Culture and History as Dimensions of Contemporary Epistemology

Abstract

The article is devoted to understanding the cultural and historical aspects of the original concept of constructive (“activity”) realism, which is being deve­loped by Academician Vladislav Alexandrovich Lektorsky (we celebrate his 90th birthday this year). The author suggests that the concept of the hero of the day (as well as the basis of the cultural and historical epistemology on which the author of the article relies) is based on the interpretation of a holistic person who actively transforms reality in cultural and historical communication with other people. Realizing this cultural and historical foundation of knowledge, and its gen­eral humanistic problems, V.A. Lektorsky focuses on the cognitive and technical aspects of modern epistemological issues, and cultural-historical epistemology em­phasizes the specifics of communication within advanced interdisciplinary re­search programs (megascience). In multidisciplinary scientific communications, a special layer of interaction-collaboration has been defined, which implies under­standing of each other by scientists at the sign-symbolic level. Phenomenological issues in this context becomes the center of the scientist’s methodological guide­lines, since it allows interpreting the “historical” and “cultural” not so much as changeable and relative, but as dynamically balanced, allowing one to think of sci­entific modernity as historically successive. At the same time, both concepts are based on the traditions of the domestic intellectual culture of the twentieth century, which includes the ideas of G.G. Shpet and M.M. Bakhtin, S.L. Rubinstein and V.P. Zinchenko, E.V. Ilyenkov and G.P. Shchedrovitsky.