Section 9

Section 9. THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH IN THE HUMANITIES

How many times has the world been told…

Socionics represents the embryo of a new scientific direction. Its fate, apparently, determines the scientific status of psychology, which, although counted among the sciences, remains to this day merely a repository of a large number of empirically discovered recipes — often effective, but with no unifying theory behind them, and many of which lack rigorous scientific justification. Most psychologists, having defects in their methodological complex, do not understand that this is the result of the deforming influence of the ideas of positivism. This remark, incidentally, applies equally to sciences adjacent to psychology, such as psychiatry and sociology, as well as many other humanities endeavours. There are sufficient grounds to believe that it is precisely socionics that is capable of becoming the generalizing theoretical foundation of such sciences.

However, socionics — while successfully performing the applied role of a humanitarian technology — is at present still far from the image of a classical science with an established terminological base, and many of its concepts are far from full justification, receiving only subjective interpretations from its leading adherents. By 2012 there were already some three dozen variant interpretations of it, whose authors prove incapable not only of carrying out such a justification, but cannot even reach consensus on the numerous points of disagreement.

Socionics, as a relatively recent direction of scientific inquiry, is interesting from the standpoint of the philosophy of science as an object of empirical observation: its short history abounds in searches, discoveries, errors, myths and prejudices. And here the problem of truth asserts itself with renewed force. Does a true exposition of socionics exist? Or is that of no interest to anyone? Or does it have no significance whatsoever? What is truth in socionics? What is truth in philosophy? What is truth in the humanities? At present socionics is represented in at least four guises:

1. As the embryo of a potential science;
2. As roughly three dozen proprietary (author-specific) technologies;
3. As a game of “WHO-IS-CALLED-WHAT” — for adults and children;
4. As socionic “stiob” (mockery), that is, the irresponsible and often vulgar use of socionic terminology for humorous or ironic purposes as a form of self-assertion. This form is widespread on the Internet, but one can encounter it in everyday life as well. Mockery is a characteristic sign of popularity combined with superficial understanding of the subject.

The problem of truth is the key problem of the theory of knowledge. But if it is somehow solved in the natural sciences, in the humanities ideological expediency still reigns. Take, for example, modern sociology: a significant portion of its adherents, who formerly served political dogmatism and totalitarianism, have turned into the servants of political adventurism, because one can earn well by it — and earn they do. Such scientific earning, or corruption, may have various “shades,” but this corruption undoubtedly belongs to the factors that distort knowledge. Add to this that such distortion lies largely in the sphere of consciousness — that is, the renunciation of truth, betrayal of it, and open mockery of it occur while people are in the state that physicians characterize as practical health. And is it not to this that we owe the fact that politicians use scientific achievements not to solve social problems but to deceive people on a scientific basis, for instance with the use of NLP and scientifically grounded PR technologies? People may, however, sincerely believe in the adequacy of the concepts and constructs they use, which can easily become the basis for the mutual opposition of individual scientists as well as of scientific schools.

“What do I mean when I speak of a crisis?” says a Russian scholar, commenting on an outstanding achievement in the humanities — the logical proof of the authenticity of the text of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. “All too often the vectors of the humanities in the 20th century were (and in the 21st still are) dictated by the momentary reference points of current politics. Whereas, one would think, it should be the reverse: the vectors of politics should be determined by the results and conclusions of humanities research” [7]. In this statement the cognitive situation in the humanities is assessed in maximally compressed form.

The question of truth in the humanities is very closely bound up with the psychology of the subconscious and with the social position of the scholar. Most contemporary philosophers and scientists belong to the privileged class, and are therefore consciously or subconsciously inclined to develop theories aimed at preserving the status quo — their own and that of the class to which they belong. They are, at least subconsciously, not interested in establishing Absolute Truth, because it might prove inconvenient. Such philosophers therefore choose the theoretical strategy of scepticism, agnosticism, or even nihilism — to which belong non-constructive, destructive criticism, the suppression or distortion of scientific truths. Positivism in all its varieties, incidentally, belongs here too.

After Marx, with his revolutionary ideas and the practice of his followers, the ruling classes experienced an existential stress under whose influence they substantially altered their class strategies. In part they resorted to creating extremely reactionary regimes whose main task was the direct suppression of the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed classes. But after the horrors of German fascism, the ideologists of the ruling classes began to seek liberal models for keeping any struggle for justice by the oppressed class under control. Alongside substantial changes in the models of class relations — one of which became parliamentary-oligarchic liberalism — and a certain reduction of the gap in living standards between rich and poor, an optimization of theoretical views in the spirit of liberal values was carried out. An unprecedented campaign to neutralize the influence of Marxist ideas was conducted. The best bourgeois minds were engaged in this (and they did it within the bounds of science!): psychologists, sociologists, philosophers and everyone who cared to. And they achieved a certain success — also because their work was well financed, while the ideology of communism in the Soviet Union had been compromised by the dogmatism and social mediocrity of the ruling elite, as well as by the people’s loss of social perspective.

The real achievements of Marxism in materialist dialectics, which for Marx were an instrument for discovering social truths, bourgeois philosophers distorted, eviscerated and discredited. In the universities of bourgeois countries it was mentioned only in a critical key, as a doctrine that either violates rational standards of cognition or is too down-to-earth and compromised by materialism. Unfamiliarity with, or outright rejection of, the dialectical-materialist methodology led Western philosophy into the dead end of logical, phenomenological and analytical positivism and pragmatism — though this did not prevent Western science, on the basis of pragmatism, from developing effective technologies. But that did not and does not solve the basic social problems connected with creating a just society — indeed, the very concept of justice has no unambiguous scientific definition. And this can be understood to mean that the problem of truth in the humanities has remained and remains unsolved because there are forces interested in exactly that, and they spend the corresponding money on it.

The change of philosophical paradigms in Europe can be approached as a single, centuries-long process of the formation of ideas about the essence of the world and the possibility of knowing it — and hence about truth as the ultimate result of cognition. One possible outcome of this process could be a true understanding of truth itself.

Here I would like to consider the essentialist approach to Truth, connected with its nature, its existence and the possibility of attaining it. Questions of pseudoscience intersect with the question of Truth; some of them were considered in the chapter “Extreme Dimensions of Modern Science.” Given what was said earlier, let us discard romantic hopes for a practical solution of the problem of Truth in a corrupted society and concentrate on the abstract side of the question. Let us stress that the search for truth in the humanities cannot be isolated from its search, above all, in philosophy.

Without claiming a complete analysis of the stated theme, we shall make only the necessary survey of the key moments in the formation of the concept of truth in philosophy and, in particular, of the understanding of truth in the humanities.

Peering into the motley variety of contemporary philosophical approaches to the problem of truth, one may come to the sad conclusion that not just humanity, but even, apparently, its cleverest part — the philosophers — have proved incapable of finding its final solution.

The starting position of modern Western European philosophy is the varieties of Kantianism. The basic thesis of Kantianism and of all its later adaptations is the impossibility of knowing the “thing-in-itself” — that is, of knowing how nature and the objects and processes filling it are constituted and function in themselves, independently of their representation in human consciousness. In one form or another this principle is preserved in all forms of positivism — in its logical, linguistic and phenomenological variants. The element of agnosticism present there has never been overcome in the numerous variations of philosophical inquiry, which gives grounds to consider these philosophies incapable of going all the way in solving the problem of truth. One way or another, sooner or later they halt before the barrier of the “thing-in-itself” in the natural sciences and the pluralism of opinions in the humanities.

Kant was not the first to assert the impossibility of complete knowledge of nature, but his was a conclusion based on rigorous logical reasoning. Here his psychological type is of fundamental importance. Being a logical-intuitive introvert (LII) — or, what is the same, a rational thinking intuitive — he was organically incapable of taking any thesis on faith and sought its logical grounds. He was the first among philosophers to conduct a unique thought experiment based on strict logical reasoning applied to the ultimate antinomies, that is, opposed assertions of a fundamental character. Among them is, for example, the question of the temporal and spatial limits of the Universe. Is the Universe bounded in space and time, or is it infinite in both respects? And he showed that both possibilities, while incompatible with each other, individually do not contradict formal logic. Note that formal logic is one of the summits of rationality. Kant framed these inquiries in the categories of the “thing-in-itself” and the “thing-for-us,” which divided the world into what is accessible and what is supposedly inaccessible to the human intellect. Moreover, for people of this type strict submission to moral principles is imperative. This is because in the structure of their psyche the function responsible for the individual’s relation to morality stands at the information input and works as a filter of what is acceptable to the personality and what is not. This, in particular, explains Kant’s heightened interest in the justification of morality and his introduction of the concept of the categorical imperative. That Kant, through his reasoning about the antinomies, demonstrated a fundamental limitation of the human intellect is equivalent to asserting the impossibility of attaining truth — which in this case would have to mean an unambiguous answer to the question of the finitude or infinitude of the Universe. Note, however, that this conclusion is limited to rationality.

It is interesting to compare Kant’s position with the philosophical work of Hegel, whose psychological type belongs to intuitive-logical introversion (ILI) — or, what is the same, he was an irrational intuitive thinker. He found a way of balanced relation to opposites, proving their systemic interdependence and the necessity of taking their joint contribution to Truth into account. Hegel proposed the dialectical key to the cognition of Truth and thus opened the path to knowing it. This, as it turned out, does not guarantee its automatic attainment, and did not save Hegel himself from metaphysical traps in cognition. This happened because he proved inconsistent in the dialectic he had discovered, remaining at the pole of absolute idealism and thus excluding the materialist pole. Still, one of Hegel’s merits is that he sketched the way out of the rationalist dead end for philosophy — which means that both philosophers and scientists should long ago have learned to synthesize opposing positions in their work.

A brilliant example here is the resolution of the long dispute between Huygens and Newton over whether the nature of light is corpuscular (Newton) or wave-like (Huygens). Modern physics has demonstrably recognized that elementary particles are capable of behaving both as corpuscles and as waves — which means that the convictions of each scientist contained a part of the truth.

Here we shall dwell on an assessment of those searches in philosophy — and hence for Truth — which exerted a direct influence on the self-definition of the entire sphere of the humanities. First of all, the work in phenomenology and hermeneutics must be placed here. The first to introduce the concept of phenomenology as a fundamental category was Hegel, in his epochal work The Phenomenology of Spirit, where he proposed a grandiose picture of the formation of ever more concrete forms of the Spirit’s self-presentation, from the Absolute Idea to the existing forms of nature and society. Despite the enormous influence Hegel exerted on philosophy, not everyone was satisfied with his solutions. K. Marx, being an intuitive-logical extravert (ILE), rethought Hegel’s teaching from the standpoint of materialism. He translated it from the language of idealistic introversion (ILI) into the language of materialist extraversion (ILE) — which was even understood as “turning Hegel” from his head onto his feet — and adapted it maximally to the solution of economic and social problems. Marx sought and partly found a balance between the poles of materialism and idealism, and this allowed him to find truths attractive to the oppressed class and on that basis to create a revolutionary doctrine, the result of which were the dramatic changes in society that followed. Part of the humanities intelligentsia went over to the positions of Marxism and began to solve the problem of Truth from the standpoint of revolutionary expediency, rather quickly reaching the dead end of dogmatic voluntarism — which, of course, is an isolated pole, and a philosopher who lands on it condemns himself to the loss of Truth.

Part of the philosophers after Kant and Hegel took the path of substituting subjective projections for truth. Many of them devise witty conceptions by which they replace the concept of objective truth with its subjective projections. Thus the founder of phenomenology, E. Husserl, made a resolute attempt to rid himself of the nightmare of the “thing-in-itself” by setting the task of turning philosophy into an exact science investigating the phenomena of subjective perception as the only reality accessible to the philosopher — thereby opposing himself from the outset to objective reality. The concept of transcendental substance as understood, for example, by Descartes, Husserl deprives of meaning. Here, of course, transcendental substance means the material world, which Husserl, as it were, brackets out — but there, outside the brackets, truth remains as well. Thus Husserl renounces the idea of comprehending the real essence of things and concentrates on comprehending their representation in human consciousness, and on the search for the laws that govern changes in the phenomenological picture observed by the subject. For him, the a priori laws standing behind the statics and dynamics of the phenomenological picture serve as truth. The main argument of his philosophical position is that there is no sense in trying to grasp the “thing-in-itself,” since it always remains outside consciousness. He confirms himself in this thought on the basis of a simple syllogism: if someone wants to acquire objective knowledge, he must compare what is inside consciousness with what is outside it, in external space; but for phenomenology such a comparison is absurd, since everything significant for the subject is located inside his consciousness, not outside it. All possible meanings are realized within the subject, and consequently truth is attained there as well. The problem of the correspondence of knowledge to a transcendent object — one possible understanding of truth — becomes meaningless. It is not hard to see that the gnoseological defect connected with the rupture of the poles of inner and outer retained its significance throughout the entire phenomenological line of the search for Truth. Nevertheless, from a theoretical point of view, Husserl’s attempt is of exceptional interest as a well-grounded error of not merely an intelligent but a very intelligent man — which Husserl, an intuitive-thinking extravert (ILE), undoubtedly was.

In his Logical Investigations, arguing against claims of psychology as the foundation of logic, Husserl comes to the conclusion that psychology is incapable of providing anything more “than empirical generalizations.” Here is an example of his reasoning, at the base of which lies the phenomenological image of reality: “How impressive is what ordinary psychological reflection wants to impose on us: logical laws are laws for justifications; and what are justifications if not peculiar interweavings of human thoughts, whose final links, under certain normal conditions, are judgments bearing the character of necessary consequences?”

Husserl opposes the attempts of the “psychologists” to reduce logic and its laws to psychology, to the laws of the psyche. In brief, the reasoning of the “psychologists” rests on the chain: logic is an instrument of thinking → thinking is a psychic process → the laws of thinking are subject to the laws of the psyche → the laws of logic must be derived from the laws of the psyche. After psychologism in logic was overcome, such a chain no longer seems convincing — but there were intelligent people who believed in its correctness!

Here “justification,” in a purely phenomenological key, is regarded as “peculiar interweavings of thoughts,” which to a considerable degree neutralizes their objective status. It is analogous to regarding painting as a “peculiar interweaving of lines and coloured patches” — the phenomenon remains, but the meaning disappears.

