The genesis of theoretical knowledge

The article distinguishes two stages in the history of theoretical knowledge: 1) the emergence of primary, embryonic theoretical knowledge within pre-theoretical empirical knowledge and according to its inherent laws; 2) the development of this primary knowledge into holistic theories based on established laws of logic and epistemology. The first of these two stages is referred to as the genesis of theoretical knowledge. Philosophers who acknowledge its reality are called aposteriorestists, while their opponents, who assert that theoretical knowledge does not arise from empirical, are called apriorists. The article asserts that apriorism is born from the historical limitations of epistemological research methods. This defines the methodological peculiarity of the article: overcoming apriorism is carried out by bringing the research tools, epistemological concepts, and principles to a working state. Their subsequent application in the research of the genesis of theoretical knowledge is mainly deductive in nature. The article is based on the principles of sequential, Laplacian determinism, according to which all events and states of affairs in the world are necessary. From these principles, it follows that empirical and theoretical knowledge share a common subject, and they represent historically successive stages of understanding this subject. To understand how they succeed each other – and thus solve the problem of the genesis of theoretical knowledge. The goal of the article is to participate in the resolution of this problem. To achieve this, categories – research tools – are introduced and carefully defined: "empirical knowledge," "theoretical knowledge," "thing," "fact," "relation," "ground of relation," as well as the theory of the three worlds by K. Popper, which plays a key role in the article. Using these categories and this theory within the framework of the so-called existential approach, the genesis of theoretical knowledge is presented as the transformation of virtual atomic empirical facts into virtual theoretical ones. Two stages of this process are distinguished. At the first stage, the pure things that are part of the atomic empirical fact are isolated, and at the second stage, the relation uniting them into this fact is derived from the internal content of these things. The methods for solving these two tasks are explored. The role that intuition plays in their solution is emphasized.

Apriorism, aposteriorism, empirical knowledge, theoretical knowledge, fact, thing, relation, ideation, idealization, induction