Theory of cognition

The aim of the theme is: to clarify the essence of cognition and its motive forces, the essence of truth and methods of its reaching.

The key words are: knowledge, mastering (developing), cognition, truth, method, methodology, information.

13.1. Cognition as Object of Philosophical Analysis

Mankind has always striven to acquire new knowledge. The process of mastering the secrets of the universe is an expression of the highest creative aspirations of human reason. Throughout the millennia of its development, man­kind has traversed a long and thorny path of knowledge from a limited and primitive grasp of the essence of being to an ever deeper and more comprehensive one. On that path, countless properties and laws of nature and social life have been discovered, and pictures of the world succeeded one another. Development of knowledge went hand in hand with the development of production, and with the efflorescence of the arts and artistic creativity. The human mind does not inquire into the laws of the world out of mere curiosity (although curiosity is one of the ideal motive forces of human activity) but with the aim of practical transformation of na­ture and man to achieve the most harmonious order of life possible in the world. As it was mentionetrud before, man is an open system of needs. However, in contradistinction to animals, man does not satisfy his needs directly (on the basis of some conditioned and unconditioned reflexes and instincts); he does it indirectly – through making and improving tools. Man’s nature causes the necessity of a constant transformation of the surrounding world and together with this – its mastering and learning.

But man’s cognitive activity is not always stipulated by some pragmatic purposes such as to make physical labor easier, to improve living standards, to increase life expectancy, to make medical care and nourishment better and so on. During the process of cognition man learns the very essence of objects, their authentic, not illusive nature; transcend the limits of everyday life, superficial understanding of the world and his place in it, realizes himself as a spiritual, moral and creative personality. Aristotle had a good reason to point out that all people naturally strive for knowledge, irrespective of the fact that the latter has its practical value or not.

So, cognition is, first of all, a special kind of a spiritual activity, the primary intent of which is to ascertain the objective and true knowledge about the world, society and man.

Being an inhabitant of the three worlds – objective (nature, society), subjective (spirit, soul, consciousness, thinking) and subjective-objective (culture), man is eager to grasp their unity and to express it in an abstract-logical (conceptual), symbolic or figurative form. The interaction of the above-mentioned worlds, the identification of any correspondence between them is called mastering. Needless to say that the sense of the notion ‘mastering’ comprises a spiritual-theoretical (objective and subjective relation), spiritual-practical (subjective and subjective-objective relation) and object-practical activity, so it has broader meaning than the notion ‘cognition’. In other words, cognition is based on the abstract-logical component of consciousness; it is the embodiment of mind. Herewith the spiritual-practical cognition is grounded on the sensual-emotional part of consciousness and the object-practical one – on the emotional-volitional part of it.

Thus, mastering is in all its manifestations (aspects) an aspiration for truth, a transition from insufficient and imperfect knowledge to more thorough and integral one being the property (indication) of human existence. It characterizes man as a creative being, as an incomplete project aimed at the future. Myths, art, life wisdom, morality and science are all forms of mastering the world, which help man to have a broad picture of the universe.

At the same time cognition is the most complicated kind of mastering since it is realized in accordance with the clearly verified laws with strict adherence to the norms of logic, consistency, sequence (succession) and explanation. During the process of cognition some complex ontological questions are posed and solved. They can be in particular as follows: Is the world knowable?, what is knowledge?, are there any criteria of truth and methods of its obtaining? and others. Taking into consideration that the results of the cognitive activity are put into practice in medicine, education, industry, transport and so on, such questions as objectivity, reliance, truthfulness and safety of the obtained knowledge are not only the philosophical problems, but also ethic, axiological and human ones.

Besides, in the course of cognition the essences of things and phenomena are discovered, which are quite often privy behind the visibility and illusion. People needed thousands of years to understand the true reason of thunder, lightning, rain and so on before subduing fire, electricity and nuclear energy. All that required tense and intellectual work of many generations of thinkers and scientists, who managed to work out some special approaches and methods of separating of true knowledge (episteme) from belief (doxa), differentiating subject and object of cognition, discovering their features and principles of interaction. No wonder that in the very first philosophical systems, namely Democritus, Plato and Aristotle’s, a great attention was paid to the problems of cognition, searching for methods, principles and characteristics of the cognitive activity, separating them from myth-making and religious practice.

Cognition is the process of selective and active functioning, refutation and continuity of progressive forms of accumulation of information historically succeeding one another. Knowledge is the result of the process of cognition of the reality tested by socio-historical practice and verified by logic; this result is on the one hand an adequate reflection of the re­ality in man's consciousness in the form of notions, concepts, judgments and theories (i.e. in the form of subjective images), and on the other hand, it is a mastery of all these and a capacity for acting on their basis.

