The Moscow Methodological Circle: Its Main Ideas and Evolution

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of Russian methodological thought, namely, a philosophical school known as the Moscow Methodological Circle. The paper analyzes the transition from the study of thought during the first stage, to the institutionalization of thought during the second. In the first stage, thought was viewed primarily from a semiotic and historical standpoint, whereas the aim in the second stage was to construct a theory of activity. Here, thought was treated as a type of activity and termed “methodological thinking”, and the source of knowledge about thought was the creative work of the methodologists, rather than the study of thought. The paper analyzes the specifics of methodological thinking and the new methodological practice. Methodological thinking is examined as a supreme ontology where the aim is to reform unfulfilled forms of thinking. A number of principles of the methodological approach are formulated: the methodologists’ creative work as the frame of reference, assimilation of intellectual technologies, and a distinction between particular and general methodology. Within the framework of the new methodological practice, several independent directions of methodology come together, marking a crisis in methodological thought. Approaches to resolving the crisis are reviewed: the new demands of the times that need to be addressed by the methodology, the need for different variations of the “supreme ontology”, a sustainable culture of methodological thinking, and a better understanding of the history of methodology.

Keywords:

• Thought
• Thinking
• Activity
• Methodology
• Creative Work
• History
• Culture

Notes

1. ^‘What happened in practice was that, during all the turning points marking the main stages of the formation of science—antiquity, the late Middle Ages and the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries—methodology was shaped first, and then science emerged and was shaped within it, essentially, as a specific organization of certain parts of methodology’ (Shchedrovitsky 1995c, 151).

2. ‘A methodology developed in this manner will include examples of all forms, means and styles of thought, including methodical, constructive-technical, scientific, organizational-managerial, historical and etc. It will freely employ all types and kinds of knowledge, but will be based primarily on a special complex of methodological disciplines—the theory of thought activity, the theory of thought, the theory of activity, semiotics, the theory of knowledge, the theory of communications and mutual understanding’ (Shchedrovitsky 1995c, 152–153).

3. In my works, I show how reasoning and cognition, schemas and ideal objects are formed. The formation and functioning of these discursive practices cannot be understood or explained without the use of semiotics and the science of schemas (Rozin 2001, 2011).

4. This is exactly why Aristotle creates rules and categories, and formulates the first concept of thought, asserting that every person is endowed with the corresponding capability of thought. This capability, according to Aristotle, presupposes the use of rules and categories, as well as a yearning for truth.

5. An important role in controlling one’s own thinking is carried out by collective forms of thought practiced in methodology—primarily, seminars with problematization and harsh critique. These set the “point of non-being” that Bakhtin had described, allowing the whole to be set and enabling an objective view of one’s own thinking. In addition, the thought of every seminar participant expands through others’ thinking, thereby turning the seminar into a real social body of the thinking individual.

6. For example, O. Genisaretsky began to develop the philosophic version of methodology and, in the process of making sense of the practice of humanitarian and culturological thought, while not sharing the values of the socio-technical approach, developed the idea of a “limited liability methodology”. S. Popov, on the other hand, proceeded in the direction of methodological and social engineering, etc. After Shchedrovitsky passed away, the methodology disintegrated into a number of separate directions, which came to be organizationally shaped either into independent groups or seminars, or represented simply by individual, famous methodologists.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vadim M. Rozin

Vadim Markovich Rozin is professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences.