Ideas and Ideals

The research is devoted to philosophical reflection on the impact of socio-cultural factors on the modern theory of communication development. The source of the observed diversity of the disunity of modern communication research primarily contains in the multidimensional nature of the phenomenon. Multidirectionality of communication studies is also a consequence of the researchers’ aptitude to the influence of certain socio-cultural factors. The article offers the challenge to outline a number of socio-cultural determinants that caused the dynamics of communication studies of the XX – the beginning of the XXI centuries and to clarify the mechanisms, procedures of their influence on the formation of the theory of communication. As a result of linguistic and chronological approach to modern communication research in the article the author traces the genesis of certain intentions of the communicative theory generated by the state of social and cultural backgrounds of the implemented communication studies. There is a revealed number of significant socio-cultural determinants based on the analysis conducted by the author, such as: a high level of internal autonomy of researchers and research dissonance of cultural and linguistic chronotopes. The impact of social and cultural events from the outside (especially in cases when the events affect the deep layers of society) is located in the same row. Actually, the purpose of the article is a factual verification of generally known terms of the socio-cultural determination of modern communication studies. As a result, we plan to designate a number of socio-cultural factors behind a range of the research intentions in the framework of the theory of communication.

The article analyzes the legal status of Canadian Indians highlighting its ethnocultural peculiarities. Canada is the first country in the world that ensured the legal status of Indians on the Constitutional level. The Aboriginal rights movement, rooted in the 1970s, greatly encouraged the adoption of the new policy towards Indian population. It should be mentioned that vast majority of Aboriginal people didn’t assimilate into Euro-Canadian society; thus, they still maintain a traditional indigenous lifestyle. Nowadays, all the Indians in Canada are divided into two legal categories: status and non-status Indians. Status Indians proved their Aboriginal origins; they are eligible for registration under the Indian Act, which provides a number of special rights and social benefits including the right to live in reservations. Non-status Indians are not registered with the federal government, so they are deprived of a range of rights available for status Indians. Indians residing on a reserve share unique cultures, identities, languages, and views of self-government, education, healthcare and tax systems.

The aim of the work is to identify the problems of the formation of engineer's culture in the system of higher education. Proceeding from the key role of social education in the development of culture, the authors analyze the state of contemporary Russian education, relying on the opinions of many academic educators. Basing on the conducted analysis, the authors draw a conclusion about the need for social and moral education of students, in particular, future engineers, in the process of their professional training. The authors substantiate the proposition that the basis of the professional ethics of an engineer is high culture of an individual, which must be formed at all levels of education. The concepts of the general culture of an individual and the professional culture of an engineer are correlated. The authors present the characteristic of the engineer's personality culture in the context of the new standard of education. It is indicated that the competence approach is fundamental in the formation of a technical college of engineering specialties graduate. The article also reveals the shortcomings of this approach; the main ones are the narrow specialization of a modern graduate of a higher education institution and one-sidedness of his education. It is pointed out that it is necessary to form such qualities of the future engineer as initiative and responsibility. The article analyzes the students opinions about the ethics of an engineer, the most part of students agree that the ethics of an engineer assumes responsibility to the society for the results of their activities. The article analyzes two main approaches to modern education. At the heart of the first is the formation of professional competencies, the basis of the second is the primacy in the formation of the person’s spiritual values. Moreover, the latter implies an organic integration of the competence approach and the traditional cognitive approach to the culture-centricity of vocational education, in the process of which spiritual, aesthetic, social, ecological and political development of the personality takes place. The basis of this approach should be a set of fundamental concepts of general and professional culture, based on national culture. Cultural-centric approach allows you to approach professional training in a comprehensive, systematic, holistic manner, which is a necessary condition for the formation of a future engineer's culture.

The article presents a sociophilosophical analysis of the problem of identity formation in contemporary society with its systemic transitional character. The idea of complex identity formation in sociospatial form is put forward and substantiated. Identity types, presented as a hierarchical structure in some conceptions, are positioned as components of sociospatial identity.  Due to highly dynamic social changes and processes the structure of sociospatial identity undergoes transformations, resulting in strengthening some components and loss of importance of the other ones. Factors, determining new identity types and transformations of the process of identification of the social actor are discussed. Major tendencies of its self-identification and their results are revealed. The most relevant of them are the following: identity fragmentation and, consequently, the breakdown of its hierarchy, transgressing the limits of national identity and formation of alternative identities (transnational, binational), strengthening of ethnic and cultural identities. Overall, the shift of identity formation from macro-social level and its dispersion to meso- and micro-social levels is established. The significance of the structure center loss is emphasized, indicating the state of chaos, which is analyzed from post-modernist viewpoint as a chance for plural identity formation in the contemporary society and, consequently, antinomic tendencies of the process.  The most relevant aspects of the presented issues, requiring further empirical investigation, are identified in the conclusion.

 The work provides insight into the formation and development of the “public opinion” concept in the latter half of 18^th century. A comparative analysis of the articles ‘opinion’ and ‘public opinion’ in the “Encyclopedia” of Diderot & d'Alembert and in the “Encyclopédie Méthodique” provides an opportunity to trace evolution and the distance between the perceptions of two notions during the various periods of time. The article considers ‘opinion’ as “doubtful and uncertain judgment” and ‘opinions’ as points of view of judges underlying the judgement, which the French Encyclopaedists referred to legal and logical spheres, and their impact on the formation of the “public opinion” concept. The work provides an analysis of ideas of public opinion as a mechanism of public control of social and political realm, which peculiarity is independence from the sphere of state regulation and the lack of institutionalized means of influencing the institutions.

