Doctrinal legal thinking as the basis of theoretical research (on the example of the theory of status public law)

The author analyzes doctrinal legal thinking in the context of ontological characteristics of thinking — the object of metasubject research in the field of cognitive psychology, physiology of thinking and other areas of modern science and, above all, in philosophy. As a result, problematizes the resources of doctrinal legal thinking in the process of producing new true knowledge, organized in the form of private legal theory, the indicators of which correlate the criteria of epistemology. Attention is drawn to the fact that in the process of developing private legal theories, which “feeds” the General legal theory, at the initial stage, of course, it is important to use the experience accumulated within a certain doctrine. Nevertheless, the limitation of the doctrinal legal worldview is noted. The author sees it in the fact that the doctrinal legal worldview (paradigm) is not able to ensure the transition to a qualitatively new knowledge according to the epistemological Maxim: from the old knowledge, the new is fundamentally not deducible. In this regard, the author substantiates the heuristic possibilities of a complex methodology. It is a complex, contextual methodology that allows, firstly, to obtain a qualitatively new knowledge about the object of a private theory; and, secondly, a complex methodology allows us to count on the fact that the knowledge obtained as a personal knowledge — thanks to the subject of the study, legal and related state reality are able to be expressed and framed in lexical constructions — the knowledge obtained, nevertheless, meets the criterion of objectivity. An illustrative example is the private theory of public law status, which is characterized in the context of epistemological criteria, namely: object, subject, empirical and regulatory framework, philosophical and ideological grounds and, of course, complex methodology.