Theory of Social Relays and Constructive Realism

Abstract

The article analyzes the meaning of V.A. Rozov’s theory of social relays for re­search in fields of epistemology and philosophy of science. It is shown that
M.A. Rozov has elaborated his own and fruitful approach to understanding phe­nomena called as “enactivist” and “extended” features of cognition in current popular cognitivist conceptions. The focus of the theory of social relays de­veloped by M.A. Rozov is on the issues of the relationship between construction and reality, the socio-cultural and natural worlds, natural and artificial processes. The author of the article tries to highlight the main ideas of this theory and com­pares it with his own theory of constructive realism. The author reveals the pecu­liarities of M.A. Rozov’s understanding of the process of human cognition.
According to M.A. Rozov, cognition is determined by the content of informa­tion. And it is determined not by the mechanisms of information processing in the brain, but by the connection of the cognition individual to the processes occurring outside his body. For a person, this is interaction with other people through socio-cultural artifacts, in particular and especially through language. According to the author, the active and constructive understanding of cognition and knowledge can and should be combined with epistemological realism. He concludes that Rozov’s theory is a prospective program of investigating the cognition in general, scientific cognition in particular.