Human activity on the development and systematization of knowledge is called science, and can only be considered such in the case of carefully verified and substantiated knowledge.
This type of human activity is aimed at studying and comprehending various laws, including the law of being, which include the laws of thinking, society, nature. Science is a combination of disciplinary knowledge and a social institution.
Science begins with the study of facts, events, phenomena, their laws, fixing statements, verifiable.
Science involves the process of obtaining completely new knowledge about an object (phenomenon, event), and the systematization of this knowledge. Science also relies on a social institution and is a special area of culture that provides interconnection with other forms of social consciousness.
The tasks of any science, including the functions of political science, include focused activities in the production of completely new, thoroughly tested and based knowledge. The knowledge gained scientifically differs from everyday (or non-scientific forms of knowledge) precisely in the presence of specific methods, means and categories of knowledge.
Modern science, interacting with other areas of human life, performs certain functions. The social functions of science are as follows:
- the cultural and worldview social functions of science arose during the crisis of feudalism, and developed at the stage of the emergence of bourgeois relations, which later developed into capitalist ones. During this period of development of social relations, the function of science was found in the sphere of worldview, in the arena of the struggle between science and theology.
- in the Middle Ages, the social functions of science consisted in the formation of a direct productive force, when theology tried to gain a place of supreme authority, and in a barely emerging science there were problems of an “earthly”, private, nature.
- Science as a social force is increasingly being used to solve problems in various areas of society. For example, thanks to the discovery of Copernicus, science gained the right to a monopoly on the formation of a worldview, challenging it from theology. This is one of the brightest examples of how the social functions of science through its penetration into the sphere of human activity, showed the first signs of an infusion into the social field.
The social functions of science are constantly changing, historically developing in accordance with science itself. It is the development of social functions that represents one of the basic aspects of any science.
The subject "philosophy of science" is a fairly young discipline of philosophical knowledge, experiencing its rise at the present time due to the rapid development of scientific and technological progress.
The subject and functions of the philosophy of science are represented by different concepts. As a subject of philosophy, one can consider the general laws of human activity in the production of scientific knowledge. This process is being studied in its continuous historical development. The philosophy of science denotes fundamental problems of a different nature: technical, natural, socio-humanitarian and others, and also finds confirmation in philosophy.
For any science, the fact of ascertaining regularity is important, since the revealed regularity makes it possible to predict and explain phenomena in different spheres of life. Any science is characterized by a continuity from everyday knowledge to science, from common sense to criticism or rational thinking, since scientific thinking can arise only on the basis of assumptions built in accordance with common sense.