In modern philosophy the doctrine of cognition is called a theory of knowledge or gnosiology. The theory of cognition is a philosophical study about the process of gaining knowledge by a man, about its sources, motive forces and regularities; the necessity of its deepening and substitution of insufficient and imperfect knowledge by more thorough and integral one.

Lenin in his “Philosophical notebooks” wrote that cognition is man’s understanding of the laws of the surrounding world and his place in it. That is to say, man’s level of knowledge reflects the level of his development, widens his possibilities and opens new and new horizons of the unknown, problematic and potential. So, any cognitive process is connected with considering the major philosophical question (its gnosiological side) about the possibilities and limits of cognition.

In seeking answers to this and other questions they used two approaches to interpret the term ‘cognition’ in the history of philosophy. The first one, which is called classical, admits single and absolute truth attaining of which reveals the sense, purpose, value and peculiarities of cognitive activity. Scientific knowledge is an ideal knowledge here. All other types of knowledge are measured in terms of the criteria and norms of scientific rationality. Exact and natural sciences are the highest forms of cognition.

From the history of philosophy it is known that the traditional approach to the problems of cognition has proved to be variegated. The way of solving the main ontological question about the first principle of the world allows to distinguish several cognitive strategies, i.e. philosophical principles of the doctrine of knowledge: a) recognition of the identity of thinking and being (Heraclitus, Parmenides); b) separation of thinking from being, opposing it to the truth (Plato, Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, F. Bacon, R. Descartes, G. Leibniz, G. Hegel, E. Husserl), c) perception of the world existing independently of consciousness, through which thinking is not able to fully reveal its essence (Pirron, Sextus Empiricus, G. Berkeley, D. Hume, I. Kant, E. Mach). 

The first type of cognition is typical to the natural philosophers of Antiquity. It is based on the thesis of Parmenides that life exists because it can be conceived. That is, the idea of an object is a part of the reality. Accordingly, thinking is able to adequately reproduce the processes taking place in the world and display them in an apparent, clear form. Zeno’s well-known aporias, which came out of the purely speculative reasons, were directed exactly to the denial of plurality and motion. 

Yet, Democritus was already inclined to a more restrained assessment of human capabilities as the subject of cognition. In his opinion, "we can not clearly say about anything what it is in fact, because the latter is hidden from us like water in a deep well.” This idea was developed in the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle, who laid the foundations of the second type of cognition. It became paradigmatic (exemplary, basic) for the whole Western philosophy from the second half of the fifth century BC and up to the end of the nineteenth century.

The further developments of this approach to understanding cognition led to the establishment of the idea of a transpersonal entity (God, the Absolute, Ideas, and Spirit, the Logos), from the position of which any cognitive activity should take place. Imperfection, inaccuracy of human knowledge was explained by the lack of complete detailed information about the world. P. Laplace (1749-1827), a famous French astronomer and mathematician, the representative of mechanistic determinism, even formulated a position known as "Laplace’s demon". According to him, the absolute truth is unattainable because all measuring instruments are not of the absolute degree of accuracy.

However, the question of the absolute origin of the subject and its relationship with man has generated a complex philosophical debate in XVII-XVIII centuries. Its contents consisted in the matter whether our knowledge is the result of a conscious reflection of the objective reality, or it is a product of the subjective construction, which has nothing to do with the actually existing world. As it turned out, to solve that problem was a very complicated task, since it implicitly absorbed the contents of all previous philosophical discussions. That what the reason why F. Engels formulated the basic question of philosophy as the question of the relation of thinking to being, the spirit to nature and mind to matter. Then it turned out that there were two conflicting positions regarding the origin of consciousness, thinking, and thus the structure and principles of knowledge – materialism and idealism. 

Materialism, recognizing the existence of the objective reality, takes matter as the beginning, the fundamental principles of learning. Matter affects the senses and creates in mind a number of feelings, associations, relationships, ideas and so on. Their comparison, combination and generalization gradually take the form of theoretical knowledge about the world. In other words, the unity of the subject and object of knowledge is achieved only in the course of the object-practical activity.  It is the only practice, which dialectical materialism recognizes as a universal way of man’s being.  Practice determines objectives, goals, learning orientation, creates tools for its implementation, and is the sphere of using the results, the criterion of true knowledge. It rates the extent to which learning objectives and outcomes relate concerning the needs and interests of people.

