Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2017 number 4

At various times, many researchers dealing with the philosophy of geology drew attention to the fact that the principles of geological knowledge were very different from those of classical natural science, in particular of physics. This feature of geology gave rise to the problem of its scientific status. In the 20th century, two philosophical schools dealing with geological knowledge, viz. Anglo-American and Soviet-Russian (Marxian) ones, tried to solve it. This article presents an attempt to look at the problem of scientific character of geological knowledge in the view of semantic features of the concept of «geology» in various periods of the development of this discipline. We want to show that the problem of geological knowledge concerns not only the degree of its correlation with science standards, but also a considerable polysemy of the notion of «geology». We believe that the latter fact makes difficulties for understanding geological knowledge, as well as puts obstacles in the way of mutual understanding between philosophers and methodologists of geology keeping to different approaches. The article focuses on clarifying different meanings of the term «geology» and correlating each of these images of geology both with methodologies of human sciences and that which is traditionally related to the field of natural sciences in order to determine the scientific status of each «geology».