“But this character too is psychic; it is only moods of a certain kind, and nothing more. And all these psychic phenomena, of course, do not stand isolated, but are individual threads of that interweaving fabric of psychic phenomena, psychic tendencies and organic processes which we call human life. Under such conditions can anything result other than empirical generalizations? And how could psychology give anything more? We answer: of course, psychology gives nothing more. That is precisely why it cannot give those apodictically self-evident and thereby supra-empirical and absolutely exact laws which constitute the core of all logic.” (Husserl, Logical Investigations)

At present such reasoning looks naive, to say the least. The loss of the dialectical component leads to a confusion of subject domains and their hierarchy. At present psychology, in the person of socionics, is emerging to the level of a rigorous theoretical science resting on such limiting theoretical concepts as internal symmetries and structural invariants — which can also be regarded as a necessary condition for the attainment of truth.

“The laws of thinking as supposed natural laws which, acting in isolation, are the cause of rational thinking” (Husserl, Logical Investigations).

This is entirely typical reasoning for a person who neglects or does not command the dialectical method and who, moreover, gives no definitions. The point is that it is not difficult to propose an entirely different scheme for understanding rational thinking. Of course, if we define rational thinking as thinking that unfolds in accordance with the laws of thinking, we shall get nothing but a tautology. To sort out rational thinking, one must first turn to its phenomenology — whose development Husserl claimed to be undertaking — that is, look at how thinking functions. It is easy to notice that at the base of such thinking lies a multitude of intellectual operators, such as the ability to discover invariants in the stream of facts, that is, stable semantic unities; the ability to generalize factual material, to classify, to analyze, etc. These operators are not objective laws; they are psychic abilities — or, closer to socionic terminology, psychic functions. As such they exist objectively; that is, they can be tracked by their results, although they are not directly perceived by the senses. Developed thinking, which forms in humans by about age 9, is capable of assessing its own coherence and effectiveness. This can become — and in some cases does become — the basis for judging the correctness of thinking, that is, its conformity to logical rules, whose set is small and can be reduced to four axioms: identity, contradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient ground. These axioms, incidentally, are not laws — that is, imperatively acting factors admitting no deviation from their intentions. They are criteria that must be satisfied in order for truth to be discoverable — truth being, in simple cases, the answer to the question of the existence of some event, phenomenon or object and its temporal and spatial boundaries. In the sphere of fundamental science, truth is a model of the fragment of reality with which the given science deals. Such a model can be used to develop technologies of various purposes and to obtain practical results. However, because the model is a concrete structure in a concrete sign system, problems arise with its unambiguous interpretation not only in other conceptual and sign systems, but even within the very sign system in which it was originally formed. This is because the deep meanings shining through sign structures are only partially caught by the average intuition of the average scientist and are easily deformed under the influence of intellectual circumstances that are difficult to take into account. Such circumstances include the typological incompatibility of scientists, their individual worldview and methodological preferences, differences in IQ, and differing speeds of assimilating theoretical material — assimilation requires a definite amount of time, different for different people, and material at first presentation may even provoke rejection as a result of one of the numerous varieties of cognitive distortion.

In connection with the concept of truth in the humanities it is also interesting to trace the formation of such a philosophical direction as hermeneutics. Long used in theology as an instrument for interpreting religious texts, it was first presented to the wider public as a science by F. Schleiermacher. Being the son of a clergyman, he knew the art of interpreting sacred texts at first hand. Such interpretation was supposed to secure their true reading — which, from a philosophical point of view, can of course be perceived as a problem. Schleiermacher extended the field of application of hermeneutics to any texts in need of interpretation and created a distinctive canon of understanding and interpreting texts. But another son of another clergyman, W. Dilthey, managed to breathe new life into hermeneutics by conceiving it as the foundation of the sciences of the spirit. Dilthey openly opposes the sciences of the spirit to the natural sciences. The latter are based on empirical analysis, while the former, in Dilthey’s opinion, are connected with immediate psychic activity, and for their comprehension a method adequate to psychic activity is needed. As such a method Dilthey posits a specially conceived understanding as the interpretation of life. Here Dilthey can be reproached with psychologism in his understanding of scientific activity, whose toolkit may of course change from one science to another — but this happens at the level of particular methods, not at the level of general scientific methodology; and, of course, the general scientific requirements of objective reliability, verifiability and demonstrability must apply to the sciences of the humanities cycle, for all their difference from natural science.

Being an emotional-intuitive introvert (EII), Dilthey had a fine feel for the psychic principle as a single and continuous stream, whose essence, in his opinion, consists in irrationality, subconsciousness and teleological directedness. One may note here that the theme of the subconscious appeared in Dilthey before Freud’s discovery of the unconscious — which means, in particular, that the preconditions of Freud’s new paradigm of the psychic were being created by the whole course of the development of philosophy and psychology. Still, it must be said that some of Dilthey’s notions are thoroughly outdated. He held, for example, that “inner life we understand, not explain,” and that “the methods of explanatory psychology cannot be used here” — but this has long since ceased to be so: discoveries in psychiatry, physiology and psychology make it possible to look at psychic life quite differently.

Within Western European philosophy the view — going back to Dilthey, Gadamer, Ricoeur and their followers — of the humanities as sciences in which truth depends on the subjective attitudes of the scholar is widespread. Yet these subjective attitudes themselves have entirely objective causes, since they depend on the scholar’s TIM (type of information metabolism), his biographical circumstances, and psychoanalytic parameters connected with subconscious complexes. All these elements can in each concrete case be identified with a high degree of reliability, and their contribution to the scholar’s position can accordingly be assessed.

Husserl’s pupil and follower M. Heidegger carried his teacher’s attempt to one of its possible dead ends. He also relied substantially on Dilthey’s hermeneutics, which had already acquired philosophical contours. Heidegger, having partly synthesized the approaches of Husserl and Dilthey, found an attractive form of linguistic phenomenology in which he presented everyday life as the full equivalent of truth — truth which is immediately present in everyday situations and finds its adequate expression in concepts and turns of speech. It may well be that the “simple man” finds it pleasant to think that he lives “in truth.” In this case one may speak of the ontologization of truth, that is, the identification of truth with existence. Paraphrasing Descartes’s famous maxim, Heidegger might have said: “I exist, therefore I possess truth.” Transforming this maxim by swapping subject and predicate gives: “I possess truth, therefore I exist” — which at once exposes its defect concerning verification, since the criterion of truth remains subjective certainty.

Heidegger demanded a return to meta-scientific and meta-technical thinking and said that philosophy and science are incompatible. “Philosophy never arises out of science or by means of science. It stands in an entirely different order of spiritual being. In the same order as philosophy stands only poetry. Thinking begins only when it is realized in defiance of so-called reason ((irrationality!)), which for centuries has been the most ardent enemy of thinking” [37]. Evidently the philosopher here subconsciously senses the subjective basis of his position and seeks a way to defend it. And is philosophy not here equated with poetry, with “pure” art — does it not turn into literature that exquisitely entertains a consumer who needs not truth at all, but emotional pleasure and sensory comfort, with which Truth is identified? Yet it is obvious that from here, despite all pretensions to rationality, irrationalism and anti-intellectualism begin. Heidegger, however, can be understood, considering his psychological type — sensory-logical introversion (SLI), or in other words an irrational sensory logician — and the terrible atmosphere of Nazism’s self-assertion in Germany in which he had to live. His type is characterized by a striving for perfection and a high but selective working capacity. His philosophy may be perceived as a miniature jewel in an elegant setting for personal use. This contributes to the close attention paid to it not only by philosophers but by humanities intellectuals, charmed by its perfection, who continue to draw inspiration from it for their own work and to find in it a refuge from social adversities. Heidegger’s philosophy suited the taste of many bourgeois philosophers — is that not because it allows them to preserve their privileged social position?

And yet this philosophy is hard to understand for a person with a mentality different from the German. Heidegger’s psychological type is a soft variety of the activator of the psychological type of the German nation — logical-sensory introversion (LSI) — and this contributes to the fact that many Germans consider Heidegger’s philosophy a successful continuation of the traditions of German classical philosophy. Be that as it may, Germans now live better than the Russians, Ukrainians and other peoples of the post-Soviet space who defeated the Germans in a terrible war. Probably Heidegger’s philosophy contributed to this as well — cosy, soothing, guaranteeing well-being, it sets a subconscious orientation toward attaining the corresponding ideals.

Heidegger makes language the basic object of hermeneutic analysis, since words are ambivalent with respect to the disclosure of meaning: with their help we discover it, but they are also capable of concealing it — otherwise nothing would be hidden and nothing would need to be discovered. But here is an unexpected move of the great philosopher’s thought: it is language, not people, that is the subject of speech. It is language, not people, not humanity, that generates texts. Language, Heidegger holds, is an essential property of human being. There are probably people for whom such an assertion is perfectly comprehensible. I, however, thought long about how to explain it to myself. What does “essential property” mean? It may mean, for example, that language lies at the foundation of human being and either completely covers that foundation or shares it with something else. But then — with what? An essential property is not simply something very important; it is something one cannot do without — not merely sufficient, but necessary.

Applied to human being, this means that the latter is not simply impossible without language but literally consists of it — or, which philosophically amounts to the same thing, is identical with it. If one abstracts from all manner of material problems, such an understanding is even in a way beautiful: people, as it were, live — but of course Heidegger means existence, and that is not the same thing — that is, they exist, or perhaps more precisely self-realize, only when they speak. After such a deciphering of Heidegger’s text, such an understanding, such a hermeneutics of it, doubts begin to appear — for people live and can self-realize without words, for example in dance. But the objection may immediately follow that dance has its own language — the language of rhythmic movements — and dance may therefore be regarded as a text, and this text has its meaning, and this meaning can somehow be understood, in part thanks to hermeneutics. One could therefore say that the human in the human being, as opposed to the animal in the human being, can be realized, humanly lived, only within the framework of at least some language — but necessarily a language. And if we stop here at the pre-socionic understanding of language — all the more so at Heidegger’s understanding of language as the subject of text generation — then we shall be forced to admit that the being of the human being as a human being is possible only in the process of generating text.

However, taking into account the conceptual inversion carried out by Heidegger, one will have to speak of the generation of human being by the self-unfolding text — or, which according to Heidegger is the same thing, of the self-realization of language as the subject of text generation. From the materialist point of view one will here have to speak of dualism, since the material-physiological life of the human being remains somehow too much outside the brackets, as if it existed by itself while “life in language” existed by itself. Perhaps Heidegger does not feel the dualism here, wholly immersed in the element of self-realizing language; but from the psychoanalyst’s point of view the question is appropriate here of the philosopher’s degree of derealization and of giving him a diagnosis — something like gnoseological autism or schizophrenia. Of course, gnoseological clinical work requires deeper substantiation, but for forming a first image of this idea, its seeming extravagance notwithstanding, it is enough to become aware of the existing gradations of worldview.

Heidegger proceeds from the entirely understandable premise that understanding is possible only in language and only by means of language, and that language therefore determines the framing of all hermeneutic problems. But this does not mean that it determines all human problems. There are, after all, aspects of human life that are not verbalized, although of course they can be verbalized. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s fundamental methodological error can be designated as fixation on one gnoseological pole while ignoring the others.

Heidegger’s quite plausible notion that the whole world of the human is reflected in language is nonetheless only an unfounded generalization, since to refute the universal affirmative proposition in which this notion is framed, it suffices to adduce even one counterexample. And are not the subconscious and unconscious processes in the human psyche, lying beyond verbal forms, precisely such an exception?

In Heidegger’s case one may speak of a technology of turning hermeneutics into ontology, that is, into a doctrine of being — which it was not before Heidegger. As a result hermeneutics, as it were, secures its place in philosophy, enters the corpus of philosophy — though it is unlikely that Heidegger himself regarded it thus. By ontologizing the linguistic problematic of hermeneutics, Heidegger furthers the transformation of hermeneutics into a doctrine of being, thereby consolidating its philosophical status. Moreover, in this historical link of the transition from Husserl to Heidegger we see the replacement of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology by Heidegger’s “hermeneutic phenomenology.” If in the former the problem of the meaning of existence is addressed, in the latter it is a matter of the meaning of what is known — but let us not forget that understanding here figures as a primordial form of human life, not merely a methodological operation. This fact is interesting in itself, for here one can see how a certain informational complex — which is what hermeneutics is — passes through a definite evolution: from a literary technique for interpreting sacred texts before Schleiermacher, through the extension of its competence to any texts by the latter, its transformation into the foundation of the sciences of the spirit in Dilthey, and finally its philosophical canonization as a variety of philosophical ontology in Heidegger.

Dilthey’s and Heidegger’s follower H.-G. Gadamer continued the theme of idealizing everyday life, endeavouring to raise the rating of common sense. According to Gadamer, truth in the “sciences of the Spirit” becomes possible in part precisely thanks to common sense. Although common sense, according to Gadamer, is not a scientific method, it is capable of being an adequate way. Well, there you have it! Where are 2,500 years of philosophical search for truth! And the logic here is not at its best either: how can something “not be a scientific method, but be capable of being an adequate way”? How can one oppose scientificity and adequacy? But from the context of his book it becomes clear that Gadamer substitutes for the concept of “common sense” as a practical, everyday understanding of things and, without particular explanation, equates it with intuition — a concept he likewise does not clarify. All this can be understood as linguistic manipulation, which, incidentally, applies to all philosophies.

Gadamer’s rather thick book TRUTH AND METHOD: Fundamentals of Philosophical Hermeneutics [5] stood for several decades at the centre of philosophical and scientific discussions and exerted significant influence on changes in modern German — and not only German — literary studies, psychoanalysis, practical varieties of philosophizing, and all humanities research that fell under the charm of Gadamer’s ideas and literary style. The book is undoubtedly talented, and it may be regarded as a continuation of the transformation of philosophy into a literary genre that entertains the reader using philosophical categories while instilling in him the idea that truth is not very difficult — nor, indeed, very important. As for method, critics hold that this concept in the book’s title carries a somewhat ironic sense: what of “method” anyway — and are we not greatly exaggerating its importance when we have common sense, which decides everything? But the concept of truth here may be considered ironic as well. It is placed in the book’s title, which secures it a special status as something important, even supremely important. But in the course of discussing this concept the author gradually diminishes its significance, lowers its potential, and continues doing so until he renders it banal, reducing it to the level of everyday relations and people’s existence. The author considers his task in this book to be, no more and no less, the search for “the general transcendental conditions of the possibility of mutual understanding and the understanding of texts.” Clearly such a task bears on truth, but its scale here is reduced to the level of everydayness — which is, to be sure, also useful and interesting, though limited and down-to-earth.

