Ideas and Ideals

This article presents a historical and sociological analysis of the theory of Distortion – a scientifc phenomenon that emerged in the 1990s at Tver State Technical University. The focus is not on the scientific validity of the theory, but on its function as a cultural indicator reflecting the core intellectual orientations, survival strategies, and epistemological anxieties of Russian science in the post-Soviet period. The authors interpret Distortion as a “mirror” of its era: it embodies attempts to overcome the crisis of paradigms, the fragmentation of knowledge, and the loss of methodological unity through the construction of universal synthetic frameworks.

Drawing on a body of monographs, dissertations, materials from the international seminar “DISTORTION – AROUND US,” and official documents produced by members of the “Tver School of Distortion,” the study employs the case study method to examine this school as a representative example of how a regional scientific community adapted to systemic crisis.

The theory evolved in two stages: fi rst as a local concept in soil mechanics (mid-1990s), then as a paradigm claiming universality, extending into physics, economics, biology, and even sacred geometry (2000s–2010s). Its genesis stems from three sources: the Soviet engineering tradition, Western nonlinear paradigms (synergetics, catastrophe theory, fractal geometry), and a philosophical-esoteric discourse (“golden ratio,” “Crystal of Life,” “Seed of Life”).

The authors identify three components of the school’s adaptive strategy: first, the creation of an internal canon of monographs forming a closed system of mutual citations; second, the strategic use of a state prize as a narrative of practical utility; third, the presentation of the theory at major international book fairs as a means of cultivating an image of international visibility.

The central conclusion is that Distortion is not a marginal curiosity but a symptomatic phenomenon of post-Soviet scientific culture. It illustrates how scientific communities based in regional universities construct autonomous knowledge worlds oriented toward internal coherence, symbolic capital, and corporate solidarity. Its historical value lies not in empirical productivity, but in its capacity to reflect the defi ning features of its era: the aspiration toward “grand theories,” hypertrophied interdisciplinarity, methodological syncretism, and the search for new epistemic foundations amid crisis.

The article analyzes science as a specific way of overcoming uncertainty, understood as a fundamental condition for the emergence of meaning, consciousness, and cognitive activity. Uncertainty is treated as a limiting state that precedes forms of distinction and structuring of experience and serves as a source of semantic structures and cognitive orientations. The methodological framework is based on the philosophy of orientation, which interprets cognition as a process of making distinctions within uncertainty, as well as on ideas from phenomenology, cybernetics, and systems theory that allow analysis of the relationship between individual experience and social forms of knowledge organization. It is shown that the act of distinction, described by George Spencer-Brown as a basic operation of thinking, underlies the formation of orientations structuring both individual consciousness and social reality. On this basis, a distinction is drawn between cognition and science: cognition is understood as an internal process of dealing with uncertainty, whereas science is interpreted as an institutionalized form of producing and verifying knowledge within society. Scientific knowledge is considered as a result of communicative processes that stabilize meanings.

Particular attention is paid to the concept of the observer, the distinction between natural and transcendental attitudes, and the role of self-reference and autopoiesis in social systems. The relationship between individual experience and social structures of knowledge is examined, and the interaction of individual and communicative levels of cognition is analyzed. The article concludes that science represents the most systematically organized way of overcoming uncertainty, ensuring the production of knowledge within global society.

This article advances the discussion by S.Yu. Kolomiytsev and N.I. Martishina concerning the limitations of falsifi ability criteria within the scientifi c demarcation problem. The subject of the study is the dynamics of a theory’s scientifi c status during its development and the relationship between this dynamic and classical demarcation criteria. The methodology employs an evolutionary model that frames scientifi c status as a variable attribute of a theory’s life cycle. This model defi nes fi ve sequential stages in a theoretical construct’s evolution: metaphysical (speculative idea), protoscientifi c (testable hypothesis), scientifi c (verifi ed theory), aposcientifi c (outdated but utilized model), and exscientifi c (rejected concept). The terms protoscience, aposcience, and exscience serve as author defi nitions for stages 2, 4, and 5, respectively. The main result establishes the specifi c, context-dependent function of classical demarcation criteria as triggers for transitions between these stages: potential falsifi ability enables the shift from metaphysics to protoscience; empirical verifi cation drives the progression from protoscience to science; the accumulation of anomalies or emergence of a competing theory signals a move from science to aposcience; irrefutable falsifi cation underpins the transition from aposcience to exscience. The analysis demonstrates that these criteria operate not as universal indicators of scientifi city, but as mechanisms governing the evolution of demarcation status. Furthermore, the model reveals the potential for a theory to return from aposcience to science through modifi cation, highlighting the prevalence of evolutionary correction over radical paradigm shifts. The conclusions emphasize the practical value of this approach. It provides a systematic tool for assessing a theory’s epistemological status using stage-relevant criteria, classifying transitional knowledge states, optimizing scientifi c resource allocation, and integrating the frameworks of K. Popper, T. Kuhn, and I. Lakatos into a unifi ed dynamic scheme. Critically, the model offers a solution to the core theoretical diffi culties regarding the applicability and limitations of demarcation criteria raised in the Kolomiytsev-Martishina discussion.

