Towards a Holistic Worldview: Human-Sizedness of Scientific and Non-Scientific Cognition

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of the human-sizedness of various forms of cognition: the extent to which the models of reality created by various forms of cognition, «comply with» a human being, help him «incorporate into» the world and identify himself. It is the human-sizedness of various forms of cognition which becomes one of the prerequisites for building a holistic view of the reality, which, as such, could only be opposed to an «inhuman» view of the world when a cognition (mostly scientific) is focused on a subject-object scheme where a man as the subject opposes the world of objects and non-scientific forms of cognition are seen as «inferior». The author believes that human-sizedness is a foundation of all cognitive processes and this philosophical reflection as such lets us look at the process of cognition from the perspective of wholeness. It is the author’s opinion that the wholeness of mismatching and often opposing forms of cognition is ensured by means of the language in which any human experience is shaped.