Scientific reality as an ontological construct

This article substantiates the need to distinguish between two different concepts: objective reality and scientific reality. Objective reality is a reality existing outside human consciousness. Scientific reality is a type of cognitive (subjective) reality constructed by human consciousness. Scientific reality differs from other types of cognitive reality – everyday, artistic, mythological, religious, and philosophical – in that its content is highly defined, precise, and systematic, derived from sensory information about objective reality and its rational processing through thought and its methods. Thanks to the qualitative and quantitative certainty of its content, scientific reality can serve as a standard for evaluating the content of objective reality. The contents of both realities never completely coincide, but precise knowledge of the degree of their similarity is sufficient to utilize scientific knowledge not only as the most effective means of adapting to objective reality, but also as a crucial means of its practical transformation. Scientific reality has a rather complex structure. The entire set of scientific realities can be divided into two subsets: 1) a group of realities related to various fields of science (mathematics, logic, natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, engineering sciences, interdisciplinary studies), and 2) a group of realities at different levels of scientific knowledge within each specific field of science. This article is set to describe scientific realities at different levels of scientific knowledge, as well as to describe the content of the macroworld scientific reality.