Knowledge is the basis of our existence in this world created by man according to the laws formed by human society. Huge arrays of information of various kinds have become our heritage, thanks to the discoveries of our ancestors.
Knowledge and skills - that's what orients us to the system in which we find ourselves almost immediately after birth. And it's great that we can use ready-made data, drawing our own conclusions based on them.
But what is knowledge? The definition in social science and other concepts related to this are of interest to us in our article. We hope that the collected information will help to consciously approach the problem of knowledge and accept its importance in the life of a modern person.
What is knowledge? Social Studies Definition
One of the sciences about all phenomena related to the social life of a person is social science. It gives us a clear definition of the term. So, in accordance with the terminology of social science, knowledge is the result of cognitive (in other sources - cognitive)human activity.
In addition, knowledge is a form in which formulated conclusions and fixed facts exist, systematized and stored for the purpose of transfer and use.
Knowledge and cognition
In addition to the direct question of what knowledge is (we gave the definition of social science above), it is worth understanding the accompanying concepts. We consider the concept of cognition to be the most relevant for a complete consideration of the issue.
Knowledge is a process through which a person receives certain knowledge. Facts about objective reality are reflected in the mind of a person, taking their place there. The subject of cognition is the person himself, and the object is that array of facts about phenomena and objects of reality, collected and presented in a certain form.
Knowledge characteristics
Deciphering the concept of "knowledge" is not only social science, but also philosophy, psychology. So, in modern philosophy, disputes are still relevant about what kind of information received is knowledge.
According to the prevailing opinion of modern thinkers, in order to move into this category, information must have certain characteristics, namely, be true, confirmed and trustworthy.
As you can see, all criteria are very relative and subjective. This is the reason for the openness of this issue for modern sciences, which include questions on social science.
Classifications of knowledge
Knowledge is a broad category of social science. Therefore, a broad classification of this concept is inevitable. It includes many different criteria, some of which are obvious, while others are the result of the thought of philosophers.
Thus, one of the obvious classifications of knowledge is according to the carrier, in other words, according to the location of knowledge. As we can imagine, they are stored in the memory of people, printed publications, all kinds of electronic media, databases and others.
More interesting, in our opinion, is the classification of knowledge - according to the degree of scientificity. In accordance with it, knowledge is scientific and non-scientific. Each species has its subspecies.
Thus, scientific knowledge can be empirical (obtained as a result of one's own observations, knowledge) and theoretical (perception as truth of abstract models of data about the world - tables, diagrams, abstractions, analogies).
There are more varieties of non-scientific knowledge, and they are interesting in themselves as categories. Non-scientific knowledge includes those that are data on elementary everyday things - ordinary and practical. Pseudo-scientific knowledge - those that operate with known scientific hypotheses that have not yet been confirmed or refuted. Pseudo-scientific knowledge is what we call prejudices, delusions, conjectures. There are also quasi-scientific (instilled by theories, but not confirmed by facts), anti-scientific (utopian, undermining the idea of reality), parascientific (which has not yet been possible to find confirmation).
Questions in social studies consider a small parttypes of knowledge. However, for the purpose of self-education, it is interesting to know about the existing theories and divisions of information arrays accumulated by mankind.
Conclusion
We examined in our article one of the fundamental definitions of the science of social science - knowledge. So what is knowledge? The definition in social science tells us that this is the result of human cognitive activity, as well as the form in which this result is stored and transmitted.
The modern classification of knowledge is very broad and takes into account many criteria. Both our everyday and professional knowledge, and exclusively scientific facts, and utopian hypotheses - all these are separate types and subtypes of knowledge.
We hope you found our article interesting.
