shows the groundlessness of a simplified understanding of the significance of K. Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem as missing its conceptual contents. The relationship between the extensional and intensional contents of constructing the G₂ sentence is revealed. It is shown that the second one is associated with the choice of a method for formalizing the concept of consistency. The advantages of the intensional interpretation of G₂ are substantiated.

The article analyses epistemologically significant assumptions in the scientific thinking by the example of comparing climate change projections with its actual changes. The existence of a large difference between projections and reality is shown, the reasons for this difference are identified. It has been established that the characteristics of the scientific thinking are largely determined by the mechanistic paradigm, which makes it possible to perceive the processes taking place in complex multifactorial systems like the climate in a limited way. The climate is characterized by non-linearity, the existence of positive feedback loops, various types of instability, etc. These processes cannot be described through the deterministic paradigm and require the development and application of new theories.

The article briefly describes the stages in the development of the theory of superconductivity, beginning with the phenomenological theory of brothers London formulated in the early 1930s, its modernization by L.D. Landau, V. L. Ginzburg and A.A. Abrikosov and ending with the latest theory created by G. Fröhlich and L. Cooper. The relevance of the work is related to the problems that arose in the development of the theory of superconductivity. The influence of the level of the development of cryogenics is shown; in the middle of the last century, the latter faced the distrust of the scientific community caused by the creation of cryonics - a technology for preserving biological material of animals and humans for a long time, followed by "revival". At the height of the confrontation between the USSR and the United States in 1989-1990, after the discovery of high-temperature superconductors, the US government allocated large funds for developments in the field of superconductivity for the Department of Defense needs. That is, along with agreements on disarmament and the use of the peaceful atom, there raised questions about the use of superconductivity for good, but not for the destruction.

The term «neurophilosophy» should be understood as a direction in the philosophy of the beginning of the XXI, applying neuroscientific concepts to solve traditional philosophical problems, while the term «philosophy of neurosciences» can be considered primarily as a section of the philosophy of science that formulates and solves problems as private neurosciences , and the entire neuroscientific direction. When analyzing scientific literature, it becomes obvious that the first term is overloaded, which is associated with the process of understanding the subject area of this discipline, which has not yet been completed. The article concludes that it is advisable to abandon the integral use of the concept of «neurophilosophy».

The "proto-language gap" is understood as a long interval between the time of full-fledged languages formation (with syntax and grammar, presumably to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic cultural progress 50-40 kya) and the first written texts that reliably record the most ancient states of languages. A lot of research is devoted to glottogenesis. Reconstructions of the so-called "proto-languages" (Proto-Indo-European one, Nostratic ones, etc.) are still popular in macrocomparative linguistics. The «proto-language gap» itself which is left without scientific attention needs to be overcome, and the article is devoted to sketchy bridging between glottogenesis interpreted as a multi-stage evolutionary process and the main features of known languages (number, complexity, types, universals). Concepts about bottlenecks are considered, in particular about the effects of the "volcanic winter" after the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Toba. After depopulation and strict selection a demographic growth began, and several populations of early Sapiens migrated from Africa to Eurasia. The data of paleoclimatology, paleogenetics and related disciplines are used as indirect evidence. Relevant views are linked to knowledge of hunter-gatherer groups and alliances as linguistic communities. Taking into account the processes of demographic growth, settlement and patterns of political evolution (with the enlargement of communities from alliances and chiefdoms to proto-states, states and empires) makes it possible to build versions of the likely dynamics of the language development in this significant period of prehistory.

The article considers the place and role of the concept of state in scientific knowledge. It is shown that without the use of this concept, deterministic ideas appear to be incomplete.