top study-index next EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN REASON AND INFORMATICS. ------------------------------------------------------------ 0 INTRODUCTION. --------------- Human being distinguishes himself from other living creatures mainly by his reason. During his prehistory he applied it unconsciously, just happening to be more ingenious than other animals, without worrying about the why's and the how's of it. Prehistory switches to history when reason becomes conscious, aware of itself. For our culture this milestone corresponds with the beginning of the Greek philosophy. Now, history appeared for a long time to be contingent or accidental. It seemed to be governed by the principle of "Cleopatra's nose", by some king happening to be more cunning than some other one, by sudden rain making some road too muddy for artillery. In this state history could be merely described, but not rigorously, scientifically investigated. First trial to approach it as a science is due to Marx, who proposed the "means of production" as an objective criterion allowing to distinguish among various historical epochs and to explain their revolutionary transitions. However, this criterion, restricted to economy, indeed to its part concerned with production, seems too narrow. Human being is more than a mule turning in a treadmill, than a honig gathering bee. Therefore we propose another, broader criterion, which we find more in harmony with the human context, wich we call the "SPECIFIC_DOMAIN". In order to define it let's have a look at the history starting with the origins of the Greek philosophy. At its very beginning, the intellectual interrogation was restricted to one single domain: philosophy. One started soon to distinguish within it various sub_domains: ontology, epistemology (theory of cognition), ethic, aesthetic, logic. Nevertheless, they stayed parts of philosophy and continued to be approached with a unique, purely speculative methodology. At the next step some domains got emancipated from philosophy and established themselves as independent disciplines with proper methodology, usually more rigorous and experimental, more scientific, than pure speculation. First of them were MATHEMATICS, ASTRONOMY and POLITICS in Greece. Shortly afterwards ETHIC established itself as LAW in Rome. Middle Age saw the emancipation of THEOLOGY, with its proper scholastic methodology (exceptionally not more scientific). Renaissance started the emancipation of OBJECTIVE_SCIENCE and the 19_th century that of PSYCHOLOGY and LOGIC. The current established view considers LOGIC as the last emancipated domain and leaves to philosophy its two remaining domains: ONTOLOGY and EPISTEMOLOGY. We define the SPECIFIC_DOMAIN as the last emancipated domain and propose it as the classification criterion of historical epochs. Consequently, each stable epoch will be associated with a SPECIFIC_DOMAIN and each transition with a new domain raising claims to independence. Transitions may be revolutionary, when the old SPECIFIC_DOMAIN will not give up and the new has to struggle for emancipation. @ Thus, we may refer to Middle Age as to the epoch of THEOLOGY, and to Renaissance as to OBJECTIVE_SCIENCE revolution. Indeed, the theological Middle Age used all available social and political means to oppose the new scientific ideology. No prior period saw as many stakes, no one had more appearences of Middle Age than the Renaissance. As a rule, the obsolete SPECIFIC_DOMAIN comes to its appogee when it is still socially, but no more intellectually ruling. All established institutions are still founded upon the obsolete principles, the new domain manifests itself via a few individuals such as Copernicus, Galileo, Keppler and Leonardo da Vinci, who are persecuted and sometimes killed as Giordano Bruno, fanatism and intolerance propagate themselves through the masses. The old domain seems to triumph just before abdicating. Finally OBJECTIVE_SCIENCE won and established itself as the SPECIFIC_ DOMAIN of the epoch of Rationalism. Further transitions followed. The limited scope of this introduction forces us to skip them and to pass directly to the contemporary situation. As we have said above, LOGIC is the last officially established domain. We live officially in a logical world. Logic based set theory is the official foundation of mathematics, which, in turn claim to be the most fundamental science. Human beings are classified, discriminated and exterminated on the base of absolute logical devices, such as race, nation, religion, or IQ. Informatics is considered as applied predicate calculus, a branch of symbolic logic. Contrarily to this established opinion it is our thesis that: WE LIVE CURRENTLY AMIDST THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL REVOLUTION. According to our definition this means that EPISTEMOLOGY became unofficially the SPECIFIC_DOMAIN of our time, that the social and scientific developpement have revealed new aspects of reality which cannot more be grasped, investigated and explained with help of LOGIC, but require some other more conform context. This context, the applied EPISTEMOLOGY, is already being developped and locally used by small intellectual elite in chosen, deepest scientific domains, mainly in physics. However, society, environment and related domains decisive for the future of the mankind consider their main problems as logical contradictions and consequently disregard them as unsolvable. We shall present in this study the great lines of applied EPISTEMOLOGY and show how and why it allows to investigate and to solve problems which appear to LOGIC as untreatable contradictions. We shall see that INFORMATICS is indeed founded in this applied EPISTEMOLOGY. We shall also see that the term REVOLUTION applies to our context literally: contemporary fanatical discrimination and extermination of hundreds of millions of people making the Renaissance and Inquisition look like children play is one of the social manifestations of LOGIC_based ideologies defending their obsolete establishment.