Methods of Constructing and Justifying Scientific Theories

The ontological, epistemological, and methodological specificity of modern scientific theories is described. The inadequacy of their positivist and materialist interpretations as a set of empirical laws about objective reality is demonstrated. It is noted that physical theories, beginning with the construction of classical mechanics, came to be regarded by many scientists not as a generalization of sensory data about objective reality, but as knowledge about theoretical, ideal objects constructed on the basis of experience but not logically derivable from it. It is shown that the methods for describing the properties, relations, and regularities of ideal objects also differ significantly from the methods of empirical cognition in science. It is noted that the relationship between empirical and theoretical knowledge in science is not logical: the connection between them has a rational-volitional, evaluative, and practical character, and its main goal is to find the domain of applicability of a scientific theory. It is concluded that the justification of any scientific theory occurs not so much through finding the domain of its empirical interpretation, but rather through demonstrating its correspondence to other, more general scientific theories, as well as to general scientific and philosophical knowledge.

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