Idealism proceeds from the statement that no reality can exist separately from consciousness. The subject (man) not only studies the world and reveals its laws, but also creates, constructs it in accordance with his cognitive abilities. So in his Critique of Pure Reason Kant proves that man is able to cognize only that he has created himself. Therefore the representatives of objective idealism view the world as being organized and developing not according to its own laws but due to the laws of Pure Thinking, the Absolute Idea and so on. The proponents of subjective idealism interpret cognition as the process mediated by ideas, principles, norms, which belong to the subject of cognition.

The representatives of agnosticism strived for the elimination of contradictions between materialism and idealism. The term "agnosticism" (derived from the Greek αγνωστοζ -unavailable knowledge) was introduced by the English scientist T. Heksli in 1869. Ancient skepticism is believed to be the first form of agnosticism, whose representatives (Atcesilaus, Enesidem, Pirron, Sextus Empiricus and others) insisted on the absence of a reliable criterion for truth and relativity of knowledge about the world. The concept of agnosticism made by John D. Hume and G. Berkeley became classical in philosophy. They believed that man is unable to establish a correspondence between the reality and the contents of his knowledge, if the latter goes beyond immediate experience. Solving this problem, Kant developed the concept of transcendental idealism, according to which man has an innate (a priori) form of sensibility, understanding and reason. However, they only allow us to explore the world only at the level of events, not essences. Theorizing as to transcendental "things in themselves" (morality, God, Universe, Freedom, etc.) leads to the appearance of antinomies, irremovable contradictions. That is, according to the German thinker, the only thing, which defines the limits of a cognitive activity? 

At the end of XIX – beginning of XX century attempts were made to overcome the limitations of the basic positions of agnosticism. In particular, the representatives of the Marxism philosophy (K. Marx, F. Engels, V. Lenin, P. Lafargue, A. Bebel, and others) considered cognition as an object-practical and transforming activity. They modified the notion of the subject of cognition, giving it a socio-cultural and historical dimension. They grounded the dialectical nature of cognition, its continuity, consistency and succession, refuted the idea of absolutization of the object and subject, of truth, accuracy, objectivity and other gnosiological categories. It should be noted that the dialectical-materialist interpretation of the process of cognition had a great influence on the development of classical science.

Complications of science in the twentieth century, intensification of its impact on social life, increasing of the responsibility of scientists for the fate of humanity forced philosophers to review and broaden their understanding of the world, methodology and purpose of a cognitive activity. The contradictions of classical epistemology were noticed by the German philosopher E. Husserl (1859-1938) in his work “The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology". He noted that new European science is not able to help us in our life needs. Objectivism removes from it those issues that are important and fateful to humans and the humanity.  This extension of the characteristics of a cognitive activity became transient to a non-classical approach in solving gnosiological issues.

The modern philosophers (G. Deleuze, J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, M. Foucault, P. Feyerabend, K. Popper and others) speak of a pluralism (diversity) of knowledge, the necessity of its deconstruction, proximity to the world of human life, its correction in accordance with the objectives and purposes of the survival of the human race. As the French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard noted, in the information era knowledge and therefore science are mercantilised (take a pragmatic dimension, are considered with the self-interested point of view). Science, truth, knowledge can be the elements of an ideological, political and economic influence. 

This limitation of science appears not only in dealing with sociocultural issues. The modern science is aimed at the study of complex, nonlinear, chaotic processes and systems. Under these conditions, it often loses objectivity, and the result often depends on the chosen method, calculations, involved technologies, devices, etc. 

The subject and object of cognition

The basic categories for the theory of cognition are "the subject of cognition" and "the object of cognition". The world exists for us only as it is given to the knowing subject. The subject of cognition is someone who cognizes. It is a complex hierarchy, of which the foundation is the entire social whole. In the final analysis, the highest producer of knowledge and wisdom is the entire mankind. A person, a group of researchers and finally a society can appear as the subject of cognition. Scientific knowledge assumes not only the subject's conscious attitude towards the object but also towards himself, towards his activity, i.e. a realization of the conditions, devices, norms and methods of research. So the subject and his cognitive activity can only be adequately understood in their concrete historical aspect.

The object of cognition is those objects and phenomena of the world, at which the process of cognition is directed. A certain fragment of the reality, a man and society could be the object of cognition. That is the object and objectivity, the subject and subjectivity are not identical pairs of concepts. 

Usually, under the subject of cognition they understand "the very human and even humanity", while the object is available for the perception of the subject reality (the nature, the inner world of a man, thinking, etc.). In other words, the subject and the object are dialectically interconnected and united in the process of socio-historical practice. The concepts of subject and ob­ject are correlative. They do not exist without each other, and their interaction determines the social and concrete-historical nature of the cognitive process. Indeed, at each stage of a society development it has the appropriate level of cognitive tools, and also some relevant research objectives that depend on the needs of society. 

It is a well-known dictum that man as the creator and subject of history creates the necessary conditions and premises for his his­torical existence. It so appears that the object of socio-historical knowledge is not only cognized but also created by people: before it becomes an object, it must be shaped by them. In social cognition, man deals with the results of his activity and thus with himself as a practically acting being. As a subject of cognition, man finds himself at the same time in the position of its object. Social cognition is in this sense man's social self-consciousness: he discovers for himself and studies his own historically created social essence.

In the history of philosophy the understanding of the object and subject of cognition relation varied depending on the social development and scientific progress. Let us consider now some approaches to defining of the subject of cognition. 

Anthropological subject. The subject of cognition is identified with man for whom a cognitive activity is a form of life. This concept was supported by J. Lametri, L. Feuerbach, L. Buchner, J. Piaget and other thinkers.

Transcendental subject.  So far back as Aristotle’s times he wrote in his “Nicomachean Ethics” that knowledge is that, that exists with necessity and therefore forever. The reason for the generality, the truthfulness of knowledge were thought by the ancient Greek philosopher as the transcendental existence of the subject (separate from the person) – God. Even in the era of the Modern Ages most philosophers explained objectivity of scientific knowledge on the basis of assumptions about the universal nature of the object of cognition. Thus, R. Descartes considered the base of cognition the activity of res cogito (the substance that thinks). Kant pointed to the transcendental subject as a system of general and necessary a priori form of a categorial synthesis. G. Hegel formulated the concept of the absolute subject with which the researcher must be joined, if willing to disclose the true nature of processes and phenomena. In the modern philosophy a concept of the transcendental subject is being developed by the representatives of phenomenology. Its founder, E. Husserl called to remove the concept of psychological entity, individual, sociocultural and other aspects and consider subjectivity as a phenomenon, as one of the forms of being. 

In the twentieth century the concept of the socio-historical essence of the subject of cognition became widespread (Karl Marx). It considered man not only as a set of biological or psychological traits, but placed him in the socio-cultural, value-semantic, and historical context. Consequently, the subject of cognition (which is not limited to a specific person) is found not aimed at attaining eternal, immutable, absolute truths, but at a practical subject-transforming activity.

The idea of a scientific community as the subject of cognitive activity is based on the above-mentioned conception. The representatives of this approach (T. Kuhn, R. Merton, and K. Popper) indicate that the scientific community is the only way to overcome the limitations of an individual. The approved norms, principles, ideals in a community provide historicity, universality, and objectivity of a cognitive process; they guarantee the right choice and application of the methods, associate science with social values and goals goals, transform truth criteria and so on.

The above-analyzed approaches to the interpretation of the subject of cognition point to a number of problems of a methodological, axiological and socio-cultural character.

Not less difficult and important task is to determine what is or may be the object of a cognitive activity, and how it is connected with the subject. After all, the understanding of the interaction between the subject and object of cognition is the first and foremost precondition of cognition.

Yet, the ancient thinkers pointed out that the object of cognition could be only the constant, essential, and eternal. Searching by Parmenides, Plato, R. Descartes and G. Hegel for the fundamental principle of the world was focused on identifying the true essence of being, which exists regardless of the subject. The materialist tradition with the solving of this question considers the object as the basis of empirical experience. 

But the development of science (especially theoretical) in XVIII-XIX centuries forced philosophers to reconsider the mentioned approaches. Putting into practice the concepts and objects, which had no analogue in the nature (instantaneous speed, an absolute black body, the ideal gas, etc.) allowed them to put forward the idea that the object of research was not the reality itself, but its modified, idealized copy, model. At first this problem was most clearly expressed by Kant. In his view, the researcher constructs the object of research. Developing the ideas of the German philosopher, English philosopher Karl Popper proposed to consider knowledge as a special subjectless world that has its own laws of development and functioning. 

In the contemporary philosophy the properties of the object are considered to be derived from the language schemes, constructs, concepts, categories involved in the process of cognition. In other words this world is given to the investigator only through one or another conceptual system of a language. American philosopher and logician William Quine called them "linguistic ontologies”. Language is a tool of cognition; it enhances the cognitive ability of a person and defines the structure of his operations. Moreover, language removes confrontation of the subject and object of cognition, there appears the diversity of their dialogue and interaction.