Note also how Gadamer, following Dilthey, distinguishes the concept of truth in natural science and the mathematical sciences on the one hand from its concept in the humanities. He insists that the interpretation and understanding of truth in natural science and mathematics differs fundamentally from its interpretation and understanding in the humanities. A barrier is thereby erected between two kinds of science. Clearly this is no more than one of the manifestations of agnosticism — an agreeable, liberal, well-packaged agnosticism that does not encroach on the status quo, and as such is suitable for the ruling class and its privileged servants.

And here is Gadamer’s main conclusion: “Theory in natural science and mathematics is created thanks to inductive and hypothetico-deductive methods, principles of cognizing regularities, explanation with reliance on causal connections. Truth in the humanities, by contrast, is closer to life, to practice, where living people act. Therefore if in natural science and mathematics the main thing is correspondence to facts, in the humanities sphere the main thing is self-evidence, when the essence of an event reveals itself.” This is easy to accept, but it is a typical neurolinguistic manipulation aimed at not disturbing social tranquillity and not touching problems of justice. It must be admitted, however, that Gadamer’s literary style and argumentation have a refined character and rather easily convince the reader, even one of a high intellectual level.

Gadamer, following Dilthey, posits understanding as the basic method of philosophy. But Gadamer does not understand that understanding is not a rational but an irrational instrument. It belongs not to the logical but to the intuitive forms of the subject’s contact with the world. Yet Gadamer, wishing to remain on the ground of rationality, masks this fact from himself by relying on the notion of the hermeneutic circle — as if it were precisely the technological procedure of repeated contact with the text that generated understanding. Such contact may become a condition of understanding, but it is not understanding itself. By “text” here is meant any interpretable system of signs, but it is interpretable either through direct intuitive penetration into the semantic field standing behind the multitude of signs — which, incidentally, is what understanding is — or as a result of prior training, that is, the tuning of intuition. The second case, however, may mask the first, since all human experience is training. Nevertheless, some manifestations of intuitive insight may be regarded as unconnected with training. Here belong, above all, innate mimetic abilities, as well as a number of intellectual operators: generalization, extra- and interpolation, invariant detection (induction), memorization and the recognition connected with it, and others. Whether the enumerated operators, at least in their simplest forms, are intuitive absolutes requires further research; but that they are inherent in all living things is an experimental fact.

The term “understanding,” like many other terms, possesses internal homonymy, encompassing a semantic range from intuitive grasping or discernment to the placement of the subject matter under consideration within the subject’s semantic coordinates. Connected with this is also the fact that some themes fundamentally cannot be understood by a subject if the corresponding semantic field has not been formed in him.

The model of truth built in Gadamer’s works is considered by his followers to be basic for the humanities sphere. It is linked to the “hermeneutic” situation of truth characteristic of the humanities as a situation of competing meanings — when many varieties of the understanding of truth exist in a science, so that preferring any one of them becomes difficult, if not impossible. The division of cognition into two branches — natural-scientific and humanitarian — is a sign of dualism, and although in Gadamer it is rather well masked, it nonetheless violates the methodological principle of the unity of the world. It must also be said that hermeneutics by no means enjoys unconditional recognition by all philosophers. Thus Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher, considers the claims of philosophical hermeneutics to universality unfounded, though it may be used for the critique of “false consciousness” and perverted forms of communication.

The emphasis on Gadamer can be explained by his popularity, but deeper work in hermeneutics, connected with the name of G. G. Shpet, simply remained almost unknown to philosophers in its time — though it is not excluded that it would not have been accepted by bourgeois thinkers owing to the peculiarities of their corporate consciousness.

The hermeneutic phenomenology of G. G. Shpet proceeds from the premise that the meaning of a word — and with it the meaning of an utterance, and of any text — is objective. Here objectivity is opposed to subjectivity, but clarifications would nonetheless not be amiss. According to Shpet, the objectivity of meaning presupposes that it can be discovered by non-psychological methods — namely those provided to the scholar by logic, linguistics or semiotics. Here discovery is opposed to the hermeneutically understood means of “grasping,” “feeling into,” empathy with the objective meaning of the text. Alas, it is impossible to circumvent the irrational character of understanding — but there is no need to. Evidently Shpet does not distinguish the concepts of “significance” (znachenie) and “sense” (smysl): the first is objective, the second subjective. This considerably lowers the value of his reflections, since it distorts the nature of the intuitive process. In any case, Shpet’s work on the problematic of truth in the humanities did not go beyond the bounds of phenomenology and hermeneutics and remained unfinished.

The gradual deepening of the cognition of an object is connected with reaching higher levels of development of the instrument of cognition. In cognition, periods of accumulation and ordering are succeeded by discoveries leading to revolutionary changes in scientists’ views. In this chapter we shall consider a variant of a possible correction of the modern general scientific paradigm in the humanities and its rapprochement with natural-scientific views.

When it is a matter of local cognition of an object in a definite place at a definite time, one can observe great diversity and significant deviations in the understanding of the basic terminology, not only in different scientific schools but among individual researchers within a single line of inquiry. The historical approach to the assessment of facts, phenomena and events gives a diachronic cross-section of the multitude of objects under consideration, and here one can see the change in the content of philosophical categories and scientific concepts over time. But the set of them itself changes as well.

The synchronic cross-section reveals divergences in the content of categories at a concrete period of time, and this characterizes individual philosophical and scientific schools. A pluralistic approach to the phenomena of social consciousness makes it possible to assess the change in the content of philosophical and scientific categories as a fact reflecting people’s everyday practice. Renunciation of a monopoly on the sole correct understanding of the content of philosophical and scientific categories, and of dogmatic pretensions to possession of absolute truth, may be regarded as a respectful attitude to the partner’s position.

Among modern scientists the idea is fairly widespread that science cognizes the laws of the environment rationally — which may be interpreted as “relying on logic, common sense, consistency, empirical facts and practice.” But now, relying on socionics, one can say that this is not quite correct, and this follows from a semantic analysis of the concepts cited. The clarification of the concepts “rational/irrational” in socionics makes it possible to arrive at their primary meaning, undistorted by the current use of these terms in the scientific community. The irrational information stream is what goes to the subject from the object. This stream has not yet been passed through the subject’s internal cognitive structures; it is not yet comprehensible to the subject — hence irrational. The rational information stream is directed from the subject to the object. This stream has already undergone internal processing — hence it is comprehensible to the subject, which is what is designated as rationality.

This is the simple primary interpretation of the terms “irrational” and “rational.” Logic and practice therefore belong to the rational instruments of cognition, while empirical facts — as that which has come “from over there” — belong to the irrational. But a certain correction must be made here, connected with clarifying the definition of the concept “fact.” A fact is not a real event but its reflection in human consciousness. A fact is a formal description of what was observed. But observation has its filters and its bandwidth. Therefore not everything present in an event will be fixed in its description, that is, in the fact. As a comparison, take modern digital photography. A camera has its resolution, which may be measured in pixels per inch. But whatever that resolution, it will always be limited, because it depends on the capabilities of existing technologies.

And if you photograph, say, a small flower, you can enlarge its image and see many details invisible to the naked eye. But there is a limit of enlargement beyond which there will be no new information: you will see the image break up into pixels — the elementary units of the image. And you will no longer be able to see what the real flower has but the image lacks — say, the structure of its cells. Therefore the real phenomenon and its representation in the observation protocol are different things: the first is irrational, the second (the fact) rational.

With these clarifications made, one has to admit that science is not a fully rational element of the social infrastructure either in the sense of the process of cognition or in the sense of the social organization of that process. This is confirmed by simple observation of the processes occurring at all levels of the scientific hierarchy, from teaching institutes and universities to academies of science and the higher attestation commissions that confer academic titles — including in a corrupt mode. Within this section, what matters to us is that truth cannot be obtained by rational methods alone; that the main channel of understanding anything whatsoever is intuition, and it belongs to the irrational instruments.

The definitions introduced allow a somewhat different view of the philosophical dialogue of generations and epochs in which the theme of truth is considered. In fairness, let us note that one of the pillars of logical positivism, Carnap, said: “My view on this subject is that there is no such thing as a logical method of obtaining new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. My view may be expressed by saying that every discovery contains an ‘irrational element’ or ‘creative intuition’ in Bergson’s sense.” Carnap’s acknowledgment of the “irrational element” in the process of discovery is very important in that it thereby acknowledges the limitedness of the rational means of cognition — and hence casts doubt on any attempts by philosophers and scientists to free themselves from irrationality. Of course, lacking a Carnapian definition of what he might call a “logical method of obtaining new ideas,” it is difficult to object to him on this point.

In various sources one encounters the thought that “when the bourgeoisie was a rising class, it appealed to Reason, to natural science, to science as such; it believed in their revolutionizing influence on the development of industrialization, on the economic development of the capitalist states. But already the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century showed that capitalism was entering the historical epoch of its deep crisis. These circumstances left an indelible imprint on all bourgeois thinking. They engendered disillusionment with the possibilities of a ‘rational’ comprehension of the world and refuted faith in the boundless power of mind and science.” These same considerations apply to the current situation in the post-Soviet states. Wild capitalism, with all its contortions and inherent vices, is in its essence irrational. It relies not on reason but on cunning, and it needs not truth but profit. Only profit does it want; only toward profit does it strive. That is why there is so much falsehood not only in politics but in science. This falsehood can be exceptionally subtle, refined, even with signs of nobility — falsehood scientifically grounded, falsehood constructed and executed in accordance with recommendations developed by talented scientists. Hence the need to turn once more to the clarification of worldview problems, to plunge into the depths of metaphysics, to reach an understanding of the general principles of human being in the world — even though this would seem to be a stage philosophy has already passed. But what of it, that it has been passed? Where are the positive results? Where are the solutions to social problems? Where is the principled position of science with its “triumphal march” and boundless possibilities? So let us try — perhaps not all is yet lost.

Let us return again to the bourgeois philosophers and see how they tried to find a way out of the dead ends of “bourgeois science” and to solve the problem of truth. First of all, they divided science into parts — where seeking truth is dangerous, and where internal and external censorship permits dealing only with a limited truth, so that technologies for dominion over nature could be created and profit extracted by those in power.

We remember how totalitarian regimes controlled the work of outstanding scientists, how they bestially destroyed them (remember Vavilov!) or kept them in “sharashkas,” where they developed modern technology with the status of prisoners — at least they were fed somewhat better there than in the concentration camps (remember Tupolev, Korolyov, Solzhenitsyn!).

Already since Kant’s time philosophers began to understand the limitedness of “pure reason,” the limitedness of formal logic, and began to develop and propose a “philosophy of life.” They began to seek something to oppose to rational — by definition logico-discursive — thinking. Any rationality was cast aside as boredom and dry “calculation” that ignores everything aesthetic and ethical — which is in many respects just; but from the dialectical point of view this is merely a leap from one pole to the other, whereas truth must take account of all poles — in the simplest case, two. And therefore only irrational contemplation, consisting of sensing and intuition, can be opposed to the rational pole. Schelling [40], for instance, held that genuine knowledge must be absolutely “free,” that it is “knowledge that cannot be obtained by means of proofs or logical syllogisms, knowledge alien to any conceptual formulation, which can be obtained only as a result of contemplation.” Renunciation of scientific proof is a variety of the metaphysical position. It is hard to say what stands behind this notion of Schelling’s about knowledge, but from the standpoint of modern psychology one may suppose that Schelling had begun to become aware of the phenomenon of intuition and perceived his intuitive insights as knowledge “obtained without logical syllogisms and remaining outside conceptual formulation.” Is not knowledge in certain varieties of dreams exactly of this kind?

Somewhere close to this was Schopenhauer’s position [33]. He said that the intellect is fit only for understanding the external connections between things, while genuine cognition of “things as they are” is possible only through intuition. Here one may agree with the great philosopher that without intuition the cognition of truth is impossible; but to reduce the whole variety of the means of cognition to intuition is one of the sources of philosophical error — the fixation on one pole characteristic of metaphysical thinking, what may be called philosophical accentuation. Proceeding from the principle that a philosopher’s worldview is conditioned by his TIM, his life situation and psychoanalytic precedent, it is not difficult to explain the key concepts of Schopenhauer’s philosophy — “will” and “representation” — as projections of his emotional-sensory introversion.

Later, views close to this were developed by F. Nietzsche, one of the founders of the “philosophy of life,” which was a subconscious response — an “indignation” of life itself against the decline of man in that society. This they noted correctly — in this their intelligence showed itself. But, as has long been known, as soon as a person finds some pole of a social contradiction, he becomes fixated on it and often ceases to see everything that does not belong to that pole. So too the founders of the “philosophy of life” began to insist that there is no objective truth at all, that a representation of the world is always a subjective interpretation, oriented one way or another toward one’s own benefit — not to mention that it may be concealed, transformed or sublimated, which understandably can considerably complicate its recognition. Nietzsche argued that the human intellect is tuned not at all to rational cognition, and that the world is “interpreted” by human passions, each of which has its own “perspective.” This is what lies at the base of the play of human thoughts and feelings. A psychologist will easily see in these philosophical dicta a projection of the psychic states of the great philosopher — emotional-intuitive extraversion (EIE) provoked épatage, dramatization of the present situation, refusal of logical univocality.

In the end Nietzsche concludes that the world has no single meaning; only a multitude of interpretations is possible, many of them opposed. It is not hard to see here a soft variety of agnosticism. Justifying and defending irrationalism, Nietzsche asserted that without mystical intuition, without myths, without illusions man and humanity cannot manage [12]. “Mystical intuition” — there he designated the most important function of his psychotype. Close to this were the views of A. Bergson (EIE). He held that the intellect’s sphere of activity is limited to the myth of dead matter; as for Spirit, the “vital impulse” that provokes and secures all varieties of creativity and social progress, the intellect has no business there at all. Life and the living cannot be understood by scientific means. For that one must suppress the mind, go against the “natural current” of human thinking. What is needed is a “vital impulse, an inner push,” irrational intuition, religious illumination and the like [2]. This is an example of philosophical accentuation on the irrational pole of cognition and neglect of the dialectical principle of the balance of opposites.

