Contradiction and Rethinking of Natural and Humanitarian Approaches

Abstract

The article analyzes the situation of confrontation between two approaches - the natural and humanitarian and the ways of overcoming this confrontation. Both approaches are characterized and the historical circumstances in which they have appeared are reconstructed. The author singles out and analyzes the three solutions currently being discussed in the scientific literature. The first solution he calls the strategy of convergence of these approaches. The second decision is defined as a strategy to remove the confrontation between the natural-science and humanitarian approaches. It relies on the establishment that science is one. The third strategy is authoring. His studies of science and its origin have shown that when studying it, one should not immediately proceed from the fact that we know what science is, namely, it is natural science. The idea of science is gradually groping, being built as the analysis of different types of science. In addition, it was found that, on the one hand, these different types of Sciences (ancient, medieval, natural, technical, humanitarian, social, etc.) can distinguish the invariant core (a sort of "gene" of science), and on the other - that they as types differ structurally. The first strategy is estimated by the author as formal, not taking into account the opposite methodological settings of these approaches. He sees the disadvantage of the second in the fact that its followers did not reveal real differences in the natural and human sciences and ways of thinking. The third strategy is the most difficult, since it involves analysis of the formation and functioning of different types of sciences. But its implementation will allow us to interpret both approaches as organic and partly interrelated moments of scientific research and thinking. As part of this strategy the distinction of science and humanitarian approaches can be comprehended in the first place, the diversity of forms of conceptualization, which, indeed, were built in opposition to each other, and secondly, the difference in the nature of problems to be solved, researchers’ attitudes, characteristics of scientific thinking, areas of application of the acquired knowledge and schemes.