Towards a discussion on the collective subject of scientific knowledge

The article offers an analytical review of domestic and foreign research on the collective subject of scientific knowledge. The effect of the scientific activity collective nature becomes a topic of discussion in the context of transcendentalism crisis and increasing interest in the social dimension of science. The research method is a genealogical deconstruction of intellectual history. The study led to the following conclusions. Within the transcendentalist paradigm, subjectivity, constructed according to the ego cogito model, is neither individual nor collective. The interactions of scientists in the "invisible college" lack their own density until the time of Robert Merton, whose ethical code for scientists is conceived as remaining unchanged regardless of the dynamics of the social situation. Karl Popper's critical realism asserts the important thesis that the ways in which objective knowledge is handled are directly collective in nature. However, the "third world" (the sphere of scientific knowledge) is completely devoid of subjective characteristics. V.A. Lektorsky and N.M. Smirnova present the dialectic of individual and collective subjects of knowledge. The jointness of scientific activity is understood as a derivative of the joint nature of human practice in general, so the bearer of knowledge is a collective subject, understood as a social system that cannot be reduced to a conglomerate of people who comprise it. The constructivist approach to the problem originates with L. Fleck, who proposed the concepts of thought-collectives and thought-styles that determine what cannot be thought in any other way. This idea is further developed in the sociology of science, primarily by S. Woolgar and B. Latour. Finally, we see a tradition of sociology and anthropology of academic communities, which explores the collective dimension of the subject of scientific knowledge, starting from the empirical description of communication models, academic life rituals and success strategies.

collective subject, collective knowledge, science, thought-collectives, thought-style, scientific communication, practice, critical realism, dialectics, constructivism