In Rorty’s famous book The Mirror of Nature [16], among other things, such masterpieces of philosophical thought are considered as the complete denial of man’s capacity to think. This idea lies in the channel of philosophical phenomenologism and psychological behaviourism. It is based on the fact that intellectual activity as the immediate generation of thoughts in the brain cannot be observed directly — it can be judged only indirectly: by analogy with oneself and by the results of another person’s vital activity. Therefore all attempts to assert the existence of intellect are declared devoid of direct foundation. To explain the observed phenomenology connected with the demonstration of intellectual activity, the concept of disposition is proposed. A disposition is the result of a specific coupling of material factors, as occurs, for example, in mechanical or electronic toys that demonstrate quasi-intelligent behaviour. This idea is transferred by Rorty to the demonstration of intellectual abilities by people. Evidently what is transferred onto the human being here is the execution of mechanically or electronically implemented programs in toys.

Stop! There it is, the key word — programs. What is a program? It is an algorithm carrying information about the corresponding behaviour of a subject. The appeal, in this case, to the concepts of information and program makes the idea of dispositions contrived — if only because a program is a meaningful sequence of symbols, and the probability of the random appearance of such a sequence is inversely proportional to the factorial of the number of all the symbols composing the program text. Already at a hundred symbols — and only a quite primitive program can be composed of that many — such a probability equals a number with 158 zeros after the decimal point. But the point is not only that such a probability is extremely small, but that there is a large number of factors that will hinder its realization. The behavioural programs of living beings are formed over millions of years as a result of adaptation to the habitat. As we see, it is easier for such a behaviourist philosopher to accept the idea that all people except himself, together with their capacity to think and feel, are the result of a random combination of material factors generating the illusion of mental activity — indistinguishable by a multitude of signs from the same activity in his own head — than to agree that human thinking is not the consequence of a random disposition but was formed in the evolutionary process as an answer to the necessity of survival. One of the varieties of the metaphysical position is the renunciation of scientific proof, when agnostic schemes reducible to the impossibility of adequate cognition are proposed in its place.

For the solution of the problem designated in the title of this section, the works of such philosophers as Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur are relevant first of all, simply because their searches exerted significant influence on the state of contemporary humanities scholarship in Western Europe. Despite certain distortions of truth in their works, they are interesting as examples of searching and of error.

An example of the psychological development of manipulative methods is so-called social semantics, which recommends, in order to reduce tension in society, replacing class-aggressive terminology with more “moderate” terms. For example, instead of the concept of “class struggle,” using concepts like “a society of reconciliation and cooperation” or “a national idea uniting poor and rich, exploiters and the exploited.” Today the scientific achievements of social semantics and neurolinguistic programming (NLP) are used by political technologists of all shades — from white to black. But the black in modern society is increasing. Scientific truths obtained in the humanities are used to manipulate the consciousness of the people — mainly its oppressed part.

Let us cite some further considerations of J. Hintikka: “One can easily understand an outside observer whose first impression, looking at the arena of modern philosophy, would be that the speakers do not listen to one another. Philosophers belonging to the various analytic traditions seem to expend their ingenuity and capacity for exact formulation unproductively on minor technical problems of no great significance, while thinkers of the hermeneutic and deconstructivist direction often appear to be manipulating general concepts expressed in a pompous jargon designed rather to obscure than to clarify ideas.” Roughly the same can be said of scientists, for many of whom the struggle for salary and prestigious social position has long since become more important than truth.

Twentieth-century psychology from the standpoint of the search for truth

Let us see how, from the standpoint of the search for truth, some results of 20th-century psychology may be assessed.

At the beginning of the 20th century the outstanding Austrian psychologist E. Kretschmer, for the first time in the history of psychology, advanced the idea of a similarity between pathological symptoms and the typical behaviour of normal people. He concluded that the disagreements here are mainly quantitative in character, and that behind them stand closely related psychic or constitutional factors [38]. One may say that Kretschmer succeeded in establishing certain psychic invariants linking norm and pathology. Later, Kretschmer’s follower the psychiatrist K. Leonhard proposed ten accentuations of the psychic sphere, which he used in his clinical practice. Independently of Leonhard, but likewise relying on the results achieved in psychology and psychiatry, the American psychologists from Minnesota S. Hathaway and J. McKinley developed a multi-profile psychological test based on clinical notions of the types of psychopathies, which they interpreted as syndromes of disharmonious personality development. This test became widespread both in work with patients and in work with healthy people, who on the basis of this method could receive a large number of recommendations connected with various aspects of life activity — vocational guidance, for example. However, the ten psychological categories they chose mostly did not coincide with those which Leonhard had laid at the foundation of his system of accentuations.

In Russia analogous work was done in the laboratory of A. Lichko. True, it was aimed at diagnosing the type of psychopathies and accentuations in adolescents, but it could be used for work with adults as well, for which, of course, it would have had to be adapted. And in this case too, despite the practical identity of the objects of research, the base set chosen consisted of psychic categories differing appreciably both from those chosen by K. Leonhard and from those used in the MMPI.

In work [11] the data of the three above-mentioned approaches to assessing the psychological status of the personality are brought together in the following table (Table Pris.01).

Table Pris.01

#	MMPI	Leonhard	Lichko
01	Hypochondria	–	Astheno-neurotic
02	Depression	Dysthymic	–
03	Hysteria	Demonstrative	Hysteroid
04	Psychopathy	–	Unstable
05	Femininity	–	–
06	Paranoia	Stuck (rigid)	–
07	Psychasthenia	Pedantic	Psychasthenic
08	Schizoidness	–	Schizoid
09	Hypomania	Hyperthymic	Hyperthymic
10	Introversion	–	–
11	–	Excitable	Epileptoid
12	–	Anxious-fearful	Sensitive
13	–	Cyclothymic	Cycloid
14	–	Affective-exalted	Labile
15	–	Emotive	Labile
16	–	–	Conformal

Here categories fell into one row when similar or equivalent descriptions — sets of psychic symptoms — stood behind them. What is strange here, though, is that the authors merely stated the existence of the difference without giving a principled assessment of the phenomenon.

Even at a cursory glance at this table one sees that the three approaches presented have much in common — and this should not surprise us: all three schools worked with one and the same mass of psychic symptoms. What is surprising, rather, is something else — why are they nonetheless so different? To answer this question one must turn to questions of the methodology of science. The most superficial explanation is that the authors of the presented systems are bearers of different methodological complexes, though their paradigms have intersections.

Of course, the scientist-socionist is alerted here by the appearance of the number sixteen, though a representative of the empirical or positivist approach may perceive it as pure chance. Indeed, had the specialists of the presented schools discovered a larger number of types, their total might perhaps have been different. But this supposition too can be doubted — for perhaps the additional types would merely have filled the gaps in Table Pris.01.

However, when the scientist-socionist begins to read closely the descriptions of the presented categories, he begins to recognize behind at least some of them — even if insufficiently sharp — features of socionic types acceptable as a first approximation. Thus to the third row (Hysteria, Demonstrative, Hysteroid) one can easily match the most demonstrative type in the socion, Napoleon (Se). Indeed, in the norm this type does not merely strive to be at the centre of attention: it possesses the means needed for this and knows how to get to and remain at the centre of its milieu’s attention. Of course, one must bear in mind that the cited typologies describe the personality primarily from the pathological point of view.

The seventh row could well correspond to Balzac (iL), the eighth to Don Quixote (Il), the ninth to London (Li). Alas, stretches cannot be avoided here — but, I repeat, as a first approximation such a matching is of interest. Later we shall show the causes of such “stretches,” and this will help us look at the developing situation quite differently.

So, if with a certain degree of conditionality one substitutes socionic types into Table Pris.01, we obtain Table Pris.02.

Table Pris.02

#	MMPI	Leonhard	Lichko	Scn
01	Hypochondria	–	Astheno-neurotic	lS
02	Depression	Dysthymic	–	Ei
03	Hysteria	Demonstrative	Hysteroid	Se
04	Psychopathy	–	Unstable	eS
05	Femininity	–	–	sE
06	Paranoia	Stuck (rigid)	–	sL
07	Psychasthenia	Pedantic	Psychasthenic	iL
08	Schizoidness	–	Schizoid	Il
09	Hypomania	Hyperthymic	Hyperthymic	Li
10	Introversion	–	–	sL
11	–	Excitable	Epileptoid	eS
12	–	Anxious-fearful	Sensitive	lI
13	–	Cyclothymic	Cycloid	Ie
14	–	Affective-exalted	Labile	Ei
15	–	Emotive	Labile	iE
16	–	–	Conformal	Ls

Here, for example, it is hard to agree that the “femininity” scale in the MMPI should correspond to the type sE (“Dumas”), especially in its male incarnation. Though still — the “Mediator,” after all; still the keeper of the hearth. It is also hard to agree that the “social introversion” (Si) scale should correspond to sL (“Gabin”), although the description of this MMPI scale reads: “High scores on the Si scale occur in persons who lack poise and confidence in human relations. In company they are easily abashed, feel constrained, grow nervous, easily lose their equilibrium. Possibly for this reason they bear themselves coldly and distantly. But they are not affected in their aloofness; they simply try to keep their distance, to stay aside, resisting nothing, respecting the rights of others and not imposing their own views [11].” “In company they are easily abashed…” — this, of course, is not about Dumas, Dreiser or Yesenin — socionic introverts who feel splendid precisely in the company of other people. Nor will this description fit those types whose ethics stands in the ANF position (lI, lS) — they know how to manipulate relations and are adapted to behaviour in society. The cited description best fits those in whom emotionality is connected with the fourth function — and that is precisely sL, and also Balzac (iL); but the latter is after all the “Critic” and is capable of withstanding the emotional pressure of Napoleon (Se). So it is indeed Gabin (sL) that fits the cited description of the Si scale best. The point is simply that the meaning of this scale in the MMPI does not coincide with how introversion is understood in socionics — and this ought to serve as an occasion for correcting this concept in psychiatry and general psychology.

One may ask whether it is accidental that the total number of types of the three typologies coincides with the number of socionic types. Rather the reverse: it is no accident that the number of types in each of the three typologies fails to coincide with the number of socionic types. This can be understood to mean that in nature there objectively exist precisely 16 types of information metabolism, but the researchers in their clinical practice were able to single out, each at his own discretion, what they were able to. They worked diligently, but something was lacking for them to find all 16 types. What they lacked were theoretical notions of completeness and of the other principles of constructing typologies. But why did this limited set not become an obstacle to their successful practice — which many philosophical schools consider the criterion of truth? That, after all, is precisely why they were confident that everything was in order with their typologies.

Taking all the above into account, one may advance the preliminary supposition that, from a hypothetical base set of human types characterizing the behaviour of the practically healthy person, the three typologies considered — relying on notions of the pathological manifestations of the psyche — selected their scales or accentuations differently; but for some reason this limited selection nonetheless did not affect the effectiveness of the clinical work of these schools’ representatives. Possibly some compensating effect manifested itself.

The case of the three typologies may be regarded as an astonishing precedent in science, when researchers worked with one and the same object but obtained results that were quite different — at any rate, non-identical. Here, of course, it is appropriate to recall the uncertainty principle, according to which the result of measurement — and, in the general case, of research — depends on the peculiarities of the measuring instrument and of the researcher; this explains something, but not everything. Apparently the deeper cause of the empirical limitedness of the presented typologies is the positivist orientation toward renouncing the solution of the eternal philosophical questions, supposedly contraindicated for serious science, and with it the renunciation of a complete theoretical solution of the problem. All these typologies confined themselves to what suited the researchers in their practical work. And that being so, intelligent people — and many scientists are such — will find a psychological defence to secure existential confidence in their own rightness.

The first question to be posed when considering such typologies is the question of their completeness. How can we be guaranteed that some important elements have not been omitted in a given typology — that everything pertaining to the object has been taken into account? As the precedent considered shows, in the case of empirical typologies there simply can be no special guarantees, since the concept of completeness does not enter into the methodological complex of positivism.

The next question in assessing any typologies and classifications is the question of the independence of their constituent elements. In each of the presented typologies one may note that some of the singled-out concept-types within any one of them have common properties — more precisely, semantic components — and are thus not orthogonal, that is, not fully independent. Thus in the MMPI, for the scales “Hypochondria,” “Depression,” “Femininity,” “Psychasthenia” and “Introversion,” the unifying feature is introversion as it is understood in socionics. The concepts of the two other typologies have common features as well. So a deeper analysis of the empirical material obtained is needed, with the aim of revealing the fundamental factors standing behind them. But this is precisely what the researchers did not do — possibly precisely because their worldview and methodological positions prove an insuperable limitation for them.

An attempt to go beyond the empirical level is undertaken in work [11], where V. M. Melnikov and L. T. Yampolsky use factor analysis as one of the instruments of their theoretical work. As a result they single out several groups of factors of different levels, describing from different sides the empirical set they chose of features (individual psychological traits) and types (integral characteristics of the personality). As the task of their research they advance the comparison of “concept-types” and “concept-traits” with the aim of “partitioning them into homogeneous groups with the subsequent replacement of each group by a new concept that is a function of the original ones. Essentially, it is a matter not simply of grouping concepts, but of constructing a new system of concepts, integral with respect to both approaches” [11]. Incidentally, Melnikov and Yampolsky devote a section of their book to constructing a model of the personality; but despite the remarkable work they carried out, this model represents only a primary generalization of empirical material. We shall not present it here; those wishing to acquaint themselves with it more closely are referred to work [11].

The authors describe the methodological structure of their research apparatus as fully as possible, which makes its theoretical analysis feasible. They use mathematical algorithms permitting an optimal grouping of features relative to the chosen criteria and the formation of factors as linear combinations — or perhaps in this context it would be more adequate to speak of a superposition — of the corresponding features. The authors take into account that “the quality of the partitions and their meaningfulness depend essentially on how many factors are singled out” and that “if the number of factors is set incorrectly, the resulting grouping will not reflect the structure of the phenomenon under investigation.” They therefore carry out a sequential series of calculations yielding several groups of factors, from which the best is then selected. And since the choice of the best variant cannot be made on statistical indicators alone, definite theoretical criteria are used for the choice, which may be regarded as parameters of the semantic fields of the factors and their groupings: interpretability, homogeneity, contrast, stability and informational reliability.

