Dichotomy and Two-Component Polytomy in Contemporary Sociology

Abstract. The article reveals the need to rethink the heuristic potential of dichotomy as a cognition method in the research of contemporary social reality, which characterizes by its structure complication and dynamics acceleration. Based on the analysis of recent works by foreign and Russian authors, it gives the description of the understanding of dichotomy and the dichotomous method in social and humanitarian knowledge, its comparison with other terms used to characterize opposites and their relationship, and the separation of dichotomies into scientific and everyday ones. This paper analyzes the practice of applying the dichotomous method in sociological research in recent years: it identifies the main sociological dichotomies and reveals their movement in contemporary sociological knowledge, which consists of the use of established dichotomies in the research of the balance between extremes, the convergence of opposites, overcoming contradictions and, conversely, their exacerbation, polarization of social relations that are observed in the contemporary world, as well as the formation of new binary pairs following the example of the dichotomy «sustainability – vulnerability». It determines the changes in the practice of dichotomous method using in the field of social and sociological cognition: on the one side, there is a transition from its use as the main research method to use in combination with other methods and methodological techniques, which allows solving a wider range of research tasks, on the other side, along with dichotomies, researchers construct two-term polytomies, which their authors call dichotomies. The author reveals significant heuristic possibilities of the dichotomous method for conceptualization, analysis and explanation of the increasingly complex and dynamic contemporary social reality: this method allows you to identify the differences between the research objects, to carry out their comparative analysis and interpretation, to reveal their dualism and opposite sides, while emphasizing the independence and interconnectedness of these extremes, to order and generalize the data obtained on the basis of this method, to develop alternative models of explanation.

Keywords: dichotomy, dichotomous method, dichotomy «sustainability ‒ vulnerability», sociological research methodology, sociological knowledge.