The scientific criteria and types of Knowledge in the Study

The aggregate human knowledge lies both in the field of science and outside it. In order to manage progress, it is necessary to determine with confidence the properties of the scientific component in the aggregate knowledge.

At the same time, one can not underestimate the knowledge that lies beyond science.

What kind of knowledge should be considered scientific?

Criteria of scientificity in the world of modern research are not harmonized. The number of author's concepts, sometimes opposite to each other, is very large. Therefore, in order to understand the signs of scientificity, it is necessary to investigate those constructs that are least contradictory.

Within the framework of this installation, three attributes of scientific knowledge are considered in this article. It should be:

• True;
• Intersubjective;
• System.

Truth and knowledge

All knowledge is knowledge about a certain subject.

If knowledge corresponds to its subject, it is true.

However, knowledge can be true outside science. It exists in pre-scientific, everyday and practical forms, as well as in the form of conjectures and opinions.

Truth and knowledge itself are far from the same thing.

Truth is said when knowledge corresponds to reality, its content is authentically independent of the knowing subject and exists to the extent that it is objective.

Knowledge itself implies a variety of forms of recognition of truth. They vary depending on the sufficiency of the grounds for such recognition and can be faith, opinion, ordinary-practical knowledge, the conclusions of science.

The latter not only report that some content is true, but also justify its truth. The following can serve as justifications:

• Logical conclusion;
• Experimental result;
• Proved theorem, etc.

For this reason, sufficient validity is an obligatory and basic requirement for scientific knowledge, in contrast to the non-scientific one.

Criteria of scientificness put forward the formula of the principle, which treats about a sufficient basis, to the place of the foundation of science.

Leibniz, who proclaimed this principle, showed that the idea, in order to prove its truth, must be justified by other thoughts, which, in turn, are already proved in their truth.

Intersubjective knowledge

Science requires knowledge to be universal for humanity, universally binding and universally valid for any person.

For comparison: an opinion as a non-scientific knowledge is individual and unessential.

There is a boundary dividing scientific knowledge in its truth and other modifications of knowledge.

Non-scientific knowledge is personified. They certify the truth without sufficient justification, recognizing this as the norm.

The truths of science are recognized only as objective and reasonably justified. They are universal and impersonal.

The intersubjectivity of scientific knowledge makes its reproducibility relevant. This means that all researchers who have studied the same object and put this study in the same conditions will get the same result.

If, however, every (every) cognitive subject does not confirm the invariance of his knowledge for all cognitive subjects, it does not show reproducibility and is not scientific.

System Knowledge

Systematicity organizes both artistic, everyday, and scientific knowledge.

However, the systemic criteria of scientific character differ in a number of features.

They are based on rational knowledge, which is generated by coherent reasoning. The support of this reasoning is experimental data.

Specificity of rational knowledge is a strict inductive-deductive structure. It gives knowledge such validity, which confirms that it is true.

Scientific and non-scientific knowledge: some clarifications

Scientific forms of knowledge do not abolish, do not abolish other forms, do not render them useless.

The delineation of a scientifically grounded scientific and unscientific knowledge that is not grounded in the intellect should lead to an understanding of the following important circumstances.

Extra-scientific knowledge is not a fiction or a fiction. It has its own resources and sources of knowledge. Its standards and norms are different from the framework of rationalism, they are produced by very real intellectual communities.

Often non-scientific knowledge is the forerunner of the scientific, as astrological for the astronomical, alchemical for the chemical, and carries in itself the germs of the emergence of scientific truths. Such types of knowledge, lying in historical retrospect with respect to the sciences, are called esoteric. They can be called a foreboding.

The novelty of the study

The scientific criteria, which indicate in the study the specific data, the content and meaning of the transformations and additions, are called the scientific novelty of the study.

Scientific novelty is recognized when:

• Research is developing a problem that was not previously raised in science;
• The investigated object was not previously studied in science;
• New knowledge has been obtained with respect to the object;
• The above conditions are fulfilled in any combination.

The interpretation of knowledge as new arises when the known data:

• Radically changed as a result of the research;
• Expanded and supplemented;
• Refined (specified).

Signs of reliable scientific criteria

The signs of scientificness cease to be its criteria, if they are considered separately from each other.

Thus, truth is born not only within science.

Intersubjective can be not only a science, but also, for example, a mass error.

Systematicity, considered outside of connection with other signs of scientific character, lays the foundation for pseudoscientific reasoning.

And only the result of cognition, in which the above characteristics are simultaneously realized, fully characterizes scientific knowledge.