Progress of Science and Interfaces of the World

Abstract

In this article, I want to show that the concept “rationality”, which is important for the French school of epistemology of science, has a dual content and is not very successful. This is the main point of my polemic with Tatyana Sokolova. On the one hand, there seems to be general rationality in it, understood as a preference (in the broad sense) for benefits over costs. Benefits include true knowledge. On the other hand, there is a historical socio-cultural context in which scientific knowledge arises and in which the parameters of practice are determined, which serves as the final instance for testing knowledge. At the same time, there are many such contexts in society, which I call human interfaces. The world, for its part, offers many of its interfaces as collections of interaction tools. When some interface of a person and some interface of the world assimilate each other, knowledge arises, that is confirmed by practice. It can be considered rational. But with a change in the sociocultural context, the human interface also changes, so that a search for new assimilation takes place. It is carried out by science. I agree with Tatyana Sokolova’s characterization of the progress of science, but I suggest at least differentiating the levels of rationality. One operates in the historical sociocultural locus, the other ensures the change of such loci and the adaptation of knowledge to them. I consider the progress of science to be an evaluative characteristic; no objectively recorded phenomenon corresponds to it. The disciplinary distinction of science is derived from the concepts of “object” and “method”, which have a performative content.