Prospects for the study of the intellectual community in the light of new methodological concepts

Abstract

Abstract. The purpose of the work outlines innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the phenomenon of the intellectual community.
In particular, this section is conducted on the example of the functioning of natural scientific societies in the territory of Ukraine of the 19 and early 21 centuries, which is one of the forms of intellectual communities. The methodology. The authors, beside the traditional historical (historical-thematic and historical-chronological) vision of the problem, offer to study it through the prism of the sociocultural approach, the network model of science, the methods of synergetics, the institutional methodology, the concept of "emotional community", the methodology of mental (cognitive) maps, as well as interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary synthesis, principles of anthropologization and personification of historical and scientific cognition. Conclusions. It has been found out that the sociocultural approach makes possible to combine into one whole three components: the person as a subject of interaction (scientist, a member of the scientific community); society as a set of interacting individuals with its socio-cultural relations and processes (transformational changes during the 19 – early 21 century in the field of politics, ideology, economics, ideological social orientations, etc.); culture as a set of values and norms (corporate culture of natural scientists). With the help of the intelligent network simulation method, it is possible to display the vertical circuits of the intellectual communities or the so-called "Intergenerational networks" like teacher/student; "Horizontal alliances", that is, interrelated sequential groups of intellectuals; as well as structural competition within professional groups (intellectual partnership/competition). In this context, it seems advisable to use synergetic methods – an interdisciplinary concept of the self-organization of complex systems in the space of their evolution, which is the alternation of two mutually exclusive processes – hierarchy and dehierarchy. Due to the authors’ thoughts, the use of institutional methodology lies in reflecting of transformation of the development of scientific societies in the context of neo-institutionalism, which studies the dynamic aspects of institutionalization. It is proved that the prospects of studying the intellectual community as a social institution consist in the study of the course of its primary and secondary institutionalization, the identification of indicators and sources of each of the institutional levels, the identification of the characteristic features of the social institute as a product of institutionalization processes and so on. Equally important is consideration of the problem of scientific creativity using psychological and socio-psychological methods (motivational structure of the person of the scientist, age dynamics of individual and collective scientific creativity, distribution of roles and leadership in scientific collectives, system of interpersonal relations in the process of scientific activity, psychological mechanism of scientific discovery and his assessment of the scientific environment, etc.), which is successfully realized through the use of the innovative research concept "emotional community". The emphasis is made on the expediency of using mental maps of individual in constructing biographies of scientists.