Modern scientific knowledge is represented by several major categories. Thus, the humanities and natural sciences are distinguished. What are the features of both?
Facts about the humanities
Under humanitarian It is common to understand the sciences that arose during the Renaissance. Philosophers and thinkers of that time were able to restore ancient knowledge about man - as a subject of creativity and spirituality, capable of developing, reaching new heights in culture, law, political self-organization, and technical progress.
The key tool of the humanities is the interpretation of facts. These could be historical events, social processes, the appearance of influential literary works. In many cases, the interpretation of facts in the humanities is quite difficult to achieve using mathematical methods - using formulas, statistics, and modeling. Therefore, to implement it we use:
- comparative approaches (when some facts are compared with others);
- theoretical methods (when the interpretation is based on an educated guess);
- logic (when it is difficult to find a reasonable alternative to the resulting interpretation result).
Examples of modern humanities: history, philosophy, religious studies, psychology, art history, pedagogy. The humanities should be distinguished from the social sciences, which study primarily social phenomena. However, within the framework of the former, tools that are primarily characteristic of the latter can be used.
Science Facts
Under natural It is customary to understand the sciences, the subject of study of which is natural phenomena in all their diversity. These can be physical or chemical processes that reflect the interaction of substances, electromagnetic fields and elementary particles with each other at various levels. This could be the interaction of living organisms in nature.
The key tool of natural sciences is to identify patterns within the framework of these interactions, compile their most detailed description and adapt, if necessary, to practical use. This involves the use of more accurate methods - in particular, mathematical and engineering ones. The use of comparative and theoretical tools is often not enough - but they can also be used and play an important role. Logical methods are characterized by very high usefulness.
It is necessary to distinguish natural sciences from technical ones - such as, for example, mechanics and computer science. The latter may be the most important source of tools for the former, but are not considered in the same category with them. It is not customary to classify mathematics as a natural science, since it belongs to the category of formal sciences - those that involve working with specific, standardized quantities and units of measurement. But, as in the case of technical disciplines, mathematical tools play a vital role in the natural sciences.
Comparison
The main difference between humanities and natural science is that the former studies primarily man as an independent subject, the latter studies natural phenomena in their wide variety. The categories of sciences under consideration also differ in their instruments. In the first case, the main method is the interpretation of facts, in the second - the description of patterns characterizing the course of various processes.
Logic is equally useful in both types of sciences. In the humanities, it allows the researcher to interpret this or that fact in the most reasonable way; in the natural sciences, it is one of the tools that can explain this or that process.
Sometimes methods that are more characteristic of the humanities - a comparative approach, the development of theories - are also used in the natural sciences. But the mathematical and engineering tools often used in the natural sciences are rarely used in the humanities.
Having determined what the difference is between the humanities and natural sciences, we will reflect the conclusions in the table.
In the history of the development of philosophical and scientific thought, there have been repeated attempts to unite various knowledge in accordance with a single universal principle. Various types of classifications, i.e., divisions of things into genus and species, were also applied to the sciences. This includes attempts to classify the sciences of Aristotle, F. Bacon, French encyclopedists, O. Comte and the positivists of the 19th century, Hegel, as the finalizer of German classical idealism, F. Engels and Marxists, as well as many modern scientists.
Aristotle generally followed the general logic and tradition of ancient philosophy, highlighting the sciences of nature (physics), knowledge and soul (logic) and society (ethics). However, it was Aristotle, as the founder of many new sciences (biology, meteorology, etc.), who proposed an additional, original principle for classifying sciences in accordance with the functions they perform: creative sciences (poetics, rhetoric, dialectics), practical sciences (ethics, politics , medicine, astronomy) and theoretical sciences (logic, mathematics, physics, first philosophy).
