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FROM POETRY TO SCIENCE OR FROM RULES TO THEORY // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 2 (36). P. 95-102

Cognition is an activity that ensures adaptation and better orientation of a person in the world. The result of cognitive activity is not a specific consumer product or service, but behavioral scenarios (usually recorded in the form of texts) that generally increase human survivability in the world. Cognitive activities are primarily distinguished by their subjects: aesthetic perception (art), unified forms of thinking (philosophy), universal values (religion), explicit structural unity (mathematics), and implicit unity of the world (mysticism). The subject of scientific cognition should be recognized not just as abstract reality, but as unequivocally reproducible phenomena, regardless of their ontological status. And this decision undoubtedly corresponds to the general scientific representations of the reproducibility of experiments and the possibility of recording the regularities revealed in them in the form of rational sign systems (formulas and theories). The main contribution of philosophy to the development of science lies not in “word creation”, not in introducing new concepts (being, cosmos, nature, infinity, logos, etc.), but in using these new concepts to construct complex, internally consistent structures that, when recorded in text, are called theories. Science as an independent cognitive activity formed when it had combined two linguistic practices, two text forms of knowledge representation: (1) empirical statements about uniquely reproducible phenomena and (2) theoretical statements, logically derived within a sign system that describes those phenomena in scientific terms. It is essential to note that neither empirical statements, such as experimentally obtained ones, nor theory conclusions are scientific in and of themselves. They only become scientific when the results of observations match the logical/mathematical conclusions of the theory. Science is a cognitive activity whose subject is uniquely reproducible phenomena and whose result is theories whose logical conclusions must be confirmed by empirical data. Disciplines such as religion, art, philosophy, mysticism are not sciences because their subjects are not reproducible. Mathematics as a whole cannot be considered a science because its subject, although reproducible, is inseparable from the discipline itself, that is, there is no clear separation of theoretical and empirical statements in it.

Keywords: science, cognition, knowledge, language, philosophy