SCIENTIFIC WAYS OF MASTERING UNCERTAINTY IN A TURBULENT SOCIETY

Abstract

Modern society is characterized by permanent challenges that create a situation of the need to preserve the key parameters of social development, taking into account temporary and situational deviations from the strategic direction of this development. The key to understanding the problem of determination in modern science can be the identification of regularities in the development of science itself. On the one hand, there is no doubt about the need to systematize knowledge and adhere to clear scientific criteria – especially in a situation of exponential growth in the volume and variety of knowledge possessed by modern society. On the other hand, science constantly abandons some part of its recent postulates, which turn out to be only partially proven hypotheses that have only partial truth. In the end, only the basic scientific criteria and the instruction for incessant internal criticism and self-improvement of science remain beyond doubts and changes, while the substantive part of science is in a state of permanent transformation and refinement. In a postmodern society, such a methodological and worldview instruction of science receives additional ideological legitimation thanks to postmodern principles of knowledge organization – such as rhizomaticity, discursiveness, narrativism, intertextuality, etc. The signs of science at its current stage of development are: a significant increase in the specific weight of interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research; emergence of new integrated sciences; the use of accurate methods in the study of methodological and epistemological problems of science and the demarcation of knowledge; search for new forms of research adequate to the latest specificity of the subject of the socio-humanitarian disciplinary spectrum; an intensive analysis of the relationships between the epistemological and axiological foundations of socio-humanitarian science. The research approach, which is based on the understanding of the factor of instability, fully meets the modern scientific and social demand for the designation of the content format and problematic challenges of modernity, provides an opportunity to grasp new cognitive horizons and slices of reality, which are characterized by signs of becoming, nonlinearity, uncertainty – that is, almost all attributes of a turbulent society.