Happiness is a universal category describing all processes of human existence. Receiving education, acquiring knowledge is an important process of personal and civil formation. The research problem is solving by the authors is connected with the search of the role and possibility of gaining happiness in the process of education from the theoretical positions of philosophy, axiology, and sociology of culture. A review of felicitous theories and methods accentuates the inattention and methodological helplessness of the humanities in researching human happiness and its natural right. The authors believe that the statement and justifi cation of the category of “feeling”, its introduction into the scientific turnover of socio-humanitarian disciplines is in demand in modern scientifi c practice. Modern pedagogical practice, limited to standards, instructions is quite far from the process of acquiring knowledge and self-disclosure of the student and teacher personalities in this process. It not only does not involve the release of feelings, but also poses a threat to the social order of society, violating the social position of the status of the interaction between teacher and student, “freezing” the meaning of the process of social inheritance requirements performance, transferring the educational process from the sphere of culture to the sphere of market relations. The value of knowledge is included in the value system of society and does not need to be evaluated. To realize the value potential of knowledge means to create conditions for the happy interaction of the main participants in this process – the carriers of the statuses “teacher” and “student”, but not to control the amount of this process and the cognitive energy allocated in this process. Knowledge may have terminal and instrumental meanings, but its main purpose is to serve the formation of personality, not to serve the controllers’ meanings of existence. Knowledge belongs to everyone; it is produced and open to all. The terminal knowledge is in the depths of a human personality, connecting him to the higher structures of experience. Learning aims towards awakening of such knowledge within a person. The meaning of the evaluation of this process is in the fact of the fulfi llment of such awakening or the lack of desire for awakening. Knowledge is a cultural value that transcends the experience of a single individual or an entire community. Education is woven into the structures of social institutions by its knowledge (not just competence) component. The need for knowledge is one of the basic, vital needs of people.

The subject of the article is a biogenic approach to cognition, considered from the perspective of the methodology of philosophical analysis. The essential basis of this approach is the study of cognition as a natural process that has an evolutionary history. The objectives of the biogenic approach are to identify the origins of cognition, to reveal its general manifestations at all levels of cognitive complexity. As a philosophical basis for this approach, one should single out a broad approach to cognition, when it is considered as a property of living things, and it is argued that the simplest biological beings functioning on a non-neural basis already have cognition. The biogenic approach proceeds from the fact that cognition is considered as a process aimed at achieving a favorable state of a biological agent for solving existential tasks (conservation and reproduction), taking into account a certain prototype of such a state based on the control of physico-chemical processes carried out inside the body and taking into account the infl uence of external factors and past experience. The article concludes that the biogenic approach has many strengths, as it allows us to determine the primary level of biological complexity of the cognition process, aims to fi nd criteria for identifying biological beings with cognition, and provides an opportunity to initiate a discussion on the construction of a unifi ed theory of cognition that takes into account and unites all manifestations of cognition at different levels of cognitive complexity. However, the biogenic approach cannot avoid a number of problems (terminological ambiguity regarding the defi nition of cognition, the lack of clear criteria for cognizing and non-cognizing biological beings, as well as the mechanisms of cognitive complexity, etc.).

In this regard, the article proposes to formulate a broad and narrow interpretation of the concept of ‘cognition’, move away from a purely quantitative approach to understanding different levels of cognitive complexity, and investigate the causes and mechanisms of such complexity, taking into account the qualitative specifi cs of the levels of biological organization of living beings.

The research is presented in methodological, scientifi c, institutional, ethical aspects.

The author has developed a dynamic process methodology (DPM), which includes: the APМ approach (selection of scientifi c results in a given fi eld), the SPМ approach (selection of scientifi c personnel), the Flow Method (improves the quality of forecasts, reducing uncertainty and risks), technology for selecting the most signifi cant achievements in a given fi eld of science. The article reveals the possibilities of DPM in relation to science and education as branches of the national economy. The DPM is actually a tool for selecting high-quality scientifi c developments and their authors in order to protect them and possibly introduce them into the country’s practice.