F. Bacon (XVII century) divided sciences in accordance with the abilities of the human soul: memory, imagination and reason. Historical sciences (natural, civil history, church history) are associated with memory; with imagination - poetry, as an image of the world not as it really is, but in accordance with the desires and ideals of a person; Sciences about nature, about man and about God are connected with reason, i.e. natural science, theology and what is commonly called extra-scientific, parascientific knowledge (magic, alchemy, astrology, palmistry, etc.).
O. Comte (19th century) rejected the principle of dividing sciences according to various abilities of the mind. He believed that the principle of classification should be based on the subjects of science and determined by the connections between them. Comte's principle ranked the sciences according to the simplicity and generality of their subjects and their corresponding methods. Thus, mathematics has a universal subject and method, followed by mechanics, the sciences of inorganic bodies, the sciences of organic bodies, and sociology.
In the second half of the 19th century. F. Engels connected the subjects of science with the forms of movement of matter. The positivist principle of classification of sciences (O. Comte, G. Spencer) was developed by him, since he left open the possibility of the emergence of new sciences on the basis of still unknown forms of motion of matter.
Modern classifications generally come down to three blocks: natural and mathematical sciences, philosophical and humanities and technical and applied sciences. The basis of this classification clearly shows the influence of ancient thought (Aristotle), positivism, Marxism, and especially the spiritual situation of the 20th century, the focus of which was the problem of man. It is man who has knowledge about nature (natural science), about himself (humanities) and about the fruits of his activities to transform the world (technical sciences).
Natural Sciences. Knowledge about nature is an integral system, the structural complexity and substantive depth of which reflects the endless complexity and depth of nature itself. Knowledge of nature is achieved through practical and theoretical human activity. All knowledge about nature must be capable of empirical verification.
Since all sciences arise from the situation of the relationship between subject and object (according to I. Kant), it is clear that the sciences of nature pay more attention to the object than to the subject. But for modern natural science it becomes fundamentally important to observe a strict measure of attention not only to the object, but also to the subject. The history of natural science provides an object lesson in this sense. So, for classical natural science, starting from the 17th century. characterized by a tendency to completely “exclude from the description and explanation everything that relates to the subject and the procedures of his cognitive activity.”
Non-classical natural science (late 19th - mid-20th centuries) is characterized by the assumption of correlations between an object and the procedures of cognitive activity; the concept of an “object within an instrumental situation” arises, which may differ significantly from an “object outside an instrumental situation.”
Finally, in post-non-classical natural science the very subject of research has changed. Now it is not limited only to the object determined by the means of scientific knowledge, but includes its orbit and the subject. The subject of science is already a subject - an object system in its self-movement and development.
For a long time, the paradigms of natural science determined the course of development of the entire complex of sciences, and even philosophy. Thus, Euclid’s geometry is reflected in I. Kant’s formulation of the a priori foundations of human sensory knowledge and reason - so convincing was its “paradigmality” for the German philosopher. The same situation developed around the physics of I. Newton (XVII century) and physics A. Einstein (beginning of the XX century), around the discoveries of G. Mendel (end of the 19th century), D. Watson and F. Crick (mid-20th century .).
In the 20th century The “palm” is gradually moving from the natural sciences to the social and humanities. The political economic studies of K. Marx and the sociology of M. Weber are becoming a model of a truly scientific approach for many scientists and scientific schools.
Humanitarian sciences. The very concept of humanitarian, i.e. human, comes from the first humanists of the Renaissance, who in the XV-XVI centuries. took upon themselves the work of reviving in the original the heritage of ancient thinkers, primarily poets, writers, philosophers, historians, i.e. those who worked to exalt the human spirit and its power. The humanities are associated with a specific, individual, unique subject and his achievements, which have something in common with the spiritual state of other subjects, that is, causing them a certain spiritual resonance.
