II. We have some a priori knowledge, and even ordinary reason can never get along without it. This is a sign by which we can confidently distinguish pure knowledge from empirical. Although we learn from experience that an object has certain

Reason (Entendement) Modest and hardworking reason, rejecting both the temptations of intuition and dialectics, and the temptations of the absolute, thereby defining its own means of knowledge. The faculty of understanding in its final and definite form; our specific (i.e. human)

1. Two types of thinking: rational and rational

It is quite clear that if philosophy is a general method of thinking, then it must investigate thinking, that is, it must be the science of thinking. But a considerable number of sciences are engaged in the study of thinking. Thinking is studied by psychology, and the physiology of higher nervous activity, and the pathology of thinking, and information theory, etc. The difference between philosophy and all other sciences dealing with problems of thinking lies in the fact that it explores thinking exclusively as a process of comprehending the truth. This kind of science of thinking is called logic.

In reality, there are two qualitatively different kinds of thinking. Plato laid the foundation for their distinction. Dividing cognition into sensory and intellectual, he singled out in thinking such two types of it as noesis and dianoia. Aristotle and subsequent ancient philosophers distinguished between nous and dianoia in thinking. In the Middle Ages and Modern times, these two types of thinking were gradually assigned the names "ratio" (ratio) and "intellect" (intellectus). In Russian philosophical literature, these two types of thinking began to be designated as reason and reason, rational thinking and rational thinking. However, this distinction was not overly strict. Very often the concepts of intellect (mind) and ratio (reason) were used as equivalent to each other and to the concept of thinking in general.

Such Western European philosophers as Severin Boethius, John Scotus Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Jacobi, Friedrich Schelling distinguished between reason (intelligence) and reason (rationo), although not all of them used these terms and not always invested in them the same content. I. Kant even spoke about the existence of another logic, apart from formal logic, which he called transcendental. But the meaning of the division of thinking into rational and rational was first more or less deeply revealed only by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Thinking is a purposeful volitional activity of a person. But it is not only subjective human activity. Thinking is at the same time an objective process that develops according to objective laws. This was not noticed for a long time, because this objective process was clothed in the form of subjective activity. The discovery of thinking as an objective process came very late. And it was done by G. W. F. Hegel.

It was as a result of the research of the latter that it became clear that if under reason, rational thinking in most cases thinking was understood as a subjective activity of a person, then under reason, rational thinking - thinking as an objective process. Thus, there are two inextricably linked types of thinking: thinking as a subjective human activity, subject to certain norms, rules - rational thinking, or simply mind, and thinking as an objective process proceeding according to objective laws - rational thinking, or simply intelligence. Accordingly, there are two different sciences of thinking - two different logics.

One of them is the science of rational thinking. The latter was first studied in detail by Aristotle, who created the science of it, called formal logic. This science considers thinking only as a subjective human activity and reveals the rules that this activity must obey in order for the result to be the comprehension of truth. Formal logic does not study the truth itself. It is not a theory of knowledge, epistemology. Therefore, having originated in the depths of philosophy, formal logic subsequently fell out of it and became a completely independent science.

Another logic is the science of rational thinking, which is both a theory of knowledge, an ontology and the most general method of knowing the world. This logic is philosophy, coincides with philosophy. The discovery by G. W. F. Hegel of thinking as an objective process led to the transformation of philosophy. It has risen to a new, higher level of development, has acquired a new form. Only from that moment on did philosophy become the science of thinking as an objective process, it became logic, but one that was fundamentally different from formal logic, was logic not formal, but substantive, dialectical.

The forms of rational thinking are the concept, judgment, conclusion. The concept as a form is also inherent in content logic. But rational concepts (intellectuals) are essentially different from rational concepts (rationals). If rational concepts can only be connected and separated, then rational concepts develop, move, pass into each other, mutually transform. As for judgments and inferences, they are not forms of reasonable thinking. The latter does without them. But on the other hand, rational thinking has its own forms, which are the idea, intuition, unitarization (holization and essentialization), version, holia, hypothesis and theory. An important category of the logic of reasonable thinking (but not the form of this thinking) is the concept of a fact.

The "basic cell of thinking" and thus the original category of formal logic is still being debated. Some consider such a concept, others - a judgment. Dialectical logic does not concern itself with judgments. But considering the process of cognition of the world, it does not begin at all with a concept. Its original category is fact(from lat. factum- done). The concept of fact came to philosophy from science and for a long time was not considered as a category of epistemology, and thus philosophy.

The genealogy of the concept of fact noted above led to the fact that many people understood facts as facts of science only. The word "fact" was often understood as a synonym for the phrase "scientific fact". Some philosophers have gone even further. “A scientific fact,” N. F. Ovchinnikov argued, for example, “is a fundamental element of scientific knowledge, since it is included in a certain theoretical system. Outside the theoretical system, we can deal with sense data, but not with scientific facts. In this case, it turns out that scientific facts arise only with the appearance of a theory, but not before, that the theory is primary, and the facts are secondary, derived from it. The error of this point of view is more than obvious. One cannot agree either with this kind of interpretation of scientific facts, or with the narrowing of the concept of a fact to the concept of a scientific fact.

In addition to scientific facts, there are undoubtedly facts of everyday life that can conditionally be called worldly. Of course, there is a certain difference between scientific and everyday facts, but both are within the same general quality.

Finding out what should be understood as a fact was dealt with by specialists in the field of both specific sciences and philosophy. But there was no single point of view on this issue, and no. Without going into the details of the discussion, I will note only the main points of view. One of them is that a fact is a phenomenon of reality. The second is that the fact is an image of reality. The third distinguishes between two types of facts: facts that exist in reality, and facts - images of this reality. Fourth: a fact is a judgment, a statement, a sentence containing certain correct information.

Despite all the differences, there is something in common in the understanding of the fact by almost all scientists (but not necessarily philosophers). The fact, as it is conceived by all genuine researchers, has two seemingly incompatible features. The first is its objectivity. A fact, taken by itself, does not depend on the consciousness of man and mankind. This found its clear expression in the well-known statement of the English publicist of the 17th century. Y. Badjella: "Fact is a terribly stubborn thing". The stubbornness of a fact means its objectivity, its independence from the desire and will of people. The second feature of a fact is that it exists in the mind of a person. It is in the human mind that facts are "stored", "accumulated", "grouped", "interpreted", and sometimes "rigged" or even "fabricated".

All this taken together helps to understand the nature of the fact. A fact is a moment of reality torn out of it and transplanted into consciousness, more precisely, into human thinking. In other words, a fact is a kind of things for us, things that exist in our minds. In consciousness, a fact exists as the content of a true, that is, corresponding to reality, judgment (or several judgments). But he himself is by no means a judgment. In consciousness, this moment of reality, which is always something whole, being torn out of reality, appears as one of its fragments. Thus, a fact is neither an image of the external world in general, nor a form of thought in particular, nor a phenomenon of reality in itself.

There are no facts in the objective world by themselves. But in this world there are objective moments, which, being transplanted into consciousness, become facts. These objective equivalents of facts, these things in themselves, I will call equifacts (from lat. aequus-equal).

As has already been pointed out, much has been written about the facts, both true and false. But there were also such works that cannot be called otherwise than absurd. Among them is, for example, the article by V. S. Chernyak "Fact in the system of scientific knowledge" (1975). “Scientific facts,” states the author, “can be both true and false. Facts are erroneous when they do not correspond to observed phenomena ... ”But the concept of truth and falsity applies only to certain forms of thought, in particular to judgments. A fact is not a form of thought, but the objective content of thought. Therefore, it cannot be characterized as either true or false. It can only be objective and nothing else.

Along with facts, there can and do exist conscious or unconscious fictions that pass off as facts. Fictional were, for example, the transformation of wheat into rye and vice versa (D. T. Lysenko and his followers), viruses into bacteria and vice versa (G. M. Boshyan), the emergence of cells from structureless living matter (O. B. Lepeshinskaya), etc. All this is often called fictitious or false facts.

Fictions of this kind, which were presented as facts, of course, can be called false facts, or, in short, false facts, but it must always be taken into account that in reality they are not any facts and certainly cannot be. A false fact is not a kind of fact, but its direct opposite.

“In the minds of some bourgeois scientists,” adds V. S. Chernyak, “there is a prejudice that a fact is something irrefutable by any further development of knowledge. This point of view has become widespread, in particular, in logical positivism. However, such an absolutization of a fact, its transformation into an absolutely true component of scientific knowledge, has nothing in common with the real process of development of scientific knowledge.

There is nothing original in this statement, except, perhaps, the author's desire to present the view of the inviolability of the fact as bourgeois, and, consequently, the opposite - as anti-bourgeois. In fact, the point of view propagated by him has long been defended by Western philosophers. “So,” wrote M. Mulkay, “we have come to a conclusion that refutes the two main premises of the standard concept; that is, our conclusion is that the factual statements of science are neither independent of theory nor stable in their meanings. At the same time, M. Mulkey refers to the works of Western philosophers that were published long before the article by V. S. Chernyak.

