Civil Expert Examination and Transdisciplinarity of Scientific Knowledge

The main aim of the article is to analyze modern processes of production and distribution of scientific knowledge. The authors distinguish between the emerging model today and the classical sociological model of the social institution of science. Using the transdisciplinary research methodology, they prove that the processes described above cannot be captured within an image of an autonomous confined world subordinate to corporate values implemented by professionals and conclude that the erosion of homogeneous scientific practices occurs by incorporating actions and decisions external to the scientific expert examination of social agents. The development of convergent technologies becomes a mechanism of reality which opens up the possibility of changing nature, including man, at the most fundamental level. Considering the convergence of virtual and offline social realities taking place during the modern digital revolution, the authors note that it affects both the institutional order and the social design of knowledge. The erasure of clear boundaries between author and reader roles, the low influence of censorship agents, convergence with traditional media led to the expansion of bloggers into a media niche of traditional opinion magazines, which had previously acted as the main channel of dialogue between science and society. Communicative analysis of the media agenda allowed the authors to conclude about its dependence on the mood of civil experts and formation of a deprofessional social field of estimates, generation of civil expert examination. At the same time, the authors revealed that in the space of exponentially increasing information the intellectual activity of the blogger is concentrated not so much on the creation of a new information product (describing new facts and phenomena), but on the creation of interpretations and criticism, involving the operation of information of a predominantly expert nature. The article carries out a study of civil expert examination as an analysis of socially significant problems independent from the professional scientific community in the context of their conformity with social interest. This is a study based on expert assessments to resolve conflicting and risky situations. The main purpose of civil expert examination is not only to analyze, evaluate, predict the consequences of objective contradiction, but also to participate in social control over the results of scientific activity. The authors conclude that civil expert examination is able to put forward methodological tools for determining the viability of scientific knowledge, complementing the basic criteria of truth with the criteria of practical applicability and ethical approval. Consequently, professional scientific expert examination loses its monopoly on the inclusion of new scientific knowledge in the reproduction of the social order. In these conditions, the connection of formal scientific knowledge with informal knowledge becomes heuristically valuable. Thus, civil expert examination is able to produce value hierarchies and an axiological framework of assessment that pragmatically determines the semantic field of establishing scientific truth.

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