From the point of view of economic security (ES) as a science, the uniqueness of national economic security (NES) as an object of research is shown, since it is not the ES of signifi cant economic entities (households, organizations, million-plus cities, regions, industries, the state), but a completely new independent fi eld of research. In this paper, the author will present one of the subjects of NES as a multidisciplinary object – how plagiarism negatively affects the effi ciency of using budget funds.

From the institutional point of view, it proves the need to create a special body that ensures the safety of the national economy, since in the context of a hybrid war, the issues of speed and quality of decisions are particularly acute, which are practically impossible to implement in the current situation due to the distribution of responsibility between different regulatory bodies of the economic bloc.

Ethically, the issues of plagiarism and responsibility for it are currently a painful topic for a scientist of any specialty. The author suggests defi ning plagiarism on two levels: verbatim borrowings and borrowing ideas. DPM in science and education is able to create a healthy scientifi c environment as a prevention of plagiarism at all levels and unjustifi ed spending of budget funds. It is proposed to create a “board of honor” for Russian scientists in the form of an encyclopedia in all scientifi c fi elds with a brief description of their scientifi c contributions.

Here we discuss in more detail the implications of such outcomes, and what are the possible ways that our worldviews can be modifi ed to account for the experimental facts. As we will see, the standard mechanistic picture of the universe is no longer a viable option, and it will never be again. Nowadays, we know this with certainty unusual for physics, that only a strict mathematical theorem could provide. We hope, that the 2022 Nobel Prizes in Physics will help to draw attention to the scientifi c and philosophical revolution that took place almost half a century ago (with the fi rst Bell tests), and that the clock-like picture of reality will soon be widely recognized for what it is – the “fl at Earth” of the philosophy of science.

The topic of active implementation of AI technologies in modern educational reality is one of the most popular in modern scientifi c discourse. This article is aimed at fi xing the points of view of domestic and foreign research community regarding the possibilities of applying artifi cial intelligence (AI) technologies in the educational sphere. The discussion is centered not so much on the diversity of approaches, topics, and strategies as on a semi-systematic (descriptive) literature review aimed at identifying the most signifi cant research traditions for the topic under consideration. The latter include specifi c applications of AI technologies, the context of technology use related to the recently concluded COVID-19 pandemic, AI as a tool for learners’ adaptation in the educational process, as well as the analysis of opportunities, limitations, positive expectations and threats to the active implementation of AI technologies in education. Both the diversity of research positions and their ambiguity are recorded. It becomes obvious that despite the large number of publications devoted to the application of AI technologies in the educational process, a number of aspects remain unclear, including the understanding of what is the phe-nomenon of modern education in the context of the AI technologies application and how it is transformed under the infl uence of such technologies. The need for further understanding of the role and place of AI technologies in modern social practices within the educational process is emphasized.

The article is devoted to the assessment of the relevance of conducted scientifi c research using the indicators proposed by the author and their characterisation based on assigning appropriate weighting coeffi cients to each indicator. Terms and their new defi nitions characterising the relevance of the conducted research are proposed, while their essence and content are disclosed.

The object of the study is the result of research work (regardless of the subject area and research focus), the subject is the relevance of the obtained research results.

The research methodology is based on the method of analyzing the existing approaches to assessing the relevance of research results, as well as the experience of practical activities of the organisation in reviewing the results of research and development work.

In the course of the conducted research it was found that the issues of relevance of the results of research work are given much less importance than the relevance of the topic, purpose and objectives of research at the stage of development of tactical and technical (technical) task of research work. At the same time, in the course of reviewing the results of completed R&D work, the reviewer lacks methodological approaches to their adequate assessment.

According to the results of the conducted research, the criteria and conditions are defi ned, when fulfi lled, it is considered appropriate to recognise the results of the conducted research as relevant. Practical recommendations on the use of the obtained research results as a basis for the methodology of assessing the relevance of the obtained results of research and development work are given.

The participants of the round table discussed the problems of transformation of the information space and the place of the human being in this process. This includes the issues of introducing artifi cial intelligence in the learning process, and the nature of human changes in the new conditions dictated by the need to respond to the relevant challenges of ever-changing technologies. The question of the changing relationship between knowledge and information in connection with the habit of using smartphones, when there is a serious degradation of the value of knowledge. Also we observe a paradigm shift in the education system and the need to respond to it as adequately as possible. The problem of adapting to fundamentally changing communication technologies that change social relations and ways of identifi cation and even self-identifi cation. The question arises about the suffi ciency of the level of human adaptability in relations with the environment formed by these technologies and  more broadly – about the validity of the ideas of transhumanism. The phenomenon of imitation of thinking is discussed, when the tasks requiring solution are reduced to the process of ‘stimulus – reaction’, as well as the problem of creativity control by bureaucratic structures in the conditions of changes in the relations between scientifi c and technological progress and social progress.