Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2024 number 4

The article considers two main epistemic attitudes - knowledge and understanding, variants of their correlation and dynamics of the respective ideas in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. It is shown that the shift of interest towards understanding has largely occurred due to dissatisfaction with the classical three-part definition of knowledge and the need to respond to Gettier-type situations. The gap between knowledge and understanding, i.e. the so-called possibility of “knowledge without understanding”, is considered separately. The distinctive characteristics and features of understanding in cognitive activity are specified. The dangers and possible social consequences of the gap between knowledge and understanding are explicated,

The article considers the thesis of incompleteness of mathematical objects, from which the criterion of intrinsic properties is explicated. Two justifications of the criterion of intrinsic properties are reconstructed; the necessity and sufficiency of this criterion as an independent metaphysical criterion of objecthood are analyzed. It is shown that both justifications are vulnerable to criticism. The following objections are raised: firstly, objects can have criteria of identity without having intrinsic properties; secondly, not all mathematical objects lack intrinsic determinacy; thirdly, an independent existence and intrinsic properties do not necessarily imply each other. The conclusion is made that the criterion of intrinsic properties in itself can be considered neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion of objecthood.,

There is a widely known statement of Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner that the invariant character of laws in modern physics is a hypothetical cause of the effective application of mathematics in this field of knowledge. He believed that the adequacy of contemporary mathematics for describing physical knowledge has the status of an empirical law of epistemology. In this article, by analyzing works in the field of artificial intelligence, the author confirmed Wigner’s hypothesis. As an example, the works of Pearl, one of the founders of the theory of artificial intelligence, are mentioned, which demonstrate the effective application of mathematics to the study of invariant regularities in computer science described using causal relationships.,

The purpose of the paper is to reveal Bohm’s ideas, primarily his notions of holism and implicit order, and to relate these philosophical views to the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the de Broglie-Bohm theory. The key principles of the causal interpretation, or the theory of hidden variables, or the pilot wave theory, are compared with the principles of the Copenhagen interpretation which is historically the first and one of the most widespread interpretations of quantum mechanics. The Copenhagen interpretation and the de Broglie-Bohm theory are based on different methodological approaches, which provide different interpretations of the same physical phenomena. The phenomenological principles of the Copenhagen interpretation, which do not separate the “event” from the observation, differ from Bohm’s approach, realistic in both ontological and epistemological terms. The concept of non-locality serves as the scientific basis for Bohm’s holistic metaphysics. Reality is a whole, but a constantly changing whole, in which implicit processes become explicit, and relatively autonomous and self-sufficient aspects that make up particles and fields separate from the whole.,

The article provides a philosophical and methodological analysis of the concept of historical natural science by the American researcher C. Cleland. In her view, natural historical hypotheses, i.e. hypotheses about the past of nature, can be empirically proven or refuted, but the character of such empirical evidence differs significantly from repeated experimental verifications or falsifications. To clarify her position, Cleland uses the notion of “asymmetry of overdetermination”. The metaphysical meaning of the “asymmetry of overdetermination” in the discussed concept is that events in nature develop from one “root” towards constant branching. In turn, the epistemological meaning of this notion is expressed in the fact that, relying on metaphysical ideas about the temporal asymmetry of nature, natural historians should search for a common cause of events through finding “strong evidence” left behind - “smoking guns”, i.e. evidence that will allow a clear choice to be made between competing hypotheses

This paper begins a series of articles focused on the problem of digital transformation of organizations. Analyzing the role and importance of key information and communication technologies and consequences of their application in the digital transformation of organizations, the authors conclude that the emergence of economic actors with a new organizational structure is expected in the near future. And since it is necessary to be ready for this now, the problem is posed of describing the features of the expected new structure and determining what will be required for the successful functioning of organizations of this structure both in terms of methodological support and in terms of their technological support. It is clear that readiness for the emergence of economic actors with a new economic structure requires a good knowledge of the current state of the problem of digital transformation of participants in economic relations. In the first part of the article, this problem is considered regarding the object component of economic actors. Its second part will present the results of the analysis of the problem of digitalization regarding the subject component of economic actors, as well as the analysis of what organizational structures of organizations currently exist, how and with what tools their digital transformation is carried out, why they are not adequate to the new organizational structure, where everything is going and what everything can come to. The following articles (after these two parts) will deal with the discussion of methodological and technological issues of the approach proposed by the authors to solving the problem of digital transformation of economic actors.

The article recognizes the ever-increasing costs of digital transformation and notes that the role of philosophy and other social sciences is to justify and develop optimal and safe paths of digital transformation. It is emphasized that the information revolution equips scientists working in the field of contemporary natural science with a new super-efficient methodology capable of leading to epochal discoveries in physics, chemistry, biology, geology and medicine. The criteria for defining the concept of “information society” are presented, and the history of the emergence and development of the information society as a stage of post-industrial society is outlined. The definition of digitalization is given, its history is traced, starting from the discovery of counting, the emergence of the numbers 1 and 0 and the work of the founder of digital transformation Pythagoras of Samos; the views of Plato are mentioned, who believed that “the practice of counting” is a perfect example of “awakening thought”. The article presents the events of all five eras of digitalization - from the pre-Internet era to the era of artificial intelligence. The methodological status of digitalization is considered from the point of view of the philosophical theory of knowledge, the stages of development of science are given. It is noted that digital transformation has greatly contributed to the progress of science communication. A brief history and analysis of the current state of science communication are presented. The problem of changing the content of the concept of “scientific subject” is considered, and the emergence of crowdsourcing as part of the paradigm of new open science is noted. The topical issues that digitalization and the information society have posed to contemporary science are formulated.

Cognitive studies of music have a long history. Thoughts that are consonant with today’s ideas were expressed by G.W. Leibniz in the early 18th century, reconsidered by A. Schopenhauer and got a new impetus after the so-called cognitive revolution, when everything related to cognition was agreed to be understood as the processing of symbols according to rules. People use symbols to record natural speech, which is the main means of information exchange, to operate with quantities and to store musical ideas, but the rules of these symbolic systems differ significantly. That is why within the framework of the classical cognitive approach, the point of view presented in the works of F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff prevailed, according to which the talk about the semantics of music in a traditional sense is not relevant, although some neurophysiological data indicate at least a mutual overlap of the “speech” and “musical” regions of the brain. This approach was based on the classical understanding of computation as a rule-based manipulation of symbols. At the current stage of development of cognitive sciences, such an understanding is clearly insufficient. One must distinguish between natural computations and their representations in conscious operations and human communication. The approach, now known as predictive coding, offers a kind of “soft” understanding of computation as any transformation of information, defining the latter (following C. Shannon) as anything that reduces uncertainty. Using Bayesian probabilistic methods, proponents of this concept show possible ways to resolve some paradoxes in neurophysiological data regarding the processing of musical information by the brain.,

The article formulates preliminary critical remarks on the reading of L. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and understanding of the rule-following problem proposed by G. Priest in the context of the limits of expressibility at the limits of thought. In the introductory and first sections, we briefly explicate Priest’s position and provide examples of the limits of expressibility both proposed by Priest and our own. The second section formulates the “doctrine” of the inexpressible in the Tractatus in the context of a determined and traditional reading of this Wittgenstein’s work. In the last section, we offer criticism of the relevance of Priest’s reading of the Tractatus and his understanding of the rule-following problem.