Of the three functions of science listed above, understanding (interpretation) is most suitable for the humanities. The humanities deal with single, unique facts, events, phenomena of a sociocultural, spiritual nature, which are least characterized by homogeneity and identical repetition. They are extremely difficult to bring under general concepts, theories, laws, that is, to explain. As for the function of prediction, in the humanities, unlike the natural sciences, it is realized to a rather small extent. Predicting any social event or the further course of history is much more difficult than predicting a solar eclipse or the approach of a meteorite to the Earth.
Views on the subject of the humanities are extremely contradictory. According to G. Rickert, laws in the humanities are not nomological (reflecting regular, repeating connections between objects or phenomena), but ideographic (interpreting unique individual facts and phenomena from the perspective of specific authors). According to neo-Kantians, the humanities should be based not on causal relationships and laws, but on the goals, intentions, motives, and interests of people. Marxist point of view
48 ma, on the contrary, historical patterns “make their way” in society with the necessity of a natural process and act beyond the guidance and desires of people. Such an antinomy, however, is resolvable within the framework of the humanities itself, although it requires qualified philosophical assistance.
The conscious activity of people, presented here in the form of motives and interests, is always determined by a certain historical situation that has developed in the past, but, in turn, determines the future contours of history, thus becoming, as it were, part of an objective “historical landscape.” One goes into the other and back again. If we separate the sphere of conscious activity of people from the historical conditions in which it occurs, then we cannot avoid fatalistic or voluntaristic interpretations, subjective-idealistic or objectivist concepts of the philosophy of history.
Comprehension of the subject of the humanities is increasingly associated with hermeneutics, which originally existed as exegesis. Hermeneutics means not only the method of the humanities (the art and theory of interpretation of texts), but also the doctrine of being (ontology). Currently, it traditionally distinguishes two approaches: psychological and theoretical. Psychological includes understanding based on one person’s experience of the spiritual experience of another, his feelings, moods, emotions. To understand the author, you must internally experience what he experienced. The theoretical approach involves revealing the meaning of the ideas, goals, and motives of the authors, i.e., it seeks to understand what they wanted to convey to us and how this information conveyed to us can enrich our understanding of life. The writer must be understood better than he understood himself, says the principle of hermeneutics. Another principle is that the understanding of a single fragment is conditioned by the understanding of the whole (text, document, history) and, conversely, the whole can be comprehended thanks to the achieved understanding of individual fragments (the so-called “hermeneutic circle”). Another important principle of hermeneutics states that to understand means to understand another, that is, to find commonality with him in worldview, culture, rights, language, etc. . The question arises: can hermeneutics be used to study nature? At first glance, it seems that no, because in nature we are dealing with repeating, similar, uniform groups of objects and phenomena. But in nature, scientists also encounter unique, inimitable objects and phenomena that do not fit into the framework of known patterns and existing theories. In this case, the scientist also seeks to understand and interpret the nature of such objects and phenomena, to identify a pattern or put forward a new 49 hypothesis for their explanation. However, in this case, the natural object inevitably loses its “uniqueness”. Against this background, the example of different interpretations of microworld objects by different scientists and scientific schools is especially clear.
The ideal option would be to use hermeneutics in natural science, if we assume that “nature is a text written by God” that needs to be deciphered. G. Galileo also thought in this vein: nature is a book written in the language of mathematics, and a person not versed in mathematics will not understand it.
The methods of natural sciences can be used in certain aspects to understand social phenomena. The experience of studying economic, demographic, environmental processes, for example in the activities of the Club of Rome, in the calculations of the “nuclear winter” scenario by K. Sagan and N. Moiseev, shows the relative success of such use. The same applies to the justification of the partial application of the historical concept of K. Marx or the concepts of A. Toynbee, O. Spengler (about the closedness and cyclical nature of civilizational processes). All these theories have a very clear and rational, but dry and abstract scheme. The specificity of the very subject of research with its colorfulness, fullness of life, individuality disappears from these schemes, as if they took the life of Russian society in the middle of the last century as an object of study and studied it only according to political, economic, demographic, etc. theories, forgetting about JI novels. Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky. K. Marx himself believed that reading the novels of O. Balzac gives him an understanding of the economic situation in France at the beginning of the 19th century. incomparably more than the most careful study of economic tables and stock market reports.
