“What is the Purpose of Scientific Research?”: Philosophy of Science in the Context of Worldview Confrontation

The article offers the author’s view on the “scientific wars” and modern discussions aimed at smoothing the “left” and “right” directions of the philosophy of science. The author tries to solve this problem with the help of the question “what is the purpose of scientific research itself?”. This question shifts the problem to the plane of ideological confrontation, in the field of historiosophy, anthropology and metaphysics. Conclusion dwells upon the fact that the desire to construct science within a particular interpretation is not a neutral method, but rather an expression of a specific goal-setting, an ideological position. There are two such positions. Philosophically, they are represented by opposing points of view on the problem of substantial and accidental forms and their relationships. The linear-evolutionary attitude to the interpretation of science, based on systemic analysis (conditional Popper), on the one hand; and the discrete attitude, determined by structural analysis (conditional Kuhn), on the other, are determined by the ways of organizing the research itself. And this is the level of methodology (as a system of installations that organize any research). It is methodological approaches that determine the application of structural or systemic methods of analysis. And since the choice of methodology is determined by worldview, it can be said that the results of any research are already predetermined by the authors’ ideological position.