Interpretability of factors is understood as the degree of correspondence to theoretical notions of the structure of the individual-psychological peculiarities of the personality.

Homogeneity, or the internal uniformity of factors, is assessed by the share of features closely connected with the factor. To single out the corresponding factors, a threshold value of the correlation coefficient of features with the given factor is used.

The contrast of a factor solution is the higher, the stronger the connections between the features forming a factor relative to the connections between factors. Contrast so defined is used by the authors to get around the natural requirement of orthogonality of factors, and is in effect an ersatz of that requirement.

Stability of the basic structure of factors is understood as the preservation of factors as the number of their groups increases. To assess it, an index of the conjugacy of two successive factor groupings, computed by formulas, is used.

Informational stability is secured by uniting in a factor a large number of interconnected features.

Besides analyzing various groupings of features into factors, the authors assessed the features themselves for closeness to the general structure of the remaining features and for stability. A feature is considered close to the general set of features if it enters into the composition of a factor with high loadings, that is, is essential for characterizing the given factor. A feature is considered stable, or reliable, if it constantly groups with the same features rather than changing its position among the groups of features.

The authors use the literature data of their predecessors, where four factors were extracted from the MMPI scales and Cattell’s questionnaire, and as a result of their own experiments they obtain two results — with four factors not fully coinciding with their predecessors’ results, and with six factors differing in various degrees from those described in the literature. These are the factors “Spiritual organization,” “Extraversion,” “Psychoticism,” “Anxiety,” “Neuroticism” and “Behaviour control.” Despite the most interesting work carried out by the authors and the well-developed methodology used in the research, an impression remains of the ambiguity, incompleteness and even optionality of the obtained set of factors — though there is no doubting the possibility of their practical use and their effectiveness for an economical description of the individual-psychological peculiarities of the personality.

To assess the situation under consideration from a methodological point of view, one must turn to the analysis of the concepts of the empirical and theoretical components in scientific work. In the history of science this opposition has repeatedly come, and in our time continues to remain, in the field of view of scientists. Relative solutions of the problem exist in science. Yet the impression remains that in philosophy the problem was never conclusively solved. How can one not recall Sextus Empiricus with his tropes asserting the unreliability of human cognition, and with him the agnostics, nihilists, positivists and behaviourists. Although between some of these gnoseological schools there is an enormous difference, what they have in common is that they merely find a gnoseological niche convenient for their theoretical existence, at whose base lies the notion of the complete or partial unknowability of the world. Unfortunately, this by no means removes from the agenda the necessity of further advance in human cognition, since it does not solve the eternal philosophical — read, methodological — questions. But whereas the sceptics simply denied the reliability of knowledge, the positivists discard that part of cognition which seems to them divorced from pragmatic concreteness and which uses theoretical constructions that are, from the positivist point of view, hard to verify. But perhaps, after all, humanity in its progressive development is capable of growing up to any pre-assigned level of complexity, and what today seems unliftable to positivistically minded scientists will tomorrow take its place among the modern technologies of cognition.

So let us return again to the polar pair of categories “empirical–theoretical.” Let us give the necessary definitions. The empirical is what is directly perceived by the human sense organs, or perceived by those same organs but with the use of additional devices — instruments, apparatus, machines. The theoretical is what is contributed to the empirical by the human intellect: selection, ordering, generalization, inductive extraction of invariants, classification, analysis, systematization, theory-building, deductive use of the results obtained, and so forth. Bearing this in mind, one may say that the theoretical is generated by the human intellect and is its functional synonym. Now, knowing socionics, one can assert on a completely new level that the human being possesses a concrete set of psychic instruments making him capable of orienting himself in the external world, of adapting to it, and — at least partially — of adapting it to himself. Analogous adaptations exist in all living things, but in the human being instrumental contact with the world has attained a far greater universality, which is what secured his dominance on Earth. Although it is now obvious that this dominance has a multitude of defects — which means that the human being’s psychic instruments require further improvement. People have learned to solve the most complex mathematical and technical problems but still cannot find a positive solution to social problems. In particular, it is not surprising that part of the philosophers, while orienting themselves splendidly in the local thickets of categories, are nonetheless unable to break through them to the light of Absolute Truth. Some philosophical directions, indeed, declare this concept, in various formulations, meaningless — which is a serious symptom of their gnoseological limitedness.

In considering the problem of the relation of the empirical and the theoretical, it is appropriate to recall Immanuel Kant [8], who introduced into scientific usage the opposition of analytic and synthetic judgments. Let us stress in passing that the seemingly utterly abstract ideas of the philosophers of all times and peoples bear the most direct relation to the front line of cognition in our time. The attempt to brush philosophy aside — even in its methodological guise — leads to researchers repeating, one way or another, the historical development of philosophical ideas; but they do so, as a rule, unprofessionally, and are forced again and again to collide with the old paradoxes of thinking, condemning their theoretical work to inferiority.

Very briefly, the essence of the problem comes down to this: some judgments the human intellect perceives as true a priori — that is, without relying on experience, without resorting to experience, without conducting experiments — while the truth of others can be confirmed only by experience. One may dispute whether no experience whatsoever stands behind analytic judgments; but it is obvious that this would have to be some other kind of experience — for example, the evolutionary experience of all humanity — and that is enough to oppose the two kinds of judgment. But one can also approach the question from another side. Let us proceed from the fact that the empirical material which is the source of synthetic judgments is processed by the human intellect — the source of analytic judgments. All the secrets of theoretical constructions are stored in the structure of the intellect. Not in the categories with which it operates — they only mask from it its own more deeply hidden structures and substrates — but in that subtle-material basis of the intellect which still remains problematic for science, that is, in the literal sense, for the intellect too. The problem here is that the personality, identifying itself with the intellect, is incapable of using it to discover its own basis — just as the eye, observing external objects, cannot see itself.

We shall not delve further here into the problem of the hypothetical subtle-material basis of the intellect, but shall merely accept (likewise as a hypothesis) that the intellect’s capacity to generate analytic judgments reflects the evolutionary process of its adaptation to the surrounding world. And one may hope that the evolution of the human intellect is not finished, and that instruments may yet appear in it with whose help all the gnoseological barriers preventing humanity from living in harmony with itself and with nature will be overcome.

Bearing this in mind, one may conclude that human cognition is an arena on which empirical facts meet the intellect, which turns them into theory — and the theory will be the more fundamental, the deeper the layers of the intellect’s structure that are used in its development.

Comparison and analysis of the three typologies cited testify that in developing them the researchers used the topmost layer of the intellect’s analytic means. Apparently it is precisely to this case that Hegel applied the expression “creeping empiricism.” But why then did practice seemingly confirm the medical value — and hence, in the opinion of the pragmatic directions in philosophy, the truth — of their findings? Here, as becomes clear after the development of the ARP (aspect-feature) theme, the effect of the common semantic field of the totality of categories was at work: an incomplete set of concepts nonetheless generates additional meanings, which to a certain degree compensates for the incompleteness of the developed typologies. The point is that the full set of ARP poles can be revealed without having the full set of TIMs — four types from one quadra suffice. This means that a researcher can be dealing with the entire semantic field of a problem while having discovered only part of the key objects. This is an example of practice being a criterion of a method’s usefulness; but of practice as a criterion of truth one can speak here only in a limited sense. As for truth — one may say that the truth of these three typologies turned out to be socionics, with certain additions. Be that as it may, we shall treat with respect the scientists who did the invaluable empirical part of this work.

It is also not excluded that the researchers could have carried their work to the highest theoretical level had they not been constrained by the methodological boundaries of positivism, which in the persons of its founders O. Comte and H. Spencer, together with their followers, effectively renounced a significant part of the philosophical heritage.

Freud, Adler, Jung, Horney: the struggle and coexistence of ideas

Let us consider a concrete example of the struggle and coexistence of ideas in the development of psychology.

Without exaggeration one may say that modern psychology begins with the discoveries of Freud. These discoveries were not made on bare ground. They were preceded by the great, though perhaps not very conspicuous, work of many psychologists. I emphasize this because I respect the philosophical principle of complementation, which provides for the continuity of theories — when subsequent theories are the development and generalization of preceding ones. Freud built his innovations on the achievements of those who came before him. Even his key discovery — the discovery of the subconscious — was prepared. This category had been used before him by philosophers and poets. Freud’s teachers and colleagues — Janet and Bleuler — in effect worked with the subconscious in treating hysteria. But it was Freud who managed to see in this phenomenon a deep psychological essence, which he presented in the category of the subconscious — and by Freud’s efforts this category became scientific. As we see, the principle of complementation was realized in Freud’s case: he created the new by relying on the achievements of his predecessors.

Freud believed that he had laid the foundation of a metapsychology, and there were certain grounds for this, since the “subconscious” and the energy of “libido” postulated by Freud, constituting the dynamic principle of the psyche’s activity and its phenomenology, made it possible to have conditionally causal explanations of what before Freud had merely been registered; and the treatment of a number of mental illnesses received at least some theoretical grounding, thanks to which variants and nuances of illnesses could be tracked, explained and classified. But does this mean that a metapsychology was built? Clearly, definitions are needed here. How can metapsychology be understood now?

It would have to be a theoretical discipline that includes categories of a high level of generalization from which the working concepts of psychology could be deduced. This cannot be said of Freud’s theoretical work, because in the final analysis it did not go beyond clinical technology. For example, his four personality types — oral, anal, and two genital — constituted for him an elemental base to which the clinical phenomenology of a concrete patient could be reduced. Clinical-technological significance attached also to the personality structure he discovered: ego + superego + id. This structure became a generalized map of the personality on which the course of the pathological process could now be localized.

So did Freud discover truth, or not? In any case it was not the complete truth, but it was a step toward it. Unfortunately, Freud never understood this. In time the Freudian technology was subjected to varied criticism and gradually lost the status of a universal instance claiming fundamentality; but thanks to the numerous corps of practising psychoanalysts, who had prestigious work and earned well, this technology preserved its medical positions. Be that as it may, the object of Freudian psychoanalysis was the personality, and the efforts of many specialists from different scientific schools were directed at understanding the personality and working effectively with it. In psychology, both together with Freud and parallel to him, on his theoretical basis or merely pushing off from it, many talented scientists worked.

Adler looked at the personality quite differently. Though he acknowledged Freud’s discoveries and worked alongside him, he developed a fully original conception of the personality and, for himself, did not consider Freud his teacher — only an older comrade. And Adler too worked fruitfully with people as a psychologist. As for Freud, Adler had many critical remarks about his concepts, but Freud took no notice of them. Adler was a physician, and in his practice he noticed that people can be distinguished by the illnesses to which they are mostly inclined. Cardiac, gastric and hepatic patients not only look different (habitus); they have different life positions, different enthusiasms and different goals of self-realization. This initial idea of Adler’s concerning the formation of the personality differs considerably from Freud’s basic idea of the Oedipus complex. The leading force of personality formation Adler considered to be the feeling of inferiority, connected with the imperfections of the organism, including its morbid states. It is precisely the desire to compensate this feeling that, according to Adler, drives a person to actions leading to a definite result. “The striving for perfection is innate, in the sense that it is a part of life as a need without which life would be meaningless” [35]. This is a fully understandable position of a scientist, the basis of his methodological complex, which secures him confidence in the truth of his work. It is also interesting that although Adler was in close contact with Freud, he hardly ever appeals to the concept of the subconscious — though, true, he does not deny it either.

The understanding of the human being as an indivisible whole (note this methodological orientation of the scientist!) prevented Adler from building as developed a hierarchical structure of the personality as Freud’s, which he undoubtedly knew well. Character, according to Adler, is a once-and-for-all formed system of attitudes which, in accordance with the principle of the wholeness of the human being, is fully determined by the circumstances of his life. Adler also came to the conclusion that every person is unique and has his personal life style, and that the division of such styles into types is only a conditional approximation. But is not the inferiority complex, as a methodological reference point for Adler, a dynamic principle explaining the mechanism of the personality’s development toward self-realization?

By way of conditional approximation Adler proposed four generalized types of life styles, differing in degree of social interest, activity and typical attitude [35].

The ruling type. Social interest is minimal, energy abundant; they care only for themselves; the typical attitude is arrogance toward others. But this is apparently not a very exact term, because Adler assigned to this type people who are decisive and coarse — which the modern manager does not always match.

The getting type. Social interest is absent, activity minimal; the attitude is parasitic and aimed at getting as much as possible from life.

The avoiding type. Social interest is minimal, activity reduced; the typical attitude is avoidance of failure.

The socially useful type. Social interest and activity are high; the typical attitude is work for the benefit of others.

So did Adler discover truth? No, but he made his contribution to its search. Compare the results of the theoretical work of Freud and Adler — they are not merely different; they have almost nothing in common. In the context of truth in the humanities, what matters to us is that two well-known scientists build two quite different theories of personality. Both adduce sufficient arguments in favour of their view of the human being, and both have successful clinical practices — that is, they not only satisfy people’s needs but earn money by it and lead materially secure lives. This means that the pragmatic component of the criterion of truth is secured for them both. So on whose side is truth? The balanced answer here is apparently this: each of them discovered some part of the truth — and not everything each discovered belongs to the truth. These are complex compounds of truth and non-truth. But the two parts are so interwoven in them that they are very difficult to separate.

Apparently Freud’s most serious opponent was C. G. Jung. But to him, as to Freud, a positivistically minded scientist could impute a penchant for metaphysics — that is, that he advances ideas and builds constructs that are hard to confirm empirically. Jung shared some of Freud’s concepts but invested them with his own meaning. The concept of “libido” as basic sexual energy was proposed by Freud, and Jung made use of it, but gradually he changed its content greatly, coming to understand libido as free vital energy which can flow along any channel of personal activity — including the sexual. Jung accepted the personality structure Freud had found, but later remade it into his own: ego + individual subconscious + collective subconscious. Freud was indignant at such a replacement and never agreed with it, but Jung insisted on his own. Which of them is closer to truth — and is it even a matter of truth here?

