RUDN journal of Sociology (Sep 2023)
Synergetic paradigm of the global world
Abstract
All sociological paradigms are based on the existing picture of the world, which determines them through cognitive models. Thus, the Darwinian evolutionism and dialectical materialism that developed in the last century were mainly based on four cognitive models: scholastic (nature and society as texts), mechanistic (nature and society as machines), statistical (nature and society as balances of average values) and systemic (nature and society as organisms). Contemporary sociological paradigms - of social facts, social behavior, social definitions and determinism - are also based on these cognitive models; however, today social processes go beyond these cognitive models, and there is a growing interest in an interdisciplinary approach called ‘synergetics’ (1). The synergetic approach uses such concepts as ‘order’, ‘chaos’, ‘nonlinearity’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘instability’, ‘dissipative structures’, ‘bifurcation’, ‘attractor’ and etc. Synergetics studies the general laws of self-organization, stability and destruction of ordered structures in complex systems of various nature; it is a theory of self-organization and development of open systems of any origin [6]. The synergetic style of scientific thinking presupposes a probabilistic vision of the world, which developed in the 19th century. Synergetics contributes to the formation of a new type of scientific thinking - post-non-classical, to the inclusion of humanistic and axiological parameters in scientific research and to the development of non-linear thinking, proving the inadequacy of the model of consistent and gradual cumulative development. The new sociological paradigm should accept the idea of synergetics about the interconnectedness of epistemology and ontology, i.e. the idea that the cognitive activity of the subject changes reality: the very choice of the object, conceptual scheme, methods and the use of the results obtained forms, changes and destroys the ontological basis; therefore, the researcher is responsible for the world that he creates and reforms.
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