Problem of cognoscibility of objective reality in the context of cross-cultural communication

Якубенко К.С., Микитенко Е.Г. Проблема познания объективной реальности в контексте межкультурной коммуникации. [24] В статье затрагивается вопрос возможности познания бытия с точки зрения таких философских направлений, как эпистемология и агностицизм. Проблема познания связывается с различными аспектами межкультурной коммуникации.

Yakubenko K. S., Mikitenko E. G. Problem of cognoscibility of objective reality in the context of cross-cultural communication. In article the question of a possibility of cognoscibility of world from the point of view of such philosophical directions as an epistemology and agnosticism is considered. The problem of cognoscibility is connected with various aspects of cross-cultural communication.

Since the ancient times philosophers and scientists have studied a problem of cognoscibility of objective reality, people existence, nature and all real. Today within a system of philosophy there are separate sections of scientific knowledge studying the subject and forms of cognoscibility, problems of the truth and sense, understanding and explanation of the natural phenomena and many other philosophical questions. But actually the problem of complete cognoscibility of the world still remains unresolved and raises more and more questions about whether human thinking processes are able to form true knowledge about surrounding world. Relevance of our research also depends on this problem.

Various problems of cognoscibility have become a subject of especially close attention of philosophers and scientists long before emergence of an epistemology. Antique thinkers were the first studying the questions of cognoscibility of the world, among them were Parmenid, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many others.

So, Parmenid studied a problem of objective reality and the validity of knowledge which criteria were invariance, consistency and timeless.

Socrates developed maieutics as a dialogical method of cognoscibility by means of elaborative questions and conversations. Plato considered that cognoscibility as such does not exist, but human's soul can remember the belonging to the world of the ideas. Aristotle, in turn, criticizes and overcomes Plato's idealism, developing an analytical method of cognoscibility of the world by means of reasoning and identification of contradictions.

However in ancient philosophy fundamentals of agnosticism, philosophical doctrine about impossibility of objective cognoscibility of reality is also found. For example, Protagor claimed that it is impossible to check and prove real existence of God and some other phenomena.

Ancient Greek sophist Gorgias formulated a peculiar manifesto of modern agnosticism in his work "On Nature or the Non-Existent":

1. Nothing exists;

2. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it;

3. Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.

4. Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood [1, p. 270].

Thus, fundamentals of philosophical doctrines about knowledge and non-cognoscibility of the world were found thousands years ago, but in Modern Period the theory of cognoscibility reached the greatest development and studying.

Many doctrines of the famous philosophers have been on the edge of epistemology and agnosticism. Therefore Kant defined existence of "things in themselves", real sources of sensual experience of the person, but for the reason that our knowledge is limited to its subjective sensual experience, we can learn not a real object but "a thing for us", its representation in the experienced feelings of the individual [2, p. 344].

However the similar gnoseological and agnostic ideas gained the development in the context of different scientific studying, such as cross-cultural communication. Within the framework of this science, in the first half of the 20th century the hypothesis of linguistic relativity "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" was developed by Benjamin Whorf on a basis of Edward Sapir's researches.

According to this theory, linguistic forms and categories serve not only for transfer of meanings and ideas of the speaker, but also form process of cogitative activity of the person. Therefore the people speaking different languages have different ideas of the world, and in case of considerable structural divergences between their languages there can be great difficulties with mutual understanding and cognoscibility of another culture.

Thus we can say that different languages differently define surrounding reality, and native speakers differentiate them and learn these or those phenomena diversely. For example, if in one language there is a certain lexical set for designation of related objects, and in other language all these objects are designated in one word and are not differentiated among themselves (for example, in language of Eskimos there are about forty designations of snow, depending on its features and characteristics while in many other languages snow is designated in a word), so native speakers of different languages may have absolutely different mental images of the same subject or the phenomenon.

Thus, we can conclude that Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis represents the assumption that the people speaking different languages think and cognize the world differently. There are representatives of this doctrine considering cross-cultural communication impossible that it may be correlated to the ideas of agnosticism. However many researchers such as Chomsky, consider that learning of other languages and cultures is a way of adoption of other point of view and other values that as a result leads to objective cognoscibility of surrounding reality in general.

References:

1. W. K. C. Guthrie. The Sophists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 270.

2. Kant I. Critique of pure reason. – М: Eksmo, 2010, p. 736.

3. "Gorgias" entry in Collins English Dictionary, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.

 

Key words: cognoscibility, objective reality, cross-cultural communication, epistemology, agnosticism, philosophy, gnoseology.

 

УДК 338.48:339.138

Трегулова И.П., доцент кафедры менеджмента

Севастопольский экономико-гуманитарный институт (филиал)

ФГАОУ ВО «КФУ им. В.И. Вернадского»,

г. Севастополь

Бахтина С.М., магистрант направления подготовки «Туризм»

Севастопольский экономико-гуманитарный институт (филиал)

ФГАОУ ВО «КФУ им. В.И. Вернадского»,

г. Севастополь