The central idea of this article is that the problem of representation of cyborg experience for us, non-modified humans, becomes solvable by the composition of two semiotic approaches: biosemiotics and actant semiotics. First, since "cyborg" implies cybernetic organism, we may consider technomodified humans to the сertain extent equivalent with animals. Therefore we can use the method of Umwelt-analysis: it was created by J.von Uexkull to reconstruct how the world is given to a living organism with particular bodily structure in "action-perception" functional circles. Within Umwelt-analysis, biosemiotics exposes the way in which perceived world appears to an organism as consisting of "material signs" where an organism itself is a sort of "communicative structure". The very possibility to describe Umwelt obtains because an environment and an organism stand in sign-relations with each other (which is also true for cyborgs). On the next step, we use tools of actant semiotics from works of B. Latour to clarify how Umwelt-descriptions produce immersive effects upon us, representing the experience of an organism. Latour claims that, once the flow of transformations from material actants to textual ones is done, the realism of scientific texts comes from a composition of characters, or, in semiotician terms, "inner frame of reference". Revealing of semiotic operations (shifting out, shifting in and figuration) in Umwelt-descriptions then displays how viewpoint of an organism on the world appears inside world-text and takes readers attention. We test proposed the approach on the example of people with magnetic implants, concluding with further perspectives of its application.

Taxonomy of the world traced back to classic commentator’s tradition of Porphyry. The works by Porphyry gives us foundation to judge the tempo of development of semiotics and philosophy of the name. Compiling the taxonomy of the natural world Porphyry drew subtle definition of objective and nonobjective substances in the live languages by means of their formal exposure. The characteristics of individual exposure of the world coincides with the consequence of layers in the map of the world since ancient periods until nowadays. Thus the sequence of floral, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic codes in interpretation of the world coincides with the natural taxonomy of the tree by Porphyry. The presentation of individual meanings is connected with the transition from poor sections of the taxonomy to the developed ones. So the individual properties of space are at maximum low, and many spatial substances acquire metaphorical meaning in floral, zoomoorphic and anthropomorphic codes. The degree of individual properties is increasing due to their denoting by proper names, which transfer the higher degree of discretion. The individual properties present themselves a sort of fossils, within which we detect the change of the mapping of the world. Therefore the most ancient Indo-European mapping of the world is connected with the concept of the world tree. So the researcher gets a possibility to register such fossils in the form of the individual texts which depict the image of the space in the evolutionary program of space. As a substitution of floral code zoomorphic code comes, when individual properties of space are described on the basis of the form of the animal. The body of the animal in individual properties is richer than the plant. Then the anthropomorphic code comes. The mapping of the world is a very important task in metaphors microcosm- and macrocosm. The metaphors lexically are independent from each other, which gives the evidence of low plausibility of mixture in the order of space. The deeper we penetrate into the ancient layers of language, the more specialized meanings we discover.

In the article the words “mir”, “volya”, “svet”, “pravda”. On the material of the Ancient Russian literature it is shown that each of these words has at least two substantially distinct meanings, and two (or three) meanings influence each other, creating game of senses inexpressible in other languages. At the same time, these words define the semantic core of national self-identification in modern times, forming the certain attitude to the key principles of life. In XIX-th century in Russian poetry “volya” is opposed to the Western “svoboda” (liberty) as the Christian goal to specific political position. The ambivalence of the national consciousness is presented by the fact that the ideal peaceful beauty of the mundane cooperative communal life coexisted with a free desire to get beyond the world-community and earthly world. Yet both ideals were receiving internal justification, intersecting with Pravda-truth as well as with pravda-justice.

How to express inexpressibly complicated things in a simple way? In order to find the answer to this question, Art always comes up with the only solution, which means modifying its own expressional vocabulary, to alter and renew the language. As a rule, the reaction of the perceptive audience, rigidly philistine in the most cases, was stigma of the new art principles, its apologists and creators. In the 19th century, there was an opposing reciprocal reaction on the part of the artists, which manifested in the image of the unappreciated genius and his proclamation of the Art of future whereas sublimation of the genius phenomenon transformed from the concrete personality into abstract principles. They are often expressed in the characters’ names, and even through the names of mythological Gods which seemed to be so symbolic and collective that the process of their complete transformation is hidden behind each of them. This process has already become common practice in art, for instance, as it was in Franz Liszt’s demonic imagery.

The article investigates the characteristics of socio-cultural manifestations of theoretical knowledge about socialization. The author identifies these manifestations with the theoretical images, which have three attributes. First, theoretical images are the results of (re-)construction of theoretical discourse which appropriately represents the main traits of reality. Second, the mentioned images correspond with the types of scientific and philosophic rationality, i. e. classical, non-classical, post-nonclassical rationality. Third, theoretical images rely on different versions of normative, interpretative or normative-interpretative methodological perspectives. The author argues that the listed attributes should be given a high priority while studying knowledge about socialization as phenomena of socio-cultural reality.