ФИЛОСОФИЯ / 6.Философия науки

Kudryashev Alexandr Fedorovich, Doctor of Philosophy, professor, Department of Philosophy and Politology, Bashkir State University, Russia;

Elkhova Oksana Igorevna, Doctor of Philosophy, professor, Department of Philosophy and Politology, Bashkir State University, Russia.

CONFLICT AS A MEANS OF COGNITIVE ACTIVITY

During the XX-XXI centuries, there have been significant changes in the understanding of the essence of the conflict. Pay attention to the conflict that serves as a means of cognitive activity. It goes without saying that conflict as an instrument (means) can be applied not only for the purpose of cognition. Thus, as a means of defusing tension, conflicts are silently used in social and political practice and in everyday life and can be initiated by provocation, slander, denunciation, etc. Conflict as a means of cognition can be used to investigate the most diverse types of objects.

In public life, where different interests are constantly confronted, for many actors the conflict is the only way to achieve the goal and self-affirmation. The media extols the victory: over oneself, over rivals and competitors, over enemies, over circumstances, finally, over wild animals on the hunt, over predatory fish on fishing. Wins in competitions, contests, wars, at Olympiads are encouraged, and when there are not enough unconditional victories, invent conditional victories, replacing life with a game. With the development of computer technology, a person has the opportunity to escape to an alternative reality, into a world of illusions. Users, keen on computer, give them most of their free time and are numbered in millions. Unhealthy pathological craving for computer games is due to a specially designed game action, where the lack of physicality enables the user to try on various masks of heroic characters living among the supernatural beings against the background of exotic landscapes. Games that have the greatest popularity among users always contain a conflict situation of confrontation, a warring side that must be overcome by any means, often at the cost of one's own life. Benefit virtual reality provides an opportunity to die «not quite»: death, and then a new birth can survive an uncountable number of times, until you get bored. In the game, death acquires a different ontological status, ceases to be the existential foundation of human life, the limit giving outlines to being, and becomes only a way of describing reality. In the last decade there is a whole subculture of lovers of computer role-playing games that are going on-line. All «role-players» are united by a passion for a certain era, often fictional and described in detail in the works of the genre of fantasy. The action of games always unfolds in a situation of intense conflict, when the «sacred world of the hero» is attacked by an unknown space inhabited by «alien creatures». To promote the game, it is necessary to master and conquer new lands and objects. With each new level, the opposing side becomes more ferocious, and victory is increasingly difficult.

In a conflict situation, an object is revealed and constituted into a new type of being. It can be used to study, for example, individuals and social groups that are part of a conflict, immediate participants in it, or who are outside the conflict but who are potential participants. Particularly it is necessary to single out those subjects who do not enter the conflict situation for various reasons, but have a significant influence on the processes taking place in the conflict. These subjects try to manage the conflict through the use of direct and reverse links. In the course of the conflict, especially for this specially organized, its subjects can learn about themselves a lot of new things.

Conflicts differ in different cognitive capacities; in any case, direct participants in the conflict are revealed in it more clearly than those subjects that are outside the conflict zone. Conflict as a means of cognitive activity, in our view, is of considerable methodological interest. Moreover, unlike the social conflict - the object of cognition, which along with the methods of its study has long been studied in conflictology, in this latter the social conflict as a means of cognition is not considered and is not used. Meanwhile, if we assume that there have always been conflicts in the society as a whole and have always been in one form or another, the problems of preventing, preventing, neutralizing conflicts are losing their status as the main and basic problems of conflictology.

The problems of the functional, directed use of social conflicts should be no less important and objectively significant. Then the content of conflictology is radically rethought. The study of the aims and functions of conflicts comes to the forefront. Conflictology becomes such a scientific discipline in which a social conflict is transformed into a definite unity of an object that requires an objective approach to its study and a means that requires a subjective approach to its use, and where, in principle, a conflict can be studied through a conflict that is constructed is created as a model of a natural, self-developing conflict. There is no doubt that the legal and moral aspects of such modeling, under other acceptable conditions, may prove decisive for its use or non-use. Conflict, i.e. irreconcilably contradictory, the situation is inherent in the very methodology of science, and in different forms. One of these species exists as a clash of opposing hypotheses. In particular, there may be a contradiction between the subject and the method of scientific research, expressed in their discrepancy, which causes the subject to develop research in a clearly expressed methodological position: the preference of the subject to the method or, conversely, of the method of the subject, which turns into a conviction of the truth of its hypothesis. In turn, the conflict between people involved in scientific activity, responds within the content of the methodology to opposition and competition, from which some variants of evolutionary epistemology grow. Sometimes the core of the conflict lies precisely in the conceptual sphere. But the real essence of it, perhaps, is hidden in human relationships, which on the whole are much richer than the mentality of their subjects, from which it follows that this essence is not one-sided, but multidimensional and does not fit within the limits of mere mentality alone.

Thus, the methodological reflection on the concept of conflict in the context of modernity makes it possible to identify significant potential opportunities for conflictology as a doctrine of social conflict, which gives its representatives, i.e. conflictologists, it is important to expand and deepen the subject of their science.

References

Кудряшев А.Ф., Елхова О.И. О конфликте и конфликтологии // Роль науки у формуванні громадянського суспільства та правової держави: Матеріали II міжнародної наукової 22-23 листопада 2013 року. Харків: Харківський економіко - правовий університет, 2013. С. 22-30.