Psychology and methodology: prospects of co-organization

Abstract

The proposed text recording of lectures given by a famous thinker-methodologist in March 1987 at one of the universities belongs to the last period of his amazingly productive work, namely to the creation of a working scheme of thought-activity, forms, means and conditions of its various reflexive elaboration and to the full formation of system-though-activity methodology as an innovative socio-cultural phenomenon in its intellectual environment – in the systematic hard work of the Moscow Methodological Circle. In addition, it is at this historical time that the idea of methodological games is mastered programmatically, organizationally and imitation-technically, and numerous organizational games are held in various problem-thematic areas of solving the most difficult scientific, industrial and covital situations. The s u b j e c t  of the collective thought communication of the lecturer with the audience of professional psychologists, which unites the problem areas of the actualized polydialogical semantic landscape of thoughts, questions, answers, arguments, are the historical perspectives of the psychology development. The lecturer offers to abandon the Galilean model of science and Wundt’s model of psychological science, in particular because of their detachment from life and their functioning in their own artificial areas of laws and regularities as ideal abstractions. Therefore, he, unequivocally denying psychologism of any kind, supports not a natural-scientific strategy of empowerment of psychology, but an intelligible, reflexive-interpretive one, which is interested in explaining, constructing and describing true mental reality according to adequately defined goals and values, forms and methods, ways and means of carried out thought-activity. The basic thesis here is formulated very categorically; “outside the framework of methodological thought, no psychology can be.” This is argued by the fact that only methodological thinking allows thought-activity of any psychological content by appropriate means, methods, forms, adequate to a particular life situation. Besides, the projected enrichment of the psychology’s subject field in the coming decades will be determined not by the available material and not by ontological content, but by a methodological approach or a full-fledged philosophical methodologem, though “thinking itself cannot be studied psychologically.” The optimal form of organization and an integral condition for the development of collective thought-activity, in particular in the field of psychology, is organizational game, which at the same time, on the principle of three “s”, provides self-activity, self-organization and self-development of its participants, that operate in a simulated, but real, problem-conflict situation.