It is a pity to waste time and space on refuting this, in my opinion, notorious nonsense. Therefore, I will limit myself to citing the statement of the outstanding Russian scientist V. I. Vernadsky. Touching upon the history of the development of mineralogy from antiquity to the present day, he wrote: “Steadily all these centuries, work has been going on, often extremely slowly collecting scientific facts, which, in the end, are the unshakable basis of any exact knowledge. They, and not a theory that captures the thought of a person, in the end build science. A precisely established fact in essence always gives more than its explanatory theory based on it. It is true for the future theory and in the historical change of theories it remains unchanged ... Many of our most modern scientific theories are based, in their basis, on ancient observations ... These and many other precisely scientifically established facts are unshakable and only more accurate and complete come to light with the growth of scientific knowledge. Any real scientist would agree with this kind of view of the facts.

3. Acquisition of worldly and scientific facts. Two ways of obtaining scientific facts: observation andexperiment

There are different ways of getting, finding, acquiring facts. Scientists, as a rule, specifically look for facts, extract them. Scientific facts are sought, obtained, mined, established, extracted. But by no means are they created. Of course, there are people, even among scientists, who present the products of their imagination as facts. Some of them are victims of self-deception (for example, the French physicist R. P. Blondlo, who “discovered” N-rays in 1901), others are conscious scammers (for example, the former Soviet intelligence officer V. B. Rezun who fled to the West). People who "fabricated" facts were always called falsifiers. The situation changed in the second half of the 20th century, when philosophers appeared who declared that facts are not discovered by scientists, but are created, fabricated by them. This view is defended, for example, by the postpositivists T. Kuhn, P. Feyerabend and practically all philosophizing postmodernists. Paraphilosophers (from the Greek. pArA- about, near) and pseudo-philosophers urgently needed pseudo-science.

Everyday facts, unlike scientific ones, are usually acquired in the course of people's daily practical activities. This by no means means that a special search for everyday facts is completely ruled out. There are situations in life when people begin to specifically look for and collect facts. But in general, if the process of acquiring scientific facts is always, with few exceptions, an active purposeful character, then the acquisition of everyday facts in most cases occurs spontaneously. People find facts, although they are not specifically searched for.

Since scientists are specifically looking for facts, various kinds of methods and techniques for obtaining facts have been developed in science. The first one is observation. Observation in science is not "gazing", but a systematic activity aimed not at ensuring the success of certain specific human affairs, but at obtaining knowledge and only knowledge. One could talk endlessly about observation as a way of obtaining facts, because many works are devoted to this topic, but I think that this is enough. Even more works have been written about such a method of obtaining facts as an experiment. And here I will limit myself to a minimum of information. If observation is a kind of obtaining facts in which a person does not interfere in the flow of objective natural or social processes, then experiment presupposes such interference. The experimenter purposefully reproduces one or another objective, most often natural, process and observes its course. An experiment always includes observation as its necessary moment.

When it comes to scientific knowledge, all textbooks on philosophy necessarily describe observation and experiment in more or less detail. This, of course, is good. But the bad thing is that the story about the methods of obtaining facts is always limited to describing exclusively observation and experiment, and almost always on the example of natural science alone. It is almost never indicated that peculiar forms of observation are used to obtain facts in the social sciences, in particular in ethnology (ethnography).

And never in the general works on epistemology is it said about the methods of obtaining facts in the sciences, in which, in principle, neither observations nor experiments are possible. Among them, first of all, is historical science (historiology). The latter explores the past. And this is such an object of knowledge, which by the time of research in objective reality no longer exists. It is impossible to observe the past, let alone experiment with it. Nevertheless, historians are extracting facts about this currently non-existent object. And since the methods of obtaining facts by historians are little known outside of this science, it makes sense to dwell on them specifically.

4. Criticism of sources as a way of revealing facts in historical science

Historians, in studying the past, rely on what are called historical sources, or, in short, simply sources. There are many types of sources, the main of which are written (documents) and material sources, primarily archaeological, for example, the ruins of temples, palaces, tools, weapons, household utensils, etc.

Historiology arose as a science about the history of a class (civilized) society, and therefore written sources - documents - have always been considered the main ones in it. Almost all (if not all) historians in the past believed, and many still continue to believe, that the concept of history completely coincides with the concept of written history. “History,” he wrote at the beginning of the 20th century. famous German Assyriologist G. Winkler, - we call the development of mankind, which is attested written documents, which has been handed over to us word and writing. Everything that lies before this belongs to the prehistoric era. History, therefore, begins when written sources become known to us. In Western science, neither the history of primitiveness nor the science of it, as a rule, is ever called history. Other names are in use: prehistory, prehistory, prehistory, protohistory, etc.

And the special attention of historians to documents is quite understandable. No matter how many sources there are, written sources are of paramount importance for the reconstruction of the history of a class (civilized) society. We now, for example, know very well that since the XXIII century. by the 18th century BC e. in the Indus River basin there was a class society - the civilization of Harappa, or Indus. But Indian writing still remains undeciphered. Therefore, we can only guess about the social structure of this civilized society. We do not know whether the Indus civilization was a system of concrete class societies (sociohistorical organisms) like the city-states of Sumer, or one large unified sociohistorical organism like the Early Kingdom of Egypt. We know nothing about any of the rulers of this or these societies, about the events that took place there during the five centuries of the existence of this civilization.

Sources always carry information about the past, but it is imprisoned and hidden in them. The facts contained in them still need to be extracted, which is very, very difficult. Historians have developed different ways of extracting facts from sources. Since historians have always attached paramount importance to documents, the methods of extracting facts from written sources have been developed in the most detailed way. All of them, taken together, are traditionally referred to as source criticism. There are many guides to source criticism. The best of them, undoubtedly, is the book by the great French historians C. V. Langlois and C. Segnobos "Introduction to the Study of History" (1898), which is still very popular both in the West and in our country. I will take it as a basis.

When one or another historical document is at the disposal of specialists, an activity begins that is called external, or preparatory, criticism of sources. There are two types: (1) restorative criticism and (2) origin criticism.

Documents relating to more or less distant times are rarely originals. Most often, copies fall into the hands of historians, and not taken directly from the originals, but from earlier copies. During correspondence, various kinds of distortions creep into the documents. The purpose of restorative criticism is to purify and restore the original original text.

Criticism of origin aims to identify the author, time and place of creation of the document, as well as to find out what documents the author himself used. As a result of such criticism, it becomes clear whether this document is genuine or whether it represents a later falsification.

After the completion of the external (preparatory) criticism of the document, the internal criticism of the source begins. It is subdivided into (1) positive and (2) negative. Positive criticism is also called interpretation criticism or hermeneutics. Interpretation, in turn, is subdivided into (1) interpretation of the literal meaning and (2) interpretation of the actual meaning.

The interpretation of the literal meaning is the task of philology, which acts here as one of the auxiliary historical sciences. But revealing the literal meaning of the source text does not necessarily represent the revealing of the actual thought of the author. The latter could use some expressions in a figurative sense, resort to allegories, jokes, hoaxes. When the true meaning of the text is established, positive criticism ends.

Positive criticism, or criticism of interpretation, deals exclusively with the internal mental work of the author of a historical document and acquaints only with his thoughts, but not with historical facts. One of the gross mistakes that even some historians, not to mention people who are not engaged in science, make is to identify the proof of the authenticity of a document and reveal its real meaning with the establishment of historical truth. When the authenticity of the document is revealed and its text is correctly interpreted, many people have the illusion that we now know how everything really happened. The authenticity of a document is seen as a guarantee of the correctness of the evidence of its author. But this is true only of ideas. If this or that idea is expressed in the document, then this means that it really existed. No further criticism is needed here.

Everything else is much more difficult. Evidence about certain external phenomena of social life, contained in an unconditionally authentic document, can be both true and false. The author of the document could be mistaken, or could deliberately mislead. Facts other than those relating to the author's spiritual life cannot simply be borrowed from the document. They need to be taken out of there. This is the task of negative internal criticism of the source. It breaks down into (1) a critique of credibility, which is to find out if the author of the document intentionally lied, and (2) a critique of accuracy, which is to determine if he was wrong.

According to C. V. Langlois and C. Segnobos, the starting point of internal criticism of historical documents should be methodical distrust. “The historian must,” they write, “a priori distrust every testimony of the author of a document, since he is never sure in advance that it will not turn out to be false or erroneous. It represents only a probability for him... The historian should not wait until the contradictions between the testimonies of various documents lead him to doubt, he himself must begin with doubt.

The document can be both false and true. Therefore, the document must be analyzed in order to highlight all the independent evidence included in it. Then each of them is examined separately. This process is extremely complex. There are many methods of establishing the reliability and accuracy of evidence.

One of the most important is the answer to the question of whether the author of the document himself observed what he testifies (reports), or proceeded from the testimony of another person. And if it turns out that he relied on someone else's evidence, then again the question arises about the source of the latter: was it his own observation or, again, the testimony of another person. This question may come up again and again, leading further and further away from the author of the document. As a rule, in almost every document, most of the testimony does not come directly from its author, but is a reproduction of the testimony of others.

This type of internal criticism is called negative criticism, because it can absolutely establish only the falsity of this or that evidence. This criticism is not able to prove with certainty the truth of any evidence whatsoever. It can establish only the probability of the truth of this or that evidence, but not its reliability.

To establish the reliability of a fact, it is necessary to resort to a comparison of evidence about it. “The ability to prove a historical fact,” write C. V. Langlois and C. Segnobos, “depends on the number of surviving documents independent of each other regarding this fact; whether or not the necessary documents have been preserved depends entirely on the case, and this explains the role of the case in the compilation of history. The most important method of establishing the reliability of historical facts is to identify agreement between them, which means the transition from the actual criticism of sources and the identification of historical facts to their unification (interpretation).

It is easiest to establish the reliability of general facts, the presence in certain societies of certain customs, institutions, etc. other events. But at least some isolated facts can also be established with certainty.

5. Primary processing of facts - their transformation from single to general

In the natural sciences, both during the collection of facts and afterwards, the process of their primary processing inevitably takes place. Its essence lies in the generalization of facts, in their transformation from singular to general. This process was discovered in an era when only one logic was known - formal, and was interpreted as the activity of reason. It was called induction, and the doctrine of it was included in formal logic under the name of inductive logic. In reality, however, this process is an activity not so much of reason as of reason. Therefore, no matter how hard the formal logicians tried to express it in the categories of their science, to interpret it as deriving some judgments from others, as a special kind of inference, only not deductive, but inductive, and to fit it under the laws (in fact, under the rules) of their science, they did little.

Attempts to express this process exclusively in terms of such concepts as "concepts", "judgments" and "inferences" not only did not make it possible to reveal its essence, but, on the contrary, prevented it. For an adequate expression of this process, other concepts were needed: the concept of a single fact, the concept of a general fact, and the concept of ascent from a single (separate) to a general one.

The processing of individual facts also took place in the social sciences, in particular in political economy. The situation in historical science was peculiar. Whereas in the natural sciences, individual facts already obtained after ascending from them to general facts ceased to be taken into account practically right up to the creation of a theory, then historiology has always continued to use individual facts. And in historical science there was a process of ascent from the individual to the general, but, as a rule, it was never brought to an end. The facts that were obtained as a result of processing individual facts were not universal. They have always been limited by certain spatial and temporal limits, they did not refer to society in general and history in general, but to certain societies that existed in certain historical epochs. This kind of general facts can be called particular general, or general particular.

6. The problem of understanding and explanation in philosophy and science

However, no science could be limited only to the collection and primary processing of facts. It was clear to scientists from the very beginning that knowledge of even a huge set of individual or even general facts relating to the object under study, taken in itself, is not true knowledge about this object. Knowing the facts is not enough, it is necessary to understand them. The concept of understanding is inextricably linked with the concept of explanation. To understand facts means to give them one explanation or another. Scientists have long used the concepts of understanding and explanation, without trying to develop them, or even to define them in any way. But at the same time, they always proceeded from the fact that understanding (explanation) is not something different from cognition, it represents some moment, component, some form, side or stage of cognition.

A different position was taken by philosophers, or rather, a certain part of them. As already noted, the concept of fact entered philosophy rather late. For a long time, it was not at all considered among the categories of the theory of knowledge. Even later, philosophers finally realized that facts need not only be known, but also understood. But when it happened, the real excitement began. Understanding has been declared by some philosophers to be something quite different from cognition. There were calls to create a special theory of understanding, different from the theory of knowledge.

When philosophers faced the problem of understanding, they began to turn to specific sciences in search of its solution. Among them, they first of all turned to hermeneutics, which had long been considered a field of knowledge specifically concerned with the development of problems of understanding.

To date, two qualitatively distinct varieties of hermeneutics have finally taken shape. One of these hermeneutics has already been discussed above. This is a special specific scientific discipline, according to some, coinciding with philology, according to others - representing one of its sections. As we have already seen, it, among other things, has been used and is used in historiology in external criticism of written sources. The second is hermeneutics as a moment, side, section or even direction in philosophy. It is commonly referred to as philosophical hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics in no way could help epistemology in any way, because the words "understanding", "interpretation" had a completely different meaning in it than in scientists who worked with facts. Scientific hermeneutics was concerned with understanding and interpreting not facts, but texts. To interpret the text meant nothing more than to reveal its meaning, that is, the thoughts contained in it. And nothing more.

