Homo Expertus in Modern Science, or the Experimenting Human

Analyzing traditions and continuity of Russian intellectual culture, the authors turn to the question of the figure of the scholar who embodies our information age and epistemologically adequately represents the prospects for the development of modern science. This question arose at the intersection of two research themes. First, it concerns the distinctiveness of epistemological style in Russian philosophy (that particular understanding of the goals of scientific knowledge and the epistemological conditions for achieving them, which enabled Russian intellectuals to propose ideas that are becoming relevant today: integrity, historicism, the sign-semiotic nature of knowledge, orientation toward communication, and others). Second, it concerns the philosophical and methodological understanding of the features of the modern technogenic stage of science’s development, where a radical transformation of structural and instrumental-cognitive parameters is taking place. In the course of research on the first theme, the authors focused on such Russian thinker-scholars as Ukhtomsky, Vernadsky, Shpet, Moiseev, Likhachev, Florensky, and many others. They were distinguished by the multifaceted nature of their scientific interests and the depth of their engagement in both the natural and the social-humanitarian sciences — what today in the methodology of science is defined as interdisciplinary. Turning to the second theme, the authors concentrated on the philosophical and methodological idea of the human-sizedness of knowledge, present in this interdisciplinary and recognized today in modern science. The ideas of interdisciplinarity and the human-sizedness clearly express the social-humanitarian orientation of knowledge. The intersection of these themes prompted the authors to address the problem of the applied orientation of modern science and to consider the epistemological function of the expert, who plays a key role in the information age.