Expertise as a form of development of science: Fundamental vs applied

Abstract

The article discusses the epistemological functions of expertise in modern science and substantiates the thesis that the emergence of expert knowledge is associated with the transformations of science (its technization, digitalization and application) and the anthropological crisis of the 20th–21st centuries. The authors believe that due to expert assessments, the target settings that are present in specific scientific research programs are explicated — both cognitive ones and focused primarily on solving various kinds of socially significant practical problems. Thus, the examination, in fact, opens up opportunities for clarifying the most effective ratio of fundamental and applied research settings in a particular cognitive activity. The authors demonstrate that expert activity allows scientists to consciously (with appeals to the semantic content of specific research projects) and, thus, more adequately (taking into account applied problems) assess the epistemological prospects of certain areas of research and thereby contribute to the expansion of the scope of scientific knowledge, development science as a cultural and historical phenomenon. To concretize the reasoning, the authors focus on how the implementation of the cognitive functions of expertise in science takes place and appeal to the legal precedent (the Kass vs. Kass process), which has become one of the models for resolving disputes in the field of biomedical research of objects with an unstable subject, ethical and legal status (cryopreserved embryos). Particular attention is paid to the fundamental predictive functions of expert knowledge, which has dignity, i. e. taking into account socio-political and existential-humanitarian restrictions, on the one hand, and contributing to the expansion of the scientific horizon, on the other.