Philosophical hermeneutics has always claimed more. These claims followed two main lines. After all, if we proceed from the fact that the course of history is determined by the ideas of people, then hermeneutics, revealing through the interpretation of texts the ideas that guided the figures of the past, thus provides the key to understanding history. This is first. Secondly, the essence of hermeneutics is to reveal the meaning, and not only written texts have meaning, but also human actions. These actions can be understood as signs, and their sequence - as a text. Social facts are the actions of people. By revealing the meaning of human actions, hermeneutics thereby opens the way to understanding social facts and, therefore, acts as a science that provides an understanding of society and its history.

But if one can still talk about the meaning of human actions, and thus, if not all, then at least some of the social facts, then this is absolutely inapplicable to natural facts. There is no meaning in nature. No thoughts are hidden behind natural facts and do not appear in them. When some natural scientists speak of the meaning of natural phenomena, they do not mean the meaning in the exact meaning of the word, that is, not thoughts, but the objective essence of these phenomena, which can only be expressed in thoughts.

Thus, the words "understanding", "interpretation" (interpretation), when applied to facts, primarily natural ones, have a completely different meaning than when applied to texts. And scientists, without specially engaged in the theoretical development of the meaning of these words in their application to specific sciences (excluding, of course, scientific hermeneutics), though not fully, not explicitly, but still understood their meaning.

Having understood one of the meanings of the word "understanding", namely the one that it has in scientific hermeneutics, we need to turn to the identification of its other meaning, namely the one in which it is used in all other sciences, when one speaks of understanding as natural, as well as social facts.

7. Unification (unitization) of facts. Idea. Intuition. Two types of fact unitarization: essentialization and holization

When revealing the essence of the facts, such a feature of them as objectivity was especially emphasized above. Facts are undeniably objective. At the same time, they are also subjective. And this subjectivity of facts does not at all consist in the fact that they exist in judgments as the content of the latter. It has already been noted above that a fact is a moment of reality torn out of it and transplanted into human thinking. Thus, the establishment of a fact is the extraction of a moment of reality from reality itself. Reasonable knowledge of the world at first inevitably involves its fragmentation into many fragments. It is in this isolation of facts from each other that their subjectivity lies. Indeed, in objective reality, all those moments of it that entered consciousness as facts exist in an inextricable connection with each other. And in consciousness they are separated, cut off from each other.

Figuratively speaking, the facts, taken by themselves, isolated from each other, are fragments, fragments of the world. And no, even the largest, pile of these fragments, no largest collection of facts can give a holistic knowledge of reality. If we disassemble, say, a house, then it will not exist after that, even if at the same time we completely preserve every single material element (logs, boards, window frames, glass, etc.) from which it was built.

That is why all scientists, insisting on the great importance of facts as the foundation on which alone the edifice of scientific knowledge can be erected, at the same time endlessly talked about the fact that facts, taken in isolation from each other, are worthless. And they, as a rule, indicated what to do to overcome the subjectivity of the facts. They need to be connected with each other, they need to be united.

“A simple fact or thousands of facts, without mutual connection,” wrote the greatest chemist of the 19th century. Yu. Liebig, - do not have the force of evidence. “A simple statement of facts,” said the great French physiologist C. Bernard, “can never constitute a science. In vain would we multiply facts and observations; nothing would come of it. In order to acquire knowledge, it is necessary to reason about what has been observed, to compare facts and judge them by means of other facts.

“Individual facts,” said the famous Russian chemist A. M. Butlerov, “appear here, like a word on a whole page, like a certain shadow in a picture. Taken on their own, they can be of very limited value. Just as speech is made up of a series of words, and certain images are made up of a set of shadows, so knowledge in its sublime, best sense is born from a mass of comprehended facts, consisting in connection with each other ... Only then does true human knowledge begin, science arises. “Bare facts,” pointed out the outstanding German biologist E. Haeckel, “serve only as raw material from which no science can be built without reasonable comparison and philosophical connection.” “Shouldn't we be content with pure experience alone? - asked the remarkable French mathematician and physicist A. Poincaré and immediately answered: - No, this is impossible: such a desire would indicate a complete ignorance of the true nature of science. The scientist must systematize; science is built from facts, like a house from bricks; but a mere collection of facts is as little a science as a heap of stones is a house.

