"FIELD" EPISTEMOLOGY: PERSPECTIVES AND DIFFICULTIES. REPLY TO CRITICS

Abstract

Summing up the discussion on “field” research in epistemology, we can say that its participants were very attentive to its theses and suggested several interesting ways of their development. Among these proposals is the study of the history of language and images of science used by Russian scientists, starting from the 18th century. An important example is the attempt in Europe and Russia to create a universal language understandable to all educated people, in which it would be possible to describe nature, science, and crafts. No less serious is the proposal to pay attention to the socio-cultural contexts of science and technology in Russia in the 19th century. In this field, we can encounter many concepts that will help us understand how to understand and describe scientific activity in Russian society with its historical features. Here, various optics are possible that enrich each other. An illustration using a specific example of how fruitful the interaction of different areas of the humanities can be – in this case, epistemology and linguistics – in the study of technoscientific texts is very important. The linguist helps with the rhetorical means used by the authors of the articles, and also offers a comparison of the rhetoric of the Russian language with the rhetoric of the modern universal scientific language – English. When a practitioner – a publisher of technoscientific journals – enters the discussion, we see how difficult it is today to organize interdisciplinary communication, even promising interesting results.