ALTHOUGH THE TREE IS ROTTEN, IT BRINGS GOOD (A RUSSIAN PROVERB)

The question of whether science is a good cannot be resolved in one article just because the concept of good allows for a variety of meanings and connotations. The article discusses the ideas of Ilya Kasavin, who concretizes this concept in relation to science. Criticizing this approach, the author, for his part, deconstructs what Kasavin proposed and conceptualizes the diversity of the usefulness of science in three key horizons: social, temporal and thematic. In the social dimension, science, on the one hand, really responds to the demands of external consumers of a scientific product; on the other, it acts as a generator of social "critical rationality", which in turn is assimilated by the same consumers. In the temporal dimension, only science, based on its theories, is able to formulate useful forecasts and predictions. Finally, in the thematic dimension, the proper function of the scientific communicative system is carried out, namely, fundamental scientific research in the form of propositional (false/true) knowledge. This three-dimensional space of scientific communication makes it extremely difficult and ambivalent to respond to the question Kasavin posed about the public good of science. After all, a positive meaning in the thematic horizon (say, the self-valuable and autonomously rational interest of scientists, for example, to the structure of the atom) can turn out to be high-risk, dangerous and high-cost in the social dimension, which means that it acquires a negative meaning in it.