“In the field of social phenomena,” wrote a specialist in the field of not natural, but social sciences V. I. Lenin, “there is no method more common and more untenable than snatching individual facts, a game of examples ... Facts, if you take them into their in general, in their connections not only “stubborn”, but also unconditionally evidential thing. Facts, if they are taken out of the whole, out of connection, if they are fragmentary and arbitrary, are just a toy or something even worse ... The conclusion from this is clear: it is necessary to establish such a foundation of exact and indisputable facts on which one could rely with which one could compare any of those "general" or "exemplary" reasonings that are so immensely abused in some countries today. For this to be a real foundation, it is necessary to take not individual facts, but the whole set facts pertaining to the matter at hand, without unified exceptions, because otherwise there will inevitably arise a suspicion, and a completely legitimate suspicion, that the facts are chosen or chosen arbitrarily, that instead of an objective connection and interdependence of historical phenomena as a whole, a “subjective” concoction is presented to justify, perhaps, a dirty deed.

Thus, the only way to overcome the subjectivity of facts is to link them together, and to link them in the way that equifacts are connected in the very reality. And this presupposes the knowledge of the connections that exist in reality. Only by knowing the real connections between equifacts, it is possible to build a world in consciousness from a pile of fragments of the world as it exists outside of consciousness, to recreate the real world in all its integrity.

Having received the facts at their disposal, people begin to order them in one way or another: they classify, generalize, arrange them in time and space. But all this is not yet the unification of facts, but only the creation of conditions for it. The unification begins when deeper than spatial and temporal relations between the moments of reality are revealed, and each fact appears not in isolation, but in connection with a number of other similar fragments.

It is this linking of facts with each other, their unification, that is what is usually called the interpretation (interpretation) of facts. The result of this process is an understanding of the facts. This understanding is manifested in the explanation of the facts. Linking, combining facts could be called unitarization (fr. unitare from lat. unitas- unity).

Unitarization always begins with the advent of an idea. The idea is the simplest unit of interpretation, the elementary mental form in which understanding can manifest itself, and thus the starting point of unitarization. Every true idea arises on the basis of facts, but it itself is never derived directly from them according to the laws of formal logic. It arises as a result of intuition, which plays a role in the logic of rational thinking, similar to the role of inference in the logic of rational thinking. Having arisen, the idea can subsequently be developed and turned into a system of ideas.

Unitarization of facts occurs in different ways depending on which facts are connected, combined, interpreted. As already mentioned, there are two main types of facts: single facts and general facts. Accordingly, there are two main types of fact unitarization: unitarization of single facts and unitarization of general facts.

The first and simpler kind of unitarization is the union of single facts. It lies in the fact that individual facts, through the medium of an idea, are combined in such a way that they become parts of a single whole. It is quite clear that a certain set of individual facts can be combined only if the equifacts corresponding to them in reality are really parts of a single whole. The concepts of the whole and the parts are often concretized in the concepts of "system", "structure", "elements" ... A system always consists of a more or less definite number of elements linked together by a certain structure. It is the structure that makes certain moments of reality parts of a single whole, elements of a single system. Combining individual facts with necessity presupposes the identification of a real structure, a real framework of a really existing holistic formation. The idea, in order to unite single facts, should be a reflection of the structure of the real whole, the structural links connecting the elements of the real system.

If we figuratively call individual facts fragments, fragments of the world, then this kind of unitarization can be characterized as the "gluing" of these fragments into a single whole. The role of "glue" in this case is played by the idea. The extraction of facts can, for example, be compared with breaking a porcelain vase into small fragments, and the unitarization described above can be compared with gluing them together, as a result of which the vase appears to us as it originally existed. At the same time, the movement of thought proceeds from the parts to the whole. The result is a mental construction, in which the extracted single facts, united by means of an idea, enter as its necessary parts. In my work “Work of Sh.-V. Langlois and C. Segnobos “Introduction to the Study of History” and Modern Historical Science” (2004) she was named idea factual picture, or, in short, ideafactual .

Strange as it may seem, the thought process discussed above had never been subjected to theoretical analysis before my work mentioned above and still has no name either in philosophy or in science. I will call this kind of unitarization holization (from the Greek. holos- integer). According to the result of holization - the created integral picture, the parts of which are single facts - in addition to the name of the idea-factual picture, it is possible to assign a shorter one - holiya. Accordingly, an idea that connects single facts can be called a holistic idea. Representing a reflection of integrity, the holic idea makes it possible to give a picture of the whole, reproduce, recreate the whole. Cholia, or an idea-factual picture, is an integral mental system, into which single facts enter as its elements. A preliminary draft of a cholia is usually called a version.

