Abstract
The purpose of Science is to achieve the truth on the way to a new knowledge. The truth, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is the correspondence of knowledge with its object. However, the key question is how to “find a universal and true criterion of the truth of all knowledge”? The contribution of the fundamental sciences is extremely important. And here, in my opinion, there appears a modern paradox which has globally changed the public consciousness. On the one hand, the fundamental science went into the status of the labor forces and, on the other hand, modern production, demanding “the implementation of scientific research and scientific approach, began increasingly resemble to science.” In the process of production—which creates the product of labor including both material goods and services in the case of material production and a new knowledge as in the case of science—the labor forces enter into industrial relations. If any scientific work as an object, an element of the external world that we aim to contemplate the work, as well as a phenomenon, and develop its conceptual representation as well as about the phenomenon that it is modeling. Hence, the closer to the actual simulated phenomenon to the studied one, the closer this work to the truth. I assume my viewpoint is quite clear, even without mentioning Goethe: “It is a shame that the truth is so simple.”
A lifetime’s worth of wisdom.
Steven D. Levitt.
(co-author of “Freakonomics” [see, e.g., Humboldt Kosmos 99, 20 (2012)].
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Notes
- 1.
I avoid to use the word “scientist” (uchenyi in Russian—“the knowing one”). Lev Landau called himself a “proletarian of a mental work” and did not like the word “scientist” because as he claimed—“scientific” can only be a cat (Gorobets et al. 2009). More appropriate word here is the researcher. The term “scientist” was also alien for V. Vernadsky (by analogy with the office and commercial workers). He only accepted the term workers of science and considered himself as one of them (Vernadsky 2004, p. 17):
these people in general accomplish a great deal, because it is among them that produce those who make their society a new one. These people, who do not fit into the present, create the future. They violate the aspirations of society for the average, impersonal. The more in the society of such people, the more diverse and stronger its culture.
- 2.
Since that time—journal is published since 1926—I remember that words “Knowledge itself is power” by Francis Bacon, which were on the cover page. See also citation to Section “Effectiveness and quality of Science: Expert Appraisal.”
- 3.
Botting (1974) elaborates that Kosmos has important role for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which has gathered over 25,000 scientists from more than 130 countries all over the world—in fact, in a sense, the scientific or Humboldt net, network—www.humboldt-foundation.de—naturally incorporated into the world scientific networks, such as the American Physical (aps.org) and Chemical Societies (acs.org), ResearchGate (www.researchgate.net), and the others.
- 4.
- 5.
We’ve already learned about senses and their role in philosophy from Lenin’s “Materialism and Empirio-criticism” where he defined matter as “Matter is the objective reality given to us in sensation.” Some logical inconsistencies of this definition and its discrepancy with the principle of “Occam’s razor,” according to which, words which do not correspond to some observable matter, should not be used, are analyzed elsewhere. See, for example, http://nohead.narod.ru/dannaia0112.htm.
- 6.
Intellect, according to Kant, is the ability to cognize subject for perceptional contemplation. Science about rules of intellect is “a logic, within which mind deals with itself, only” (Kant 1770).
- 7.
Editors’ note: The English word “science” became established in the 1830s as a translation of the German notion Wissenschaft.
- 8.
A bright example of “how understanding arises” was given by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (Von Weizsäcker 1973, Footnote 7, p. 745): “In his simile of the cave, Plato describes people who are sitting in the cave and looking at the wall, there they only see the shadows of some things which are transported behind their backs. Then they are turned around or at least one of them is turned around completely in order to see the reality. Then he suddenly realizes how unimportant is the great art of the people, who have been sitting with him looking at the shadows. This is the art of predicting what shadow would follow the other one. They take the shadow to be the real thing. But this art is far surmounted by the understanding of one who sees the real thing. But then, he has seen only the things which are carried behind their backs in the cave. He goes into the outer world, and there he sees the shadows of things in the light of the sun, and he sees real things in the light of the sun, and then he may see the sun itself.”
- 9.
In personal notes “Equinocial Regions of the New Continent during Years 1799–1804” (London 1814, Vol. 1, pp. 34–35) about his wanderings, Alexander v. Humboldt wrote: “The very nature of sublimely eloquent. Stars as they shine in the firmament, fill us with joy and ecstasy, and yet they are all moving in the orbit determined with mathematical precision.”
- 10.
The word “mathematics” comes from the Greek μαθημα (máthēma), meaning language, “what is taught,” i.e., “Science.” That is why the attitude to mathematics as “the science of sciences,” “the queen of sciences” (Loktev 2013).
- 11.
To complete this Section, I would like to illustrate it with the quotation from works of Osip Mandelstam (1972): “Contradictory views, or paradoxes, played a significant role in the history of science. Two kinds of views are in conflict, and the latter causes a further movement of science forward giving the development of this conflict.”
- 12.
The first place in Russian Web (Ru.net) is taken by search of the words “to download (watch, listen) for free”? (Zinoviev, 1997).
- 13.
Do you actually meet 70+, 80+, and so on somewhere? By the way, the author of these lines is still lingered in the “group” aged 60+.
- 14.
There appeared some information that 3D printers which can print food and for which “there is nothing impossible” are brought to Kiev. Thanks God, XL-printers that can breed babies in test tubes and get the smell of the earth after the rain have not yet been invented.
- 15.
If to talk about the digitalized science, we can think of Neptune Planet, which was “discovered on the tip of a pen” by American astronomer Percival Lawrence Lowell (Liubarsky 1983) (thereby obscuring the role of numerous observations of the motion of the planets, which led to this “pen”), and, then, was “re-discovered” with the help of telescope.
- 16.
Bit is the main item of classical information in computational and digital communications. Epistemologically, this word comes from “bheid” meaning a “part” (Smirnov 2013). However, there is an opinion that this word came as a short form of “binary digit,” receiving only two logical values or states: either a “0” (logical value “false”) or “1” (logical value “true”).
- 17.
It is more than enough to think of h-index of Einstein and his work on the EPR paradox (Einstein et al. 1935).
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Kryachko, E.S. (2018). Selected Theses on Science. In: Valsiner, J., Lutsenko, A., Antoniouk, A. (eds) Sustainable Futures for Higher Education. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96035-7_17
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