46.The problem of the truth. Absolute and relative truth.

Truth is an adequate reflection of an object by the knowing subject, which reproduce reality such as it is by itself, outside and independent of cons.

Divided into Absolute and Relative truths

Absolute truth – is a peace of knowledge that is not refuted by the subsequent development of science but enriched and constantly reaffirmed by life.

Relative truth – is limited true knowledge about something.

The concreteness of truth, as one of the basic principles of the dialectical approach to knowledge, assumes an accurate taking into account of all the conditions in which the ob­ject of cognition exists. Concreteness is the property of truth based on a knowledge of real connections, on the interaction of all the as­pects of the object, of the principal and essential features of it, of its tendencies of development.

Objective truth-common for all people/

47)Thought: Essence, Levels and Forms

Transition from sensation to thought. Only a small part of what man cognizes can be covered by sensuous contemplation. Mostly, cognition is realized in thought in terms of concepts, judgements, etc. Man cannot live without thinking. So how is the transition from the sensuous to the conceptual level of cognition to be explained? How is a sensuous image of an object transformed into an act of thought. In actual fact the two cognitive levels are inseparable, and an entirely independent sensuous cognition does not therefore exist. Man looks at the world with understanding eyes. When we speak of the acuteness of perception, we have in mind the clarity of the ob­ject's conscious perception. Man's cognitive activity is made possible precisely by this unity, by the admixture, so to speak, of thought in sensuous contemplation.

Thought correlates the evidence of the sense organs with the individual's available knowledge and, more­over, with mankind's entire total experience and knowledge to the extent that these are possessed by the given subject. The transition from the sensuous to the rational does not mean, however, the movement from reality to the empty darkness of the supersensuous. Thought relies on the sensuous material of speech, in the first place of inner speech, and on the symbolized visual images.

The principal forms of thought. A form of thought is a definite type of its organization, a type of connection between the elements of its content. The principal forms in which thought emerged, de­veloped, and is now implemented, are the concept, the judgement and the inference. These forms of thought evolved as a result of thousand-year-long human practice of transformation of reality, as the quintessence of this practice, a quintessence that embodies the forms of men's activity in the intellectual sphere.

- The concept is a form of thought which reflects the essential properties, connections and relations between objects and phenome­na in (heir contradictions and development; a thought-concept gener­alizes and singles out the objects of a certain class in terms of defi­nite generic and specific features inherent in them. Concepts are ob­jective in their content and universal in logical form, as they per­tain to the general rather than the individual

Concepts may be scientific and everyday ones. The latter identify similar properties of objects and phenomena, often on the basis of external traits, regardless of the laws controlling them, and fix these properties by naming them. The former reveal the profound proper­ties, or the general as the essential and the law-governed.

Concepts are both the result and the means of cognitive activity. It is due to concepts that thinking can be theoretical as well as practical, since only in concepts is the essence of things reflected. Abstract thinking itself is regarded as a process of operating with concepts.

Concepts acquire logical meaning only in judgements. The judgement is a form of thought in which something is asserted or refuted through establishing links between concepts.

Logical operations are ways of establishing necessary connections and relations between thoughts which ensure the cognitive movement of thought from ignorance to knowledge. Thought is impossible without judgements, and judgements are im­possible without concepts.

Man can arrive at a given judgement through direct observation of some fact or in a mediated way—with the aid of inference. An in-ference-is a process of reasoning in the course of which one or several judgements called premisses yield a new judgement (conclusion or consequence) which follows logically from the premisses.

Judgements and inferences are operations of thought which man performs all the time: they permeate the entire fabric of mental ac­tivity. Let us consider two principal forms of syllogistic activity—in­duction and deduction, the two most important devices or methods of cognitive activity. As an operation of thought, induction is a pro­cess of derivation of a general proposition from a number of particular (less general) statements or individual facts, while deduction is on the contrary a process of reasoning proceeding from the general to the particular or less general. Two principal types of induction are distin­guished—complete induction and incomplete induction.

Complete induction is a general proposition concerning all the objects of a certain set or class on the basis of considering each ele­ment of this set. The sphere of application of such induction is clearly restricted to the objects whose number is limited and practi­cally accessible to direct observation.

4. Intellectual-Sensuous Contemplation

Sensations, perceptions, representations. The subject's direct links with objective reality are established through sensations —the initial sensuous images or elementary facts of consciousness. Sensation is the reflection of separate properties and qualities of objects which di­rectly affect the sense organs; it is an elementary and psychologically indivisible cognitive phenomenon

The sense organs are a kind of channels or windows open to the world, through which streams of external influences continually come in.

The difference between external influences determines the diver­sity of sensations. Sensations have a broad range of modalities, in­cluding tactile, visual, auditory, vibrational, temperature, olfactory, and gustatory. A type apart are sensations of processes occurring in the organism's inner environment —organic sensations, as well as sensations of the movements and positions of the body's organs (kinesthesia), the sense of balance, and static sensations.

In the process of life's evolution, special sense organs have de­veloped for only a small number of stimuli. The sense image of other properties of the objective world —as, e.g., of the form, size, and distance of objects from each other and from the observer — arises from the interaction of indications of different sense organs.

Whatever object we may take, it has a great many extremely diverse aspects and properties. Consider a lump of sugar: it is hard, white, sweet, it has a definite shape, mass and weight. All these properties are combined in something integral, and we per­ceive and comprehend them as a single whole rather than separ­ately. An integral image reflecting objects affecting the sense organs and their properties and relations directly is called perception. Per­ception is a higher stage of cognition, essentially different from sensations. Perception is thinking, living contemplation; we look at things with an outward eye but we see them with an inner one. The depth of this comprehension depends on a person's intellec­tual level, his experience.

Representation is the highest form of sensuous reflection, it is imaginal knowledge about objects that are not directly perceived. The physiological condition of the existence of representations is reten­tion of the traces of past influences and their actualization at the given moment. This function, which ensures the continuity and suc­cession in cognitive activity, is termed memory; without it, recogni­tion would be impossible. Representation is a generalizing synthesis of many sensuous perceptions.

Images with which man's consciousness operates are not re­stricted to the reproduction of the perceived. Men creatively com­bine and relatively freely create new images owing to their creative imagination or fantasy. Representations stand, as it were, between sensuous and rational cognition.