The described type of unitarization has never been used and could not be used in the natural sciences. In natural science, isolated facts obtained immediately or somewhat later, but always generalized. From individual facts, the thought of the natural scientist in all cases, without exception, moves to general facts. For the natural sciences, only general facts matter.

But even general facts, taken by themselves, are only fragments of the world. And the most complete sum of general facts is not capable of giving a picture of the world. They definitely need to be combined. But in the case of general facts, holization is impossible. The only possible way here is to discover the essence of phenomena represented in thinking by facts, to reveal the laws that determine the dynamics of these phenomena. Only knowledge of the essence, laws makes it possible to unite the general, and thus the individual facts behind them. This type of unitarization can be called essentialization (from lat. essence- essence). Essentialization begins with the creation of an idea, which is a sketch of an entity - an essential idea. Then the essential idea is developed, and first a hypothesis is created, which is either rejected or becomes a theory, which is no longer a sketch, but a picture of essence. Therefore, this process could be called theorizing.

In this case, unification means not recreating the whole from parts, but revealing the commonality between all these phenomena, which consists in the fact that they are all subject to the action of the same law or the same laws. Here the thought moves not from the part to the whole, as in holization, but from one level of the general to its deeper level. Therefore, if cholia includes as its components the facts that it combines, then the theory does not include any facts. It is purely a system of ideas.

Essentialization, or theorization, is a higher form of unitarization than holization. It occurs rather late, in contrast to holization, which has always existed in various forms. A theory can be scientific and only scientific (science is also understood as the science of philosophy), but cholia can be and most often is not scientific, but everyday.

Unlike holization, the process of essentialization, the creation of a theory, has long been noticed and more or less studied in detail. There is a huge amount of literature about him. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be explored further. In philosophical literature, especially in the writings of representatives of analytical philosophy, theory is most often misunderstood. It is interpreted as a statement (judgment, sentence), a sum or, at best, a system of statements. In reality, a theory never consists of propositions. It is a system of ideas and concepts that finds its expression in the text. It is important to distinguish between theory and theory.

See, for example: Strogovich, M. S. Logic. - M., 1949. - S. 74 et seq.; Alekseev, M. N. Dialectics of forms of thinking. - M., 1959. - S. 276-278 and others.

See, for example: Asmus, VF Logic. - M., 1947. - S. 27-31; Klaus, G. Introduction to formal logic. - M., 1960. - S. 59-60; Kopnin, P.V. Dialectics as logic. - Kyiv, 1961. - S. 228-233 and others.

Systematization and communications

Is there any special parallel individual thinking in the subject of the utterance, in addition to figurative and verbal (thinking that is not reduced to figurative and verbal)?

: "(to Bulat Gatiyatullin) The problem may be that you identify thinking with its reduced projection in the form of a verbalized text? I don't know... with verbalization, then everything is clear. Most likely, you really do not distinguish between thinking (reasonable in the Hegelian sense), as something immediate, indefinite, preceding verbalization, and thinking (rational), as a stream of connected internal text that can easily be transferred to paper. a common position - they even say: “a person thinks in words". But Sophocles does not think like that, and many others (you can find a bunch of quotes from philosophers and scientists about how thoughts come to them). Although maybe you think in words - I don't know. So, if you think not in words, then the process of fixing thoughts in words is appropriate to call "reduction". "Reduced projection" is a type of reflection of thought on the plane of formal logic with an unconditional loss of the original content (like any projection)."

(recent exchange of remarks on the net: "You really have a hard time with logic ... - :) With what kind of formal, dialectical logic?"). Why necessarily on the plane of formal logic? There is also dialectical logic. It is also "verbalized", as you put it. In fact, what you are proposing is no longer a reduction, but a primitivization. And than, "unconditional loss of original content"(What is that phrase)? With primitivization, I agree, the content is lost. What about reduction? What then is the point of projection if the content is lost? On the contrary, any projection highlights a certain content that is not visible (badly viewed) from a different position.

About reasonable (in the Hegelian sense) thinking too "phrase twirled" in your discussion. That it is allegedly indefinite and precedes the rational as such. I shook all Hegel's texts specially at this angle - and did not find a hint of your interpretation. Maybe I missed some text? On the contrary, Hegel clearly indicates that the mind accepts the definitions given by the mind as the initial one. They are subjected to intellectual processing, generating universal. In the universal, reason "comprehends the particular." All this is expressed in the well-known principle of ascent from the abstract to the concrete. That is, not to the syncretism of myth and mysticism, but to structured concrete directed reason and speculative philosophical thinking in Hegel.