Cognition as the object of philosophical analysis

Lecture 15

THE THEORY OF COGNITION

All people naturally strive for knowledge

Aristotle

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

Cognition as the object of philosophical analysis

As it was mentioned before, man is an open system of necessaries (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. 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.

But man’s cognitive activity is not always stipulated by some pragmatic purposes such as to make physical labour 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 spiritually theoretical (objective and subjective ratio), spiritually practical (subjective and subjective-objective ratio) and material-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 spiritually practical cognition is grounded on the sensual-emotional part of consciousness and the material-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 just 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 stated 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 so on. 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, value 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’s 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.

In modern philosophy the doctrine of cognition is called a theory of knowledge or gnoseology. 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 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, widening his possibilities and opening new and new horizons of the unknown, problematic and potential. So any cognitive process is connected with solving the major philosophical question (its gnoseological side) about the possibilities and limits of cognition.

In search of answers to this and other questions there formed two approaches to the interpretation of the term ‘cognition’ in the history of philosophy. The first one, which is called classical, admitssingleand absolute truth attaining of which reveals the sense, purpose, value and peculiarities of a cognitive activity. Scientific knowledge is ideal knowledge here. Exact and natural sciences are the highest form of cognition.

But the traditional approach to the problems of cognition has proved to be variegated.

Human knowledge forms a highly complex system of social memory; its wealth is transmitted from generation to gener­ation, from people to people by means of social heredity, of culture.

Nearly all philosophers have analyzed epistemological problems in one way or another.

Epistemology evolved along with the emergence of philosophy as one of its basic branches. It studies the nature of human knowledge, the forms and laws of the transition from a superficial knowledge of things known as opinion to cognizing their essence, or true knowl­edge, and in this connection it considers the paths of attaining the truth and the criteria of the truth. But man would not have been able to know the truth as such had he not made mistakes, and epistemology therefore also studies the way man falls into error and overcomes delusions. Finally, the most burning issue in epistemology is, and has always been, that of the vital meaning of true knowl­edge of the world, of man himself and of human society. Knowledge of the essence of things permits man to use them in accordance with his needs and interests, modifying avail­able things and creating new ones. Knowledge is the link between nature, human reason and practical activity.

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 reality tested by socio-historical practice and verified by logic; this result is on the one hand an adequate reflection of re­ality in man's consciousness in the form of notions, concepts, judge­ments and theories (i.e. in the form of subjective images), and on the other, it is a mastery of all these and a capacity for acting on their basis. Its reliability varies, reflecting the dialectics of relative and absolute truth. In its genesis and mode of functioning, knowl­edge is a social phenomenon recorded in natural and artificial lan­guages.

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