Neither one nor the other carried out an experimental verification of his concepts. Nevertheless their practical activity was successful. This can be taken to mean that, from the standpoint of the philosophy of pragmatism, they were both right. A very convenient point of view — anything whatsoever can be justified, so long as successful practice stands behind it. Freud considered the subconscious a “seething mass of impulses and instinctive intentions” without particular direction, whereas for Jung it is a fairly structured part of the psyche. The individual subconscious, according to Jung, is structured by complexes and constitutes a more or less independent part of the collective subconscious, which is structured by archetypes. Complexes, according to Jung, are emotionally charged units which at the subconscious level determine a person’s behaviour. Within the computer metaphor one may say that these are certain programs recorded on psychic media and introducing distortions into what is considered normal behaviour. As for the archetypes, they yield almost not at all to verbalization but have a total influence on human behaviour. Here one may see a decent metaphysical construct — but there will always be philosophers who, on their own basis, subject such concepts to destructive criticism. Within the computer metaphor, archetypes can be understood as metaprograms — program frames setting highly generalized parameters of the individual’s behaviour.

If one compares Jung’s constructions with Freud’s, one can see that Jung did not destroy but developed, filled with new content, what Freud discovered — and in this the principle of complementation shows its action, according to which a more developed theory must include the less developed one as a particular, degenerate or transformed case. The collective subconscious, according to Jung, includes material common to all humanity — which especially irritated Freud. But note that the semantic field of the Jungian subconscious partially intersects with the semantic field of the Freudian superego. Just like the superego, the collective subconscious transmits ethnic and social norms and forms of behaviour, but its source is more concretized — it is the collective, the community, the socium.

Let us also note how these two scientists understood the instance of the ego. Jung held that the ego is fully conscious, though he does not always adhere to this consistently. In Freud the ego was at first opposed to the subconscious and hence understood as fully conscious; but in time Freud came to the conclusion that the ego contains subconscious parts as well. In Jung one can see a striving to consider the ego more structured than in Freud. This idea looks most convincing after acquaintance with Jung’s development of the construct of the psychological type. Besides the level structure of the personality introduced by Freud, in Jung a functional structure of individuality appears. Here one can see the vector of the theoretical construct’s development in the direction of greater concreteness — and in this one may discern a greater approach to truth. Let us note, all the same, that both great scientists in their clinical empirics continuously sought and found confirmation of their theoretical ideas.

Let us also compare the two scientists’ attitude to consciousness. Jung emphasized that Freud takes consciousness as that which precedes the subconscious — which, incidentally, is reproduced in the structure of the corresponding terms. And Freud is not hard to understand here, because at first he had no notion of the subconscious and worked with consciousness, and only later discovered the subconscious, which had been covered over by the conscious. Jung, however, came to the conclusion that it is exactly the other way round: “more plausibly, the subconscious appears first, and out of it, on its basis, consciousness grows” [34]. And Jung too can be understood when he says that “in early childhood we are all unconscious, as are all our most important instinctive functions. Therefore, most likely, consciousness is a product of the subconscious” (ibid.). As can be understood, Jung’s position here is the better grounded — that is, there are grounds to consider it closer to truth. But only if we accept by default the notions of consciousness current in psychology at the beginning of the 20th century. And although the concept of consciousness does not yield to definition, a certain explication can nonetheless be carried out here. Relying on the integral experience of humanity, one may come to the conclusion that consciousness as the experiencing of one’s own being has a wide spectrum of gradations and is inherent not only in all living things but is originally present in the world as just as inalienable a basis of it as being itself. The human level of consciousness is neither the initial nor the highest. There are in the world entities possessing a considerably lower level of consciousness and, conversely, a considerably higher one. We shall accept this statement here as a hypothesis, some grounds for which it will be possible to try to offer later.

Comparing the constructs of Jung and Freud, one may again pose the question of scientific truth. But one may hold an eclectic position and use both theories, bringing to the fore, according to the situation, whichever of them suits better or better satisfies the practising psychologist. The eclectic approach can easily be justified by reference to the pluralism of opinions — adding, moreover, that this is now fashionable.

Let us note also the theory of K. Horney. This woman researcher studied under Freud and became a psychoanalyst. But she managed to find arguments against the Freudian — possibly subconscious — discrimination of women as inferior beings because they supposedly, as Freud emphasized, lack a penis. She wrote: “One must not take on faith woman’s striving to justify her lowered self-esteem in one way or another by the fact that she is a woman. One must note that every person who belongs to a minority or to a less privileged group tries to use this status to instil in those around him various ideas connected with inferiority…” [23]. And Horney knew well what she was talking about. For the theme developed here it is important that Horney, in counterweight to classical psychoanalysis, names as the generalized cause of neuroses basic anxiety, which arises from disturbances of interpersonal relations in childhood. Working with the neurotic personality, Horney developed an entirely different approach [24] from Freud’s. She began to define the neurotic’s behaviour in terms of demands, compulsion and defence mechanisms. And here one can see this woman’s discovery of yet another structural unit of the personality which Freud lacked — an instance that demands, expects, seeks support and help. This fourth structural unit found its place in socionics — it is the SUPERID. It is precisely this instance in the structure of the personality that is responsible for demanding and expecting help. It would all seem so simple — yet the development of an adequate model of the psyche had to be awaited for almost half a century, and even now not everyone accepts it.

In the field of ego psychology, at the same time as and later than the scientists named, many more researchers worked: Murray, Erikson, Sullivan, Rank, Reich, Angyal, Bakan, Rogers, Maslow, Perls, White, Allport, Fromm, Fairbairn, Kelly, Cattell, Skinner, McClelland, Fiske, Maddi — and this is only a portion of the psychologists who devoted their lives to developing the theoretical understanding of the personality. They all worked with one and the same object; they all contributed their mite to its cognition. Their clinical practice was successful. Many of them were quite satisfied with themselves and their position in society, and the contribution of each may be assessed as a step — small, perhaps, but a step — in the direction of truth.

Modern psychology has done much for the understanding of the human personality and its structural units, but psychologists still have no single point of view on all this. Comparing the results of individual authors, one can see many gradations — from near identity, comparability, continuity and parallelism to complete opposition, absence of any points of contact, and even enmity. This is partly explained by disagreements in methodological complexes — and this too ought to become a subject of psychological research. Individual components of such complexes lie in the sphere of the subconscious, which also affects the final result. This can be taken to mean that psychologists do not always understand how they obtain their results and where these come from. But who if not psychologists — who know the importance of the influence of the subconscious and the unconscious — should take up research in this area? Perhaps then the principles would become clearer on whose basis the problem of truth in the humanities can be discussed.

The methodological principle of the synthesis of existing knowledge requires finding paradigms that would make it possible to unite the valuable informational results found by individual researchers and to arrive at generalized theories. But synthesis is not simply an eclectic assemblage of elements. It is an emergence onto a qualitatively new level of understanding and use of the elements being synthesized. It appears that precisely such a new synthesis has become — or can become — socionics, at whose base lie the information paradigm (IP) and the field paradigm (FP). Within socionics, whose basic conception was given by Aušra Augustinavičiūtė, all the concepts of ego psychology attain their truth. Socionics does not mechanically transfer the Freudian concepts of ego, superego and id, but finds their truth in the functional system of the psyche. To these elements is added the SUPERID, with which Horney worked, though she did not reflect on this. At first acquaintance with socionics the impression may arise that these terms are “dragged in by the ears” from an entirely different theoretical milieu — and deformed, moreover, by simplified understanding. But the internal coherence of socionics guarantees a correct adaptation of these terms with the necessary refinement of the concepts standing behind them, and this gives grounds to consider the socionic adaptation of Freud’s concepts the discovery of their truth.

And now, already within socionics, each of these concepts relates to a corresponding structure and itself acquires its own structure. In socionics there is no longer the psychoanalytic (Freud) or analytical-psychological (Jung) confusion with the concept of the EGO. It is now an instance that has a definition — the sphere of greatest confidence with respect to the informational aspects of the program-potential function (PPF) and the communicative-probing function (CPF) [29]. Both these functions indicate the boundaries of greatest self-identification and determine the optimal self-realization of the personality. What in modern psychology bears the name “core of the personality” is easily identified with the EGO block of Model A. All the other structural units of the personality can be explained analogously. A distinctive triumph of socionics was the identification of the fourth element of the personality structure absent in Freud — the SUPERID. Just as Mendeleev’s system of elements demanded a precisely determined filling of its cells with elements not yet discovered, so Model A “provided for” the existence of an element still unknown in psychoanalysis. That element became the SUPERID. In Freud it merged with the id, because it included the latter’s characteristic features. Yes, it is to a considerable degree an infantile and impulsive substructure of the personality, but it has the right to independent existence. The demands that society makes on the personality must be balanced by the demands the personality makes on society — and this is the content of the SUPERID.

And now let us pose the control question. Are the blocks of Model A the same structural units that were in the personality structure proposed by Freud? Are we dealing here with a formal — perhaps even artificial — terminological homonymy? The correct answer here, it seems, is dialectical: both yes and no. The categories of Aušra Augustinavičiūtė are the development and refinement of Freud’s categories. Freud’s categories are the first, approximate sketch of Augustinavičiūtė’s categories. Augustinavičiūtė’s categories are Freud’s categories brought to their truth. Though perhaps he would not have agreed with that. In connection with the above, the principle of complementarity may be regarded as the requirement of the successive refinement of theoretical constructs as the subject domain approaches the theoretical maturity of its scientific models.

Temperament: from Hippocrates to an eight-element system

Probably the most popular and well-known theme from psychology is the concept of temperament — it has come down to us from the time of Hippocrates. Its experimental development was undertaken by the outstanding Russian scientist I. P. Pavlov, who managed to discover physiological parameters of the nervous system to which he reduced these psychic phenomena — and this may be understood as a justification and proof of their real existence. How Pavlov decomposed the temperaments into physiological components — balance, mobility, strength — is shown in Table Pris.03. But analysis of this table from the standpoint of logic shows a defect, and it therefore cannot be considered true.

Table Pris.03

Temperament	Balance ±	Mobility ±	Strength ±
Choleric	–	+	+
Sanguine	+	+	+
Phlegmatic	+	–	+
Melancholic	–	+	–

It is known that three systemic factors — which the atomic features of higher nervous activity, namely balance, mobility and strength of the nervous system, can be — must generate eight types of behaviour, and such that they can be confidently distinguished from one another. Hence four more rows must appear in the table, as shown in Table Pris.04. The theoretical incorrectness of Table Pris.03 can be judged from the asymmetrical arrangement of the plus and minus signs — just as we would do in a mathematical formula. By correctly (regularly) arranging the signs in Table Pris.04, one can find the places of the known and unknown units of this table.

Table Pris.04

Temperament	Balance ±	Mobility ±	Strength ±
Sanguine	+	+	+
?	+	+	–
Phlegmatic	+	–	+
?	+	–	–
Choleric	–	+	+
Melancholic	–	+	–
?	–	–	+
?	–	–	–

If Pavlov or his followers — for example, B. Teplov and V. Nebylitsyn, leading scientists of the institute of psychophysiology — had managed to rise to such an utterly minimal theoretical generalization, they would have expanded the elemental base of the theory of temperaments and made an outstanding contribution to psychology. But the limitedness of positivist methodology, together with the ideological censorship of dialectical materialism, became an obstacle for the Soviet scientists, and the priority of introducing a system of 8 temperaments went to the Western scientific school of psychology.

In Western Europe psychologists, in offering matrimonial recommendations, based themselves on a minimal set of concepts characterizing people’s psychophysiological reactions. To such concepts belong EXCITABILITY, ACTIVITY, and DURATION of sensations and nervous reactions. Note that here, as atomic parameters of higher nervous activity, features different from Pavlov’s are taken. This can be understood to mean that the features we consider atomic are not such, and that possibly still more fundamental elements stand behind them. It is also not excluded that a more careful analysis would permit the conclusion that these two triples of psychic parameters are synonymous. Might one not make such correspondences: EXCITABILITY ≈ Balance, ACTIVITY ≈ Mobility, DURATION ≈ Strength? Note that all these parameters are polar: excitability presupposes non-excitability, and the second pole of balance is imbalance. But in that case, how do the non-excitable and the balanced differ from each other? Their semantic fields are very close, but this requires deeper linguistic analysis. It appears, however, that in different psychological schools one and the same phenomenon was observed but designated differently at the level of words. In essence, we are dealing with an identical conceptual base.

But one may also advance the hypothesis that the decomposition of the given level of psychic activity into basic components may be performed in some other way as well. The concepts cited above were proposed and used in psychology as early as the beginning of the 20th century by the Dutch psychologists Heymans and Wiersma [14]. The complete set of combinations of these basic elements gives eight types of psychophysiological reacting (Table Pris.05).

Table Pris.05

Temperament	Excitability ±	Activity ±	Duration ±
Passionate	+	+	+
Choleric	+	+	–
Sentimental	+	–	+
Nervous	+	–	–
Sanguine	–	+	+
Melancholic (amorphous)	–	+	–
Phlegmatic	–	–	+
Apathetic (carefree)	–	–	–

We see that the set of these types includes the classical temperaments as well. For example, the choleric temperament corresponds to the combination excitable–active–non-durable. Thus what for long years — and in official post-Soviet psychology, with its ostentatious reliance on the concepts of dialectics — was considered given once and for all turned out to be only part of a more developed system.

Still, there was some criticism of the system of temperaments — some concluded that pure temperaments are encountered “rather rarely” (note: the measure is not specified), and that usually a real temperament is a mixture of the basic ones. And methods were proposed by which one could determine the percentage of cholericity, sanguinity, phlegmaticity and melancholicity in a concrete person. But in the technical respect a certain defect can be discerned here, because the complex — the real temperament — was expressed again through the complex, and the still insufficiently explained: the set of basic temperaments, which were used in place of the absent more developed system.

However, the psychophysiologists continued their searches, and in the book of P. Simonov an attempt is presented at a physiological explanation of temperament as a complex formation depending on the joint work and correlation of functions of such brain structures as the frontal cortex, hypothalamus, amygdala and hippocampus [17].

Simonov proceeds from the premise that human behaviour at the most general level is determined by two parameters: the satisfaction of one’s own needs and the taking into account of events occurring around one. The singling out of the dominant need is performed by the motivational subsystem of the brain, into which enter the amygdala and hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is responsible for first-priority, acute, dominant needs, and the amygdala for supplementary, non-urgent, subdominant needs. The anterior sections of the neocortex orient human behaviour toward the signals of highly probable events. At the same time, signals with a small probability of reinforcement are inhibited. Orientation toward the signals of highly probable events makes behaviour adequate and effective; however, in special conditions — in situations with a significant share of uncertainty and a deficit of pragmatic information — the possibility even of low-probability events must be taken into account. The hippocampus is responsible for this function, supplementing the activity of the frontal sections of the cortex.