Technical sciences study nature transformed and placed at the service of man. "Techne" translated from ancient Greek means art. In ancient theatrical performances, at the climax, the “God ex machina” often appeared, driven by a skillfully designed pulley mechanism. Thus, technology (art) became a mediator between man and God, man and fate, man and nature. T. Campanella (16th century) believed that a person in his desires does not stop at the things of this world, but wants even more - to rise above the sky and the world. Not having legs as fast as a horse, man invents the wheel and cart, not being able to swim like a fish, he invents ships, and, dreaming of flying like a bird, he creates flying machines. The phenomenon of technology includes a number of meanings. The first is an instrumental understanding of technology. Technology is understood as a set of artificially created material means of activity or a set of artifacts used as a means of activity. In this sense, technology is always things created by people from an inorganic substrate and used by them. In the second sense, technology is understood as a skillful process of activity or as skill, for example, the technique of agriculture, navigation, healing, etc. Nowadays, the word “technology” is most often used in this meaning, denoting the totality of knowledge and skills in manufacturing something. The third meaning of technology is understood extremely broadly as a way of activity, a way of life and a way of thinking, for example, language, first oral and then written - this is technology, modern world religions are also technology.
Unlike natural sciences, technical sciences (applied mechanics, radio electronics, mining, agronomy, genetic engineering, pharmacology, etc.) are more specific, because they study specific objects created by man, “second nature,” and also utilitarian, since they are focused not on understanding the essence of the phenomenon as such, but on a specific result that has practical application. But without the natural sciences, technical sciences cannot develop, in principle, because the former give them the basis and reveal the essence of the processes used in technical systems.
In turn, the humanities also have an impact on the technical sciences. Technology is created by man and for his needs. It is included as an integral part in the process of his life and at the same time should not subjugate a person to himself, deprive him of freedom and creativity. The technical and engineering ethics that arose on this basis is intended to prevent the distortions of society towards technicalism.
Technical sciences tend to progress, which is determined by the social need for practical scientific achievements used in production. However, there is a limit and a transition to its opposite: progress in one respect is regression in another. It is not for nothing that it has long been believed that technology, as a “gift of the gods,” can turn out to be a “Pandora’s box.”
In the process of understanding the surrounding world and man himself, various sciences are formed. Natural sciences - sciences about nature - form natural science culture, humanities - artistic (humanitarian) culture.
At the initial stages of knowledge (mythology, natural philosophy), these two types of sciences and cultures were not separated. However, gradually each of them developed its own principles and approaches. The separation of these cultures was also facilitated by different goals: natural sciences sought to study nature and conquer it; Humanities set their goal to study man and his world.
It is believed that the methods of the natural and human sciences are also predominantly different: rational in the natural sciences and emotional (intuitive, imaginative) in the humanities. To be fair, it should be noted that there is no sharp boundary here, since elements of intuition and imaginative thinking are integral elements of natural science comprehension of the world, and in the humanities, especially in history, economics, and sociology, one cannot do without a rational, logical method.
In the Ancient era, a single, undivided knowledge about the world (natural philosophy) prevailed. There was no problem of separating the natural and human sciences in the Middle Ages, although at that time the process of differentiation of scientific knowledge and the identification of independent sciences had already begun. However, for medieval man, Nature represented a world of things behind which one should strive to see the symbols of God, i.e. knowledge of the world was, first of all, knowledge of Divine Wisdom.
In the era of modern times (XVII - XVIII centuries), an exceptionally rapid development of natural science began, accompanied by a process of differentiation of sciences. The successes of natural science were so great that the idea of their omnipotence arose in society. The opinions and objections of representatives of the humanitarian movement were often ignored. The rational, logical method of understanding the world has become decisive. Later, a kind of split emerged between the humanitarian and natural science cultures.
