The problem of the cognizability of the world is one of the key in epistemology. Without its solution, it is impossible to determine the nature of cognition and its scope, nor the laws or trends of human mental activity. In conjunction with it, the question usually arises of what is the relation of the accumulated information to reality and what are the criteria for their reliability. Thus, one of the main questions that philosophers have been facing for several millennia is how reality really reflects our knowledge, and whether our consciousness is able to give an adequate picture of our environment.
Of course, the problem of the cognizability of the world in philosophy has not received a complete and unambiguous solution. For example, agnosticism categorically (or, at least in a certain sense) denies that we can reliably comprehend the essence of the processes occurring in nature and ourselves. This does not mean that this philosophical concept rejects knowledge in principle. For example, such an outstanding thinker as Immanuel Kant devoted a lot of work to this problem and, in the end, came to the conclusion that we can only understand phenomena, and nothing more. The essence of things remains inaccessible to us. Continuing his ideas, another philosopher, Hume, suggested that we were not even talking about phenomena, but about our own sensations, since nothing else was given to us to comprehend.
Thus, the problems of the cognizability of the world among agnostics can thus be reduced to the assertion that we observe and have from experience only a certain appearance, and the essence of reality is hidden from us. It should be said that no one has refuted this thesis finally. Back in the 18th century, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant raised the question of what we can know in general and how, and since then it has remained almost as relevant as it was then. Of course, we can blame the agnostics for reducing the entire amount of our knowledge to purely mental activity, which does not so much analyze the environment as it adapts to it. The same Kant called our reason something similar to the molds with which the child plays in the sandbox. Everything that we take, right there in our brain takes on a given form. Therefore, we rather construct the object that we are trying to understand.
The problem of knowability of the world, or rather, its incomprehensibility, is still vividly interested in scientists. Pragmatic philosophers say that our mental activity is simply utilitarian in nature and we “pull out” from reality what helps to survive. Helmholtz’s theory is interesting that we simply create symbols, ciphers and hieroglyphs, designating them these or those concepts for our own convenience. The famous mathematician Poincare, like the author of the “philosophy of life” Bergson, agreed among themselves that our mind can comprehend certain relations between phenomena, but are not able to understand what their nature is.
The problem of the cognizability of the world also worries modern philosophers. The creator of the famous theory of verification and "falsification" Karl Popper urged scientists to be more careful and say that we are available not some objective truth, but only plausibility. Knowledge does not give us a complete reflection of reality, and at best it can serve the needs and utilitarian needs of man. His equally famous adversary, Hans-Georg Gadamer, stated that all this applies only to the natural and mathematical sciences, to which the truth is not revealed at all. The latter is possible only in the field of “spirit sciences”, which uses completely different criteria for understanding.
Nevertheless, even most of these scientists nevertheless acknowledge the probability of realizing the reality, and the problem of the cognizability of the world simply appears before them as a question of the nature of what and how we are studying. There is also another point of view, which is more familiar to us, since it was shared by materialistic philosophy. According to her, the source of knowledge is objective reality, which is more or less adequately reflected in the human brain. This process takes place in logical forms arising from practice. Such an epistemological theory tries to scientifically substantiate the ability of people to give in the aggregate of their knowledge a true picture of reality.