Proceeding from these notions of the functional peculiarities of the enumerated brain sections, one can conceive and describe the peculiarities of behaviour in the case of predominance of one or another physiological block. For example, if the coupling “hypothalamus–frontal cortex” predominates, the subject’s behaviour will be oriented not simply toward satisfying the dominant need but directed toward the highly probable signals of objects capable of satisfying that need. Everything that distracts the subject from performing this task — competing motivation and signals distracting from advance toward the goal — will be ignored. Thus the subject’s behaviour will be distinguished by impulsiveness and impetuosity, which is easy to correlate with the manifestations of the choleric temperament. Such a person’s interests are constant and stable. When such a person meets difficulties, he does not retreat but persistently overcomes them. Analogous explanations can be made for the other temperaments as well.

Let us stress once more that in the above descriptions of the temperaments we see justifications of them that differ considerably among themselves. This gives the right to pose to scientists — psychologists and physiologists — the question: which of the cited justifications is true? Does it matter which of them is true? What is truth in psychology and physiology? Perhaps it is all merely a game of paradigms? Or perhaps the whole point is that these scientists could allow themselves to stop at the level attained thanks to a pragmatic situation that demanded no more of them?

The episodes considered from the history of the development of modern psychology are a definite hint at the existence of a vector directed toward the search for truth as an adequate reflection of the essential parameters of the object under investigation in the theoretical constructs of a scientific school or an individual scientist. The process of cognition itself looks like a gradual refinement of the concepts used, both within the searches of an individual scientist and in the process of the formation of a scientific direction — or, as Lakatos might perhaps have said, a research programme. Every link on the path of cognition bears a relation to truth, and one must be able to find this aspect in the investigations of genuine scientists; but there have long been grounds to suppose that there exists a final truth of the whole chain of investigations united by a single theme. In many scientific spheres a large number of fragments of such final truths have been obtained, and of course we now know and can do considerably more than was accessible, for example, to the ancient Greeks — to Sextus Empiricus, say, who wrote two volumes of reflections on the theme of the impossibility of attaining truth.

Taking the foregoing into account, one may say that the entire history of the study of the personality in psychology can be regarded as a single process of the gradual cognition of this complex and at the same time humanly important essence — the gradual disclosure of the truth of this concept. But the survey made of the historical and conceptual circumstances of the formation of true knowledge and of the category of truth induces pessimistic thoughts about the almost insurmountable difficulties preventing humanity from arriving at truth-based technologies of social development.

Even a superficial survey of some approaches to the problem of truth points to unresolved contradictions between different philosophical positions. Such a state of affairs fosters an irresponsible attitude of people toward other people, toward society, and toward their own lives as well. The unresolvedness of the problem of truth at the philosophical level becomes an obstacle to solving it in the humanities too.

It was always thus, but now we directly see how contradictory the positions of politicians are, how cynically political technologists act, proceeding from the momentary interests of individual people and groups and disregarding the needs not merely of other people but of entire peoples.

Taking the above into account, we set ourselves to show the possibility of the ontologization of truth, the possibility of the conscious and subconscious choice of a philosophical position, to give a notion of the information paradigm and the field paradigm, and also of the possibilities of a deductive approach to constructing the reduction base of the humanities. We must also answer the question: “Is a variant possible in which the humanities acquire the status of natural sciences? How is that to be understood?” It is possible only if the objective status of information processes is proved. The ontologization of truth is understood here in the sense that to truth corresponds the essence of the object, whose discovery is precisely the attainment of truth. Note that in some philosophers the ontologization of truth came down to truth being replaced by its identification with the current state of humanity (Heidegger). This was justly criticized by philosophers of the materialist and dialectical direction as a simplification of the real state of affairs, as philosophy’s capitulation before the difficulties of cognition — but it can also be understood as a subconscious replacement of inconvenient truth by acceptable constructs permitting social consensus in conditions of severe ideological crises.

What is Truth? The Information-Field Paradigm

In philosophy the basic object of the search is Truth. It is precisely the answer to the question “what is Truth?” that provokes the greatest disagreements among philosophers — both among those belonging to different philosophical directions and, it happens, within one and the same school. One may even say that if philosophers knew what Truth is, they would long ago have stopped doing philosophy — unless the theme interested them in a historical aspect. Yet there is nothing mysterious in the concept of truth: it is the integral expression of the criterion that knowledge must satisfy. Knowledge is the informational reflection (otobrazheniye) of an object in the psyche. “Reflection” is, of course, a metaphorical expression, synonymous with the concept of model.

Instead of reflection one might say image, were it not for the visual connotations attached to that concept — as if there were something drawn in the psyche. But in our time the content of this concept can easily be transferred to any other sensory modalities: an image may consist of sounds, tastes, aromas, touches, pain, terror, sensations of joy, regret and the like. The generalization of these considerations is the notion of the image as a totality of parameters of arbitrary nature. When we speak of informational reflection, however, we must define what information is. In this connection the concept of the information-field paradigm in socionics must be discussed. A clarification is needed here: why precisely in socionics? The point is that it is precisely in socionics that the concept of IM (information metabolism) acquired the character of a fundamental scientific category. But besides this, in socionics it proved possible to pose the fundamental question of the substrate of psychic phenomenology [29]. These same problems, to be sure, concern all the humanities; but the positivist approach entrenched in them, against the background of the strong influence of all varieties of analytical philosophy, proved an insuperable obstacle to the introduction of essentialist approaches.

The Information-Field Paradigm (IFP) in socionics

A number of problems revealed by methodological analysis of numerous works of theorist-scientists in the field of socionics served as the basis for formulating two fundamental paradigmatic hypotheses: the HYPOTHESIS OF THE FIELD BASIS OF THE WORLD (FBW) and the HYPOTHESIS OF THE FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTER OF INFORMATION as a MAXIMALLY GENERALIZED ESSENCE which, alongside ENERGY and SUBSTANCE, determines the phenomenological picture of the World. In their subject matter these hypotheses are nothing new in science and philosophy, but their concrete refinement with respect to the subject domain of socionics is supremely essential for the construction of socionics’ basic concepts. Socionics’ reliance on these two hypotheses makes it a fundamental scientific direction and transfers it into the category of the natural sciences, while preserving for it the status of a humanities science as well.

Elsewhere I have already given separate formulations of these hypotheses [26]. On mature reflection, however, I came to the conclusion that, while each retains high theoretical value, they are so closely connected with each other that they admit unification as the information-field paradigm (IFP). Of course, it need not be confined to socionics — it has general scientific significance — but its introduction into socionics proved highly appropriate, since it solves the problems connected with the justification of this scientific direction.

After the concept of information, in the works of C. Shannon and N. Wiener, turned into a scientific category, paradigms began to be created on its basis whose aim was to use the potential of this concept to explain what had previously been explained on other bases. For example, information paradigms appeared in theories of art, advertising, administration, management, in pedagogy and even in economics — which of course should not surprise us, but is quite indicative. What used to be described in economics in the categories of money, commodity, surplus value etc. now came to be viewed from the angle of information processes. For instance, economic theories introduce the concept of “information asymmetry” between employee and employer, which creates a “transparency deficit” in the labour market — a lack of information among the interested parties [9]. Castells, for example, writes that “the contemporary change of paradigm may be seen as a shift from a technology based primarily on cheap inputs of energy to one predominantly based on cheap inputs of information derived from advances in microelectronics and telecommunications technology” [9]. Thus information becomes an economic category.

Information paradigms (IP) have been designated with respect to science as such, since the problem of processing enormous flows of information stands acutely here. “This flow of information requiring analysis engenders serious difficulties. Scientific work has long demanded an extreme degree of specialization; recently, however, a situation increasingly arises in which the scientist loses the possibility of keeping track of all new works even in his own narrow field. He faces a dilemma: either read articles or work. In addition, owing to the technical difficulties of disseminating and processing enormous quantities of information (one may also call this the imperfection of the information system in science and technology), great efforts must often be expended on searching for the needed information, and they do not always lead to success. As a result many works are done repeatedly, or not as they ought to be done. By the estimate of American scientists, from 10 to 20% of research and design work could be dispensed with if information about work already performed were available. The losses from this in the USA amounted to 1.25 billion dollars” [21]. As we see, the special role of information in science is acknowledged here — and yet this is only an applied moment. Information is still not regarded here as one of the ultimate essences alongside energy and substance.

Attention was paid to the concept of information in psychology as well, which is of course not surprising. There even arose the direction of cognitive psychology, where the object of research became the cognitive processes in which information flows are involved. But here too the concept of information is used in a limited way, as a particular process connected with cognition — above all intellectual cognition. Incidentally, scientists often use new concepts opportunistically, as happened, for example, in Soviet science, where the concepts of dialectical materialism were forcibly implanted. And when, with gradual liberalization, the term “system” penetrated to us from foreign sources in its constructive rather than metaphysical meaning, it became fashionable in dissertation science to use this term as a marker of the “advanced” character of a study. Yet analysis of many Soviet dissertations shows that the people who used this term were in essence distorting its meaning, and what they tried to present as systems were not systems at all. The concepts of the synergetic, organismic, statistical, probabilistic, holographic, organizational, ecological and other approaches are used analogously in many cases. The main defect of the use of such constructs is individual scientists’ failure to understand their partiality. Adequately describing some side of reality, they do not describe it in its wholeness. But whereas talented scientists who intuitively sensed their explanatory potential tried to introduce these concepts carefully, their less discriminating enthusiast-followers begin superficially to fill the conceptual spaces of concrete subject domains with newfangled constructs. As a result these constructs turn into explanatory absolutes — when, as it seems to such scientists, the simple introduction of such concepts into the context of a study suffices to make the study fundamental. Obviously this is a manifestation of intellectual vulgarity. This phenomenon, along with the hasty identification of concepts from different paradigms and theories, can at best be assigned to the category of the childhood diseases of beginning theorists. Materialist dialectics, on the rise of its formation, exposed the metaphysical squalor of such methodological complexes — but soon itself fell into the trap of dogmatism, turning into its own dogmatic opposite.

Does an analogous fate threaten the concept of information? Will not zealous beginning theorists start applying it where needed and where not? Certainly such a danger exists, and this depends to a considerable degree on definitions.

It seems that the key problem of all varieties of phenomenologism, since the time of Wittgenstein’s primitively provocative Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is formulated as the “inexpressibility of semantics.” “The indefinability and other inexpressibility of our concepts really means the indefinability of the most basic symbols of our language, and they cannot be defined precisely because such definition would require appeal to still more basic symbols” [4].

Is a solution of the problem of the “inexpressibility of semantics” possible? From general considerations concerning the realistic groundedness of our world and the gradual accumulation of effective knowledge, one must seek such a solution rather than follow the lead of the relativistic moods of individual philosophers — all the more so as these have been refuted many times by more optimistic doctrines and by the progress of human practice.

In search of such a solution, let us first attempt to find those most fundamental concepts to which all the rest could be reduced. To this end let us pose the question: “What, at the level of ultimate generalization, is the object of research in science? Not of physics, not of chemistry, not of biology, not of sociology, not of mathematics or any other concrete discipline, but of science as a whole?” It is three essences in their totality: energy, matter and information. Everything studied in the sciences reduces to these three essences. But can each of them be defined without appeal to other concepts available in the language? There is no need to. It suffices to apply the procedure of ostensive identification, that is, to pass to the direct demonstration of the phenomenological and essential manifestations of these three essences. Properly speaking, the experiment is one of the variants of the ostensive procedure, when a phenomenon is observed directly or with the help of instruments, after which the procedure of naming is performed, as a result of which the correspondence between object, name and concept is established. Energy any person perceives directly as the cause of his own capacity to do and change something. A person is able to distinguish the presence of this essence in himself and can personally use it for the concrete accomplishment of definite changes — for example, to perform some work; and that is exactly how energy is defined in physics. For understanding the ostensive procedure no special philosophical reflections are even needed. Of course, in the course of realizing the ostensive procedure mental capacities may be required — but that is already for formalizing the results of such a procedure, or for comprehending it. It is also clear that one must not discard the integral human experience and the knowledge acquired by humanity, whatever sophisms may be offered by those philosophers who consciously or subconsciously stand on the positions of scepticism, agnosticism or nihilism, decorously packaged in the constructs of various forms of phenomenologism, hermeneutics or analytical philosophy.

Having dealt with energy, one may pass to matter — but it will be unproductive to understand it as the philosophical category of the ultimate generalization of all things. Let us look at matter as the material of which things consist. That is, the talk here must be of substance in its atomic-molecular form. And here Einstein’s well-known physical formula E = mc² comes in useful. This formula speaks of the direct connection between energy and mass, which is equivalent to substance in atomic-molecular form. This means, at the least, that substance can be reduced to energy. This first step is enough for the “theoretical” fixation of “matter” — that is, of that from which things are made or consist — thereby conferring on matter the status of a basic concept. Still, for the considerations presented here one more mental procedure is needed, to neutralize the influence of relativism and scepticism, which are the consequence of the difficulty of correlating all aspects of knowledge and of its limitedness. This procedure consists in relating sceptically to scepticism and understanding the relativity of relativism.

As for the concept of information, since the time of Shannon and Wiener no adequate and satisfactory definition of it has been found.

N. WIENER: “Information is Information, not Matter or Energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.”

In this definition the rule is violated according to which a definition must not be negative.

N. WIENER: “…information is a designation of the content received from the external world in the process of our adjustment to it, and of bringing our thinking into correspondence with it…”

Here information is defined through the concept of content, which itself needs definition. But content is a partial synonym of information. Thus we have here the replacement of the concept being defined by a synonym. In the end, we all understand what information is — but for science that is not enough; a systematic definition is necessary.

L. COUFFIGNAL: “…information is the combination of a carrier with semantics; semantics is the psychic effect of information; the carrier is the physical phenomenon connected with semantics for the determination of information…”

The author of this definition understands the dual character of information, but here it remains unclear what semantics is — a concept derivative from information — and its use in the definition leads to the appearance of a “circle in the definition,” or a cyclic reference, which makes the algorithm of definition defective.

L. BRILLOUIN: “we define information as the result of choice… We completely ignore the human evaluation of information… In other words, we define information as something distinct from knowledge, for which we have no quantitative measure.”

