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

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.