Stages of knowledge of Nature
The history of science shows that in its knowledge of Nature, since ancient times, humanity has gone through three stages and is entering the fourth.
1. At the first stage, general syncretic ones were formed, i.e. undivided ideas about the surrounding world as something whole. It was then that natural philosophy appeared - the philosophy of Nature, which contained ideas and guesses that became the rudiments of the natural sciences in the 13th - 15th centuries. Natural philosophy was dominated by methods of observation, but not experiment. It was at this stage that ideas about the world as developing from chaos, evolving, arose.
2. The second stage - analytical - is characteristic of the XV - XVIII centuries. At this stage, mental dissection and isolation of particulars took place, which led to the emergence and development of physics, chemistry and biology, as well as a number of other sciences (along with the long-existing astronomy). The natural desire of researchers to penetrate ever deeper into the details of various natural objects has led to uncontrollable differentiation, i.e. division of the relevant sciences. For example, chemistry was first divided into organic and inorganic, then physical and analytical chemistry, etc. appeared. Today this list is very long. The analytical stage is characterized by a clear predominance of empirical (obtained through experience, experiment) knowledge over theoretical knowledge. An important feature of the analytical stage is the advanced, preferential study of objects of Nature in relation to the study of processes in Nature. The peculiarity of the analytical period of development of natural science is that Nature itself, until the middle of the 19th century, was considered unchanged, ossified, outside of evolution.
3. The third stage is synthetic. Gradually, during the 19th – 20th centuries, the reconstruction of a holistic picture of Nature began to take place on the basis of previously known particulars, i.e. the third, so-called synthetic stage began.
4. A number of researchers believe that today the fourth - integral-differential - stage is beginning to take place, at which a truly unified science of nature is born.
It is noteworthy that the transition to the third (synthetic) and even to the fourth (integral-differential) stages of the study of Nature does not exclude the manifestation of all the just listed features of the analytical period. Moreover, the processes of differentiation of the natural sciences are now intensifying, and the volume of empirical research is growing sharply. But both of these are now happening against the backdrop of ever-increasing integrative trends and the birth of universal theories that seek to derive all the infinite variety of natural phenomena from one or more general theoretical principles. Thus, there are no strict boundaries between the analytical and synthetic stages of the study of Nature.
Natural scientific revolutions
What is the natural science revolution? Typically there are three main features:
1) the collapse and rejection of ideas that previously dominated science;
2) rapid expansion of knowledge about nature, entry into new areas of nature that were previously inaccessible to knowledge; the creation of new tools and devices plays an important role here;
3) the natural science revolution is caused not by the discovery of new facts in itself, but by radically new theoretical consequences from them; in other words, a revolution is taking place in the sphere of theories, concepts, principles, laws of science, the formulations of which are being radically changed.
In order to cause a revolution in science, a new discovery must be of a fundamental, methodological nature, causing a radical change in the very method of research, approach and interpretation of natural phenomena.
Natural scientific revolutions have an important feature. New theories that received their justification during the natural science revolution do not refute the old ones if their validity was sufficiently substantiated. In these cases, the so-called compliance principle applies:
Old theories retain their significance as an extreme and, in a certain sense, special case of new, more general and accurate ones.
Thus, Newton’s classical mechanics is an extreme, special case of the theory of relativity, and the modern theory of evolution does not refute Darwin’s theory, but complements and develops it, etc.
The first global natural science revolution, which transformed astronomy, cosmology and physics, was the creation of a consistent doctrine of the geocentric system of the world.
The second global natural science revolution represented a transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism, and from it to polycentrism, i.e. the doctrine of the plurality of stellar worlds.
The third global natural science revolution meant a fundamental rejection of any centrism, a denial of the presence of any center in the Universe. This revolution is associated, first of all, with the advent of A. Einstein’s theory of relativity, i.e. relativistic (relative) theory of space, time and gravity.
The fourth global natural science revolution presupposes a certain synthesis of general relativity with quantum (discrete) ideas about the structure of matter into a unified physical theory, similar to the unified theory of all fundamental physical interactions already being created in our time: gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong. This revolution has not actually been realized yet. But many researchers believe that the time is not far when they will talk about it as a fait accompli.
Scientific picture of the world
The scientific picture of the world (SPW) includes the most important achievements of science that create a certain understanding of the world and man’s place in it. It does not include more specific information about the properties of various natural systems, or about the details of the cognitive process itself.
Unlike strict theories, the scientific picture of the world has the necessary clarity.
The scientific picture of the world is a special form of systematization of knowledge, mainly its qualitative generalization, ideological synthesis of various scientific theories.
In the history of science, scientific pictures of the world did not remain unchanged, but replaced each other, thus we can talk about evolution scientific pictures of the world. The most obvious evolution seems to be physical pictures of the world: natural philosophy - until the 16th - 17th centuries, mechanistic - until the second half of the 19th century, thermodynamic (within the framework of mechanistic theory) in the 19th century, relativistic and quantum mechanical in the 20th century. The figure schematically shows the development and change of scientific pictures of the world in physics.
Physical pictures of the World
There are general scientific pictures of the world and pictures of the world from the point of view of individual sciences, for example, physical, biological, etc.
Modern scientists clearly see enormous prospects for the further development of science and a radical change in human ideas about the world with their help. The natural laws of nature, as well as methods of its transformation and development, while they study man and the laws of his evolutionary development. Natural sciences study the structure of the objectively existing world and the nature of all its elements, appealing to experience as a criterion for the truth of knowledge.
Researchers consider science to be a rather young analytical phenomenon that has not yet comprehended all the secrets and universes.
The humanities, unlike the natural sciences, study the world created by man from the perspective of its cultural values and spiritual content, while relying on the meaning and significance of things. In addition, the humanities work with sign systems and the relationship of these systems to human reality.
Functions
Humanitarian and also differ in their functions. Thus, natural sciences tend to describe, explain and predict phenomena/properties of the material world, while the humanities strive to reveal and interpret one or another meaning of things. There are several interpretations of understanding - one of them, purely psychological, argues that initially the process of understanding is an act of getting used to the motives and goals of the author's intention.
For example, historical events are understood by revealing political, social, economic and cultural conditions, as well as specific actions.
Another interpretation is based on the idea of an event or work, the object of understanding of which is meaning, usually interpreted as invariant textual content in relation to options for its retelling or its representation using various sign systems. Otherwise, the boundaries between the humanities and natural sciences are quite arbitrary. At the present stage of development of scientific knowledge, they are characterized by mutual enrichment of scientific methodologies and criteria for assessing various scientific results.
At the theoretical level, individual sciences have a general theoretical and philosophical explanation of open laws and principles used to form the methodological and ideological aspects of scientific knowledge. An essential component of general scientific knowledge is the philosophical interpretation of scientific data, which constitutes the methodological and ideological foundations of the natural and human sciences.
To begin with, let us ask a question that, at first glance, has nothing to do with the formation of classical ethology, or generally with the topic of this book: how, in fact, do the humanities differ from the natural sciences?
Many copies have been broken around this issue and many opinions have been expressed - from the classic definition of the German philosopher and cultural historian Wilhelm Dilthey (who proposed to distinguish between the “natural sciences” - natural and the “spiritual sciences” - humanities) and to arrogant teasers: they say, the humanities - these are those that can be successfully studied by a person who is unable to complete a school mathematics course. A separate subject of debate is the classification of certain specific disciplines as natural or humanitarian.
Some passionately argue that modern psychology has long been a natural science, since it is all based on experiment and uses such complex instruments as magnetic resonance imaging.
Of course, such statements reflect only widespread stereotypes (generated not only by poor familiarity with the subject, but also by an underlying desire for self-affirmation). However, even more correct and competent judgments often cannot clarify the situation. For example, it is written on Wikipedia that “the humanities are disciplines that study man in the sphere of his spiritual, mental, moral, cultural and social activity.” It seems clear, but imagine, for example, a group of doctors and pharmacists studying the rehabilitation of people who have suffered a stroke. They ask their patients to read a written text, perform arithmetic operations, name the names of loved ones... This, of course, directly relates to the spiritual and mental spheres - but is this enough to recognize such research as humanitarian?
The division according to the methods used also does not add clarity. For example, the methods by which the young science of bioinformatics establishes family connections between species of bears or strains of a virus (who came from whom and in what sequence) are essentially no different from the methods by which medieval textualists establish genetic connections between different lists of the same thing. the same monument. Nobody seems to doubt that bioinformatics (including molecular phylogenetics) is a natural science, and even more so about the humanitarian nature of textual criticism.
Without pretending to be an exhaustive solution to this old and rather complicated issue, we will try to point out one difference that is often mentioned, but usually in passing, in the background, as an additional one. Thus, the same article on Wikipedia, in particular, says: “Unlike the natural sciences, where subject-object relations predominate, in the humanities we are talking about subject-subject relations.” A reader who is not too attentive will glance at this line and immediately forget it. And in vain. She points to the very essence.
The fact is that in the humanities, in the relationship between the subject of research and its object, there is always a certain “two-layer” - which never happens in the natural sciences.
No matter how complex and multi-linked the chain of interactions by which a natural scientist judges his object may be, there is no subject in it. The only subject of natural science research is the researcher himself. And in, say, a historical study, there are at least two of these subjects: a modern historian and the author of the source being studied. The latter is subject descriptions of historical reality and at the same time object modern research: after all, even if nothing is known about it, a modern scientist, willy-nilly, sees the events, processes and people of interest to him only through the medium of the ancient chronicler. And no matter how critically he treats it, no matter how he checks everything possible using independent methods (according to reports from other sources, according to archaeological data, etc.), such a view is radically different from the “unmediated” view of a natural scientist.
It follows from this, in particular, that what we call a “historical fact” is not a fact in the sense in which this word is used in natural science. For example, in some Tmutarakan chronicle it is written that in such and such a year Prince Vseposlav did such and such - for example, he made a campaign against a neighbor or was baptized. Events of this kind are usually called “historical fact.” But is this really a fact? No. The only fact here is that there is such a chronicle message. Anyone can, with some effort, see the original document, and if the skeptic has sufficient qualifications, then carry out the appropriate analyzes (parchment, ink, lettering, features of word usage, etc.) and make sure that this fragment was written at the same time as the whole the rest of the text, and the language of the document corresponds to the era of the reign of Vseposlav. But did the prince really complete his campaign? If so, did it happen that year and not another? Was this campaign as victorious as the chronicle tells us?
It is impossible to a priori consider everything that the chronicle says as facts - it may also be written there, for example, that during this campaign the prince turned into a gray wolf at night.
This means that we must correlate this with all available other data, with the laws of nature and common sense. This is how they treat not facts, but theories, hypotheses, and reconstructions.
If anyone believes that this is an exaggeration or an attempt to discredit the reliability of historical knowledge, let them at least look at the debate among modern historians about what in the chronicle story about the baptism of Prince Vladimir in Korsun can be considered a presentation of real events, and what can be considered literary and edifying additions. Or he will turn to the circumstances of the death of Tsarevich Dimitri: having two richly documented accounts of the events of May 1591 in Uglich, historians still cannot say anything definite about how the Tsarevich died, since both versions (“Godunovskaya” and “anti-Godunovskaya”) are absolutely implausible even to the most benevolent glance.
One should not think, however, that this effect is unique to historical science. Of course, in different sciences its size and forms can be very different. In linguistics, for example, it is almost invisible (which is what makes many people persistently want to exclude it from the humanities): an individual native speaker of a language can do almost nothing with it through a conscious effort. Some people have managed to introduce a new, previously non-existent word into the language, but no one has yet been able to arbitrarily endow the language with a new case or a new prepositional construction. Therefore, linguistics can treat language “over the head” of the second subject, almost like an object of natural science (although if you know what to look for, the influence of the “second subject” can be discerned there too). But psychology is doomed to remain a humanitarian science, despite the powerful arsenal of natural scientific methods and instruments, or the aspirations of outstanding psychologists and entire scientific schools. She cannot get away from the second subject, because he is, in fact, the subject of her study.
Note that the presence of a second subject allows the humanities to study objects that... simply do not exist. That is, they do not exist objectively - but they exist in people’s ideas and, as such, may well become an object of study.
One of the areas of folklore, for example, is devoted to the study of ideas about various kinds of supernatural creatures - goblins, brownies, water creatures, kikimoras, etc. Specialists in this field map the distribution zone of, say, Uros(have you heard of this type of evil spirit?) just as definitely as zoologists know the habitat of the snow leopard or the Indian rhinoceros. And literary scholars can even study a deliberate fiction, the fictitious nature of which is known not only to them, but also to the “second subject” himself - the author of the work being studied. And because of this, literary criticism does not cease to be a real, full-fledged science.
A few years ago, a scandal broke out in Britain when it became known that homeopathy was being taught in some provincial universities. After a sharp protest from scientific and medical organizations, some of these institutions abandoned the odious subject. And others... simply transferred it from the natural cycle (where this course was taught along with medical disciplines) to the humanities. In fact, whether homeopathic effects exist or not, this specific field of human activity itself - with its tradition, history, rules, theories, institutions, etc. - certainly exists, which means it can be studied. Humanitarian methods.
What does all this have to do with animal behavior?
The most direct. As already mentioned in the introductory chapter, a particular sequence of animal actions can only be called “behavior” when it carries some meaning- and specifically for the animal itself, that is, subjective. In other words, in behavioral science, just as in the humanities, there is always a second subject - the animal whose behavior we want to study. But at the same time, the researcher of animal behavior is deprived of the opportunity to apply the methods of the humanities to his object.
The fact is that all these methods are somehow related to the study signs, through which the “second subject” makes his inner world at least partially accessible to an external observer. And undoubtedly the main type of such signs, without which almost all others cannot exist, is word, articulate speech - sounded or recorded by one or another writing system. It is in the word that a historical document, a folk tale, a classical poem, and the experiences of the subject in psychological experience are expressed.
As we have already mentioned briefly, speaking about the formation of scientific psychology, all ingenious devices and methods turn out to be informative only when they can be correlated with the subjective world - and access to it is possible only through the word.
And even the birth of psychoanalysis, which discovered that in the inner world of a person there is a lot of things that he himself does not know about, changed nothing in this regard: slips of the tongue, free associations, the presentation of dreams, a story under hypnosis - all the material that allows a psychoanalyst to look into the realm of the unconscious, again embodied in the word.
But an animal behavior researcher does not have such opportunities. His “second subject” is fundamentally mute and speechless. And if one or another of his actions mean something (and without this they cannot be considered behavior) - how can one find out what exactly, without being able to resort to the mediation of words? Following the zoopsychology of the late 19th - first quarter of the 20th century, we have approached this problem more than once. Together with Romens, we tried to judge the inner world of animals by analogy with what lies behind similar human behavior - and we were convinced that nothing would work that way. Together with Watson, we decided to ignore this inner world, to study patterns of behavior without reference to it - and were forced to admit through Tolman’s lips that this was also impossible. The dilemma seemed fundamentally insoluble, like Zeno’s aporia about the barber or the production of alkahest - a liquid that dissolves absolutely all substances.