Here the author uses an operator, or operational, definition, which, however, does not disclose the essence of information, making the definition formal. What does it mean to ignore “the human evaluation of information”? That is, the author concentrated only on the quantitative side of information, which probably makes sense in solving certain technical problems but misses the essential side of information.

“…thus, information is a universal REALITY, acting in the sphere of the material and in the sphere of the ideal, manifesting itself in these spheres as process, function, measure and property (of matter and the living) and existing in these spheres as a universal goal-striving semiotic system endowed with varying degrees of animation (manifestations of intuition, sensory-imagistic perception and reaction, emotional content, etc.).”

Here the author violates the first rule of definition: the unknown must be defined through the known; the author instead introduces an enigmatic set of words and misleads not only himself but the reader. To define information as a function is to try to define a more fundamental concept through a less fundamental one. But if someone considers the concept of function more fundamental than the concept of information, he must first prove this — and, of course, give a definition of function. To define information as measure is to introduce a circle into the definition, since measure is a translation of the term “information.” Analogous remarks can be made about the attempt to define information through the concept of “property.” Of course, the definition made by the author possesses poetic qualities — one feels in it the “grandeur” of the author’s understanding of information, and not only its connection with everything but the connection of everything with everything, and this impresses. But for a working definition it will not do. However, in calling information a universal reality the author thereby acknowledges its fundamental character. In any case this definition is interesting in that it shows how difficult it is to give a definition of what at the intuitive level we all know perfectly well. In this authorial passage one can also see an attempt at a phenomenological description of information — though plausibly the author does not realize this.

“…to this day no rigorous definition of information exists, although mountains of books have been written about the phenomenon of ‘information.’ Information theory, though it enjoys enormous and deserved popularity and has indisputable successes and achievements in a whole series of applied fields, continues to remain in a somewhat constrained position, for its central concept — information — is still not rigorously defined,” it is asserted in a rather solid monograph, the result of the collective labour of scientists of the St Petersburg Institute of Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Military Medical Academy [21, p. 103].

This is the testimony of a solid scientific collective that has collided with the difficulty of an essential definition of information. Let us nonetheless try to get to the essence of information. The reader is also given the opportunity to give his own definition of information and to fix it in written form, so that he can compare his understanding of information with the one that will be given below.

By now there is no doubting that C. Shannon, by introducing a measure of information, did not thereby define its essence, as it might seem to some. The measure of informational quantity found by Shannon obviously cannot be considered a definition of the concept. Naturally, the procedure of measuring some one parameter of an object does not reveal its essence. It is roughly like judging a person’s character by his weight. Still, Shannon, attempting to give such a definition, proposed understanding information as a measure of the inhomogeneity of a medium. And such a formulation may seem entirely adequate — but only at first glance. The first rule of definition is that the unknown must be defined through the known. Here the unknown, “information,” is defined through the concept of measure. But what is measure? Measure is the process and result of measurement, i.e. of obtaining information. Measure is not only a way of obtaining information but is itself the information about the measured parameter or object. Therefore measure is a synonym of information — or at least the concept of measure is equivalent to the concept of information. And in defining information through measure we have a circle in the definition, albeit more or less well masked. Hence the Shannonian assertion that information is a measure of the inhomogeneity of a medium may be regarded as an explanation, an explication using synonymic substitutions, but in any case it is not a definition.

Moreover, the very procedure of definition is informational — that is, as a result of a definition we obtain information about the object being defined; and this means that in defining information we shall have to use something at the base of whose functioning lies the very concept being defined, and obtain information about information without knowing in advance what it is. Such a situation is paradoxical and may be regarded as a hidden circle in the definition, and may therefore be qualified as unacceptable. A counter-argument is possible here, based on the fact that in human practice there is a large number of objects that can be used without knowing their construction. One can drive a car, work on a computer, or wash clothes in a washing machine without going into their construction — merely pressing keys and manipulating the controls. However, in these cases too certain knowledge and skills are necessary, without which the use of such devices may prove dangerous or unproductive. The same may be said of ideal objects, to which definitions belong. For handling them too, not only knowledge and skill are necessary but also observance of safety rules — though the possible negative consequences here may be less obvious than in the case of a car. But are not the colossal tragedies that have occurred in human history connected precisely with irresponsible handling of ideal objects, of information? In any case, neglecting the rules of handling anything whatsoever is not technological. Let us therefore treat with respect and caution the situation of the self-application of a concept that arises in the attempt to define information. Thus, having arrived at the paradox of defining information, we shall not define it but shall accept it, at least temporarily, as an axiomatically basic concept. At the same time, refusal to define a concept casts doubt on the very possibility of its use. In the present case, however, this situation can be neutralized by passing to the axiomatic level, to which its own methodological requirements apply. Let us therefore continue the search for an adequate image of the concept of information and make several preliminary explications.

So: the concept of information is not subject to definition. Let us analyze the situation of the impossibility of giving definitions to certain concepts. This situation goes back by its roots to the axiomatic method applied by Euclid as early as the 5th century BC. This method owes its existence to the fact that a complete verbal definition of any concept whatsoever is impossible. Complete here means that it would be necessary to define not only the given concept but all the concepts used in that definition. In attempting such a definition we fall into the dictionary circle: the words by whose help we defined other words must themselves be defined by means of some words, as a result of which the entire dictionary will be involved, and the last words we shall have to define through those used earlier — or leave without definitions. Fortunately for humanity, many concepts can be introduced into speech and intellectual circulation without verbal definition. For this it suffices to have what is called an ostensive definition — when, pointing at an object, one simply names it. In this case the object is linked with its sensory representation, and the concept corresponding to it is formed in the process of its practical use. That, for example, is how children are taught to talk and to use the objects of everyday life. In logic it is held that ostensive definitions have an ineradicable defect, since they point to a single object, whereas a concept relates to a set of objects possessing a number of common — above all essential — properties. But the logicians here fail to take into account a whole series of innate abilities that human beings possess. In the given case the limitedness of the ostensive definition is overcome by the human capacity for generalization. Thus a child quickly begins to understand that a table is not only the concrete table standing in their kitchen, and he learns to distinguish any tables regardless of their size, shape and decorative elements. The case when a person masters a concept by means of an ostensive definition we shall call an ostensive situation. The clarifications made here will be needed in discussing the axiomatic method.

One of the rules of definition says that the defining concept must be more fundamental, more general, than the concept being defined. It follows that the most fundamental concepts cannot be defined and must be accepted axiomatically. Philosophers long ago collided with the fact that such concepts as being and consciousness cannot be defined. Consciousness itself defines everything with which it comes into contact, but possesses no means of defining itself. It does not, however, need to — being identical with itself and immediately aware of itself; though it is not hard to imagine an ostensive situation in which consciousness, perceiving itself, has a sufficient notion of itself. With being the matter is somewhat more complicated: if the proper being of the self-aware subject is defined by the ostensive situation (recall the famous “cogito ergo sum”), the being of the objective world and of the things filling it may require proof. Being lies at the foundation of everything, and attempts to define it through less fundamental concepts will imperatively lead you back to being. The problem of being is for humanity the ultimate problem and constitutes the essence of all its practice. Thus the definition of being, by virtue of its ultimate fundamentality and universality, cannot be reduced to a single act, but turns into an endless technological process, constitutes the essence of human being, and proves an inexhaustible source of problematization.

One of the key errors in reasoning about information is its univocal binding to the subject and to subjectivity. The main dogma here is that information is recognized as existing only in the subject’s perception. This, incidentally, may be understood — and by some scientists is so understood — as meaning that information is created by the subject and subjectivity; although, of course, both the subject and subjectivity are inseparably connected with information and are informational categories. Note that the rigid binding of information to the subject led some philosophers to formulations strange from the standpoint of common sense — the recognition of an object’s existence only when it is observed by a subject (Avenarius).

In cybernetics the opinion was maintained that information is always for someone — that information does not exist outside the subject’s perception. But this is a misunderstanding connected with the failure to distinguish the concepts “significance” (znachenie) and “sense” (smysl). This distinction was first introduced in the works of the remarkable German logician and mathematician G. Frege (1848–1925), though his notions of it may be corrected, supplemented and developed. In the present text, by significance we shall understand, in full accordance with Frege, the object correlated with a word as a phonetic or graphic sign. Sense is the subjective experiences connected with the object that figures as the significance. Thus significance is objective, since it correlates with an object, while sense is subjective, since it depends on the subject’s life experience and basic values.

As for not an elementary sign but a text, here Frege proposes to consider its significance to be the truth-value of the totality of signs, i.e. “false” or “true.” The sense of such a text is, according to Frege, the judgment it expresses, which apparently carries complete information about its truth-value. Such an approach may be regarded as a technical simplification necessary for the needs of the logical investigation of texts. For general use of the opposition “significance–sense” we shall retain the understanding of a text’s significance as the objective registration of an event or phenomenon, and of its sense as the subjective attitude to what is registered. This distinction makes it possible to connect with the concept of information an objective and a subjective component. On the one hand, information exists objectively, freely propagating in natural media; on the other, it acquires operative sense only in the psychic structures of a subject. Every material object continuously undulates, radiates into the medium waves of different natures and modalities, which objectively — that is, independently of the presence and desire of any subjects — carry on themselves the reflection of various properties of objects: their position in space, their size, shape, colour, temperature, etc. All this the subject, having perceived it through the sense organs, can evaluate as operative information. It is important to note here that signal streams carrying informational codes are capable, under certain conditions, of transferring these codes onto signal streams of another nature. Thus the electrical impulses travelling along nerve fibres turn into mechanical movements of the vocal cords. These movements produce acoustic waves, which by means of a microphone can be transformed into electromagnetic waves filling the surrounding space. These waves, caught by a radio receiver, turn into acoustic waves, and these, reaching the organ of hearing of other people, turn there into mechanical oscillations of the membrane, hammer and anvil, which are then transformed into electrical impulses in nerve fibres. And finally, inside the subject’s psychic substrate these nerve impulses are decoded into significances and senses, as a result of which the subject receives a certain message. A message is a synonym of information in its subjective aspect. In its objective form, information is the natural codes of all possible parameters of an object. These codes are modulations of any components of the medium capable of being deformed by contact with the object. Such are the solid, liquid, gaseous, electromagnetic, gravitational — and, possibly, components of the subject’s habitat not yet discovered by physicists.

At the level of modern science and technology it is not at all difficult to imagine boundless information spaces filled not only with radio and television programmes, whose energy carrier is electromagnetic fields and waves, but also with continuous streams of modulated waves of different modalities carrying the codes of the parameters of all the objects immersed in the media of these waves. Part of these streams people have learned to decode, having developed the corresponding organs in the process of evolution, while part has remained beyond their natural abilities. Thus part of the range of electromagnetic radiation the ordinary person does not perceive and hardly feels, which at the pre-scientific level may be perceived as something mystical or turned into a mystery. It is not hard to suppose that there may exist other energetic — but not electromagnetic — carriers of information, forming virtual spaces connected with the subject’s mental activity. Probably these spaces could be called the Platonic virtual world of ideas. Is it not this world, in distinction from the other sense organs, that our intuition touches? Is it not from there that we intuitively read off certain thoughts; is it not from there that dreams and fantasies come to us, which may not even have a correlate in the physical world? Is it not from there that music and other works of art come to us? Alas, one cannot confine oneself to the physical components of the medium alone as the substrate of virtual information fields, since in them their own modulations — the natural codes of objects’ parameters — are preserved only briefly. With the exception, true, of solid rock, capable of preserving traces of past events for billions of years; but with it one can connect only part of the hypothetical information field, since its modulations are not so light and mobile as to pass through the intuitive barrier. Precisely this is sufficient ground for formulating the hypothesis of the existence of information fields whose substrate is subtle-energy components of the medium unknown to physics. But of course this in no way diminishes the significance of the physical information spaces.

Within the framework of the information paradigm what matters is that information is not only not something wholly subjective, but that its existence is entirely objective — that is, does not depend on whether anyone perceives it or not — although its sense for different subjects may prove different, though of course not necessarily. It must be stressed here that to information in its objective form corresponds significance, and in its subjective form — sense. Failure to distinguish these concepts leads to the misunderstandings connected with a one-sided understanding of information.

Before the concept of information turned into a scientific category, its modern understanding was partially reproduced in the concept of idealism, as something opposed to the material. Idealism is a system of thinking that relies on non-material essences — ideas. Now, with the development of the information paradigm, the possibility has appeared of an adequate recoding of idealist notions into scientifically grounded informational concepts — when the Platonic world of ideas can, without particular reservations, be understood as a virtual space of informational complexes, conglomerates and essences.

Bearing this in mind, all the treasures of idealist thought can be interpreted as principles, laws and explications of the processes, phenomena and events occurring in the material medium. Clearly information can be coded in an infinite variety of ways — including graphically with acoustic accompaniment, with the addition of tactile sensations, smells and tastes — in the form of 2D, 3D or ND images.

From the informational point of view, such seemingly irrational phenomena as mythology can be understood as more or less adequate codes of natural and social phenomena. The concept of “idea” is etymologically connected with the concept of “eidos” and goes back by its roots to the Indo-European “vid,” “ved” (seeing, knowing). Thus one may say that an “idea” is a “videya” or “vedeya” — something that can be seen and by means of which one can know, though the seeing here may be realized not necessarily by material but by intellectual or spiritual vision.

At the level of human activity we constantly deal with the transformation of ideas and designs into various things and actions. Is it not thus that the graphic information about, say, an aircraft, present in the drawing made by the designer, is then turned by the workers at the factory into an aircraft? But it is considerably harder to imagine how some primary idea floating somewhere in the virtual Platonic space could turn into a material thing, be embodied in the form of some object existing, or beginning to exist, in the physical medium. In actual fact this is not difficult at all — one need only think, that is, turn to the virtual world of ideas, and you will receive everything you need for solving your problems. Understandably, one must have access and permission to this world, and this requirement operates here far more strictly than access in the information world of computers and the Internet.

For the further unfolding of the theme, note that the concept of information is closely connected with the concept of form. If information is a measure of the inhomogeneity of a medium, then form is that inhomogeneity itself — an essence that can be directly perceived by the sense organs or instruments, and to whose definition the ostensive procedure can therefore be applied. Measure, measurement, is the procedure of recoding first-signