13.4. Practice as the Basis and Purpose of Cognition

The principal form of the mani­festation of human life is activity – sensuously objective, practical, intellectual, and theoretical. Man is an active being rather than a passive spectator at the "pageant" of life. He continually influences things around him, lending them forms and properties necessary to satisfy the historically evolved social and personal needs. It is in the transformation of the world that man lends definiteness to his way of life.

Practice is the material, sensuously objective and goal-directed ac­tivity of men intended to master and transform natural and social ob­jects, and constituting the universal basis, the motive force of the de­velopment of human society and knowledge, Practice designates not only, and not so much, the sensuously objective activity of a separate individual as the total activity and experience of the entire mankind in its historical development. Practical activity is social both in its content and in the mode of its application. Contemporary practice is a result of world history, a result that embodies infinitely varied re­lations between men and nature and among men in the process of material and non-material production. Being the principal mode of man's social existence and the decisive form of his self-assertion in the world, practice acts as a complex integral system incorporating such elements as need, goal, motive, separate actions, movements, acts, the object at which activity is directed, the instruments of achieving the goal, and finally the result of activity. In practice, somebody always does something to create something out of some­thing with the help of something for some purpose.

Social practice forms a dialectical unity with cognitive activity and with theory. It performs three functions in relation to it:

1. It is the source and the basis of cognition, its motive force; it provides the necessary factual material for it, subject to generaliza­tion and theoretical processing. It thus feeds cognition as soil feeds trees, and does not let it become divorced from real life.

2. Practice is a mode of application of knowledge, and in this sense it is the goal of cognition. Scientific knowledge has a practical meaning only if it is implemented in life: practice is the arena in which the power of knowledge is applied. The ultimate goal of cog­nition is not knowledge in itself, but practical transformation of re­ality to satisfy society's material and non-material needs through harmonizing its relationship with nature.

3. Practice is the crite­rion and measure of the truth of the results of cognition. Only that knowledge which has passed through the purifying fire of practice can lay claims to objectiveness, reliability, and truth.

We can thus say that practice is the basis for the formation and development of cognition at all its stages, the source of knowledge and criterion of the truth of the results of the cognitive process.

The main kinds of practice are the material-production activity and social-transforming activity of the masses (the latter includes people's activity in the social, political and cultural spheres of so­ciety's life). Natural-scientific and social experiments are special kinds of scientific practice.

The feedback mechanism permits the implementation of correc­tive influences of theoretical and practical activity on each other, which ensures the role of practice as the criterion of truth.

Inasmuch as practical activity is conscious, the mental, spiritual element is undoubtedly part and parcel of it. The position of isolating the material and practical activity from the intellectual and theoretical one is hostile to dialectical materialism. These kinds of activity form an indissoluble unity. To resort to the dry language of categories, a part is not the whole, and substituting the one for the other is fraught with theoretical-methodological and worldview errors.

Basic concepts and categories:

Agnosticism is the philosophical position rejecting knowability of the world in principle.

Gnosiology is the philosophical study, where a cognitive process is examined from the point of correlation of the subject and the object of cognition, the problem of truth and its criteria are analyzed, form and methods of a cognitive activity are studied. Traditionally, Gnoseology is defined as the theory of cognition.

Epistemology is the philosophical study about the constitution, structure, development and functioning of knowledge. The basic problems of epistemology are concentrated on the analysis of the opposition “object – knowledge”. Sometimes the term “epistemology” is identified with the term “gnoseology”.

Knowledge is socially meaningful information gained by any way or method, which is ordered and arranged according to some norms. It could be also the facts, feelings or experiences known by a person or group of people gained by experience or learning.

Truth is defined as an adequate reflection of an object by the knowing subject, which reproduces reality such as it is by itself, outside and independent of consciousness.

Method originates in a practical activity as a generalized device that conforms with the properties and laws of reality, with the objective logic of the things at the transformation of which human activity is directed. It is a totality of ways and schemes (an algorithm) of a theoretical and practical mastering of the reality. In science method means the way of a scientific investigation, which includes an entire system of operations, rules and norms of a scientific research.

Methodology is a study of researching methods, ways of organization of a theoretical and practical activity of a man. They differentiate a philosophical methodology, a general scientific methodology and a specific science methodology.

The object of cognition is seen as the real fragments of being that are subjected to study by the subject of cognition (man).

Mastering is a spiritual and theoretical, spiritual and practical, material and practical comprehension of the world, expressed in the form of myths, art, philosophy, science and so on.

Cognition is the process of gaining knowledge; the activity of the subject of cognition aimed at obtaining some error-free and precise information about the world; the process and the result of man’s reflection of the world; man’s realization of non-experience principles of consciousness organization manifesting uniqueness of human being.

Rational cognition is the highest stage of man’s comprehension of the world, where they make a transition from sensations and ideas to concepts, judgments and deductions as forms of abstract thinking.

Skepticism is the philosophical conception which doubts the possibility of a reliable cognition of the world and the existence of a reliable criterion of truth.

The subject of cognition is a bearer of an activity, consciousness and cognition. Usually the subject of cognition is a man.