The problem of the knowability of the world and its relevance

The problem of the knowability of the world is one of the key in epistemology. Without its solution, it is impossible to determine the nature of cognition and its scope, nor the laws or tendencies of human thought activity. In combination with it, the question usually arises of what is the relation of the information we have accumulated to reality, and what are the criteria for their reliability. Thus, one of the main questions that has faced the philosophers for several millennia is how the reality reflects our knowledge, and whether our consciousness is in a condition at all to give an adequate picture of our environment.

Of course, the problem of the knowability of the world in philosophy has not been fully and unambiguously resolved. For example, agnosticism categorically (or at least in a certain sense) denies that we can reliably grasp the essence of processes occurring in nature and ourselves. This does not mean that this philosophical concept discards knowledge in principle. For example, such an outstanding thinker as Immanuel Kant, devoted a lot of work to this problem and, in the end, came to the conclusion that we can understand only phenomena, and nothing more. The essence of things remains inaccessible to us. Continuing his ideas, another philosopher, Hume, suggested that we are not even talking about phenomena, but about our own sensations, since nothing else is possible for us to comprehend.

The problems of the cognizability of the world in the agnostics, therefore, can be reduced to the assertion that we observe and have from experience only a certain appearance, and the essence of reality is hidden from us. It should be said that nobody finally refuted this thesis. In the 18th century, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant posed the question of what we can know at all and in what way, and since then he remains almost as relevant as at that time. Of course, we can reproach the agnostics for reducing the entire sum of our knowledge to purely mental activity, which not so much analyzes the environment as it adapts to it. The same Kant called our minds something similar to the forms with which the child is played in the sandbox. All that we take, immediately in our mind takes a given form. Therefore, we rather construct the object that we are trying to understand.

The problem of the cognizability of the world, or rather, its incomprehensibility, is still vividly of interest to scientists. Pragmatist philosophers say that our mental activities are merely utilitarian and we "pull" out of reality what helps to survive. Helmholtz's theory is of interest that we simply create symbols, ciphers and hieroglyphs, denoting them certain concepts for our own convenience. The famous mathematician Poincaré, like Bergson, the author of the "philosophy of life," agreed that our minds can comprehend certain relations between phenomena, but they can not understand what their nature is.

The problem of the knowability of the world disturbs contemporary philosophers. The creator of the famous theory of verification and "falsification" Karl Popper urged scientists to be more careful and say that we are not available to some kind of objective truth, but only plausibility. Knowledge does not give us a complete reflection of reality, and at best can serve the needs and utilitarian needs of man. His no less famous enemy, Hans-Georg Gadamer, said that all this applies only to natural and mathematical sciences, to which truth is not at all open. The latter is possible only in the field of "sciences of the spirit," which uses completely different criteria for understanding.

Nevertheless, even most of these scientists still recognize the probability of comprehending reality, and the problem of the cognizability of the world simply appears to them as a matter of the nature of what and how we study. There is also another point of view, which is more familiar to us, because it was shared by materialistic philosophy. According to her, the source of knowledge is an objective reality, which more or less adequately reflects in the human brain. This process occurs in logical forms that arise on the basis of practice. Such an epistemological theory tries to scientifically prove the ability of people to give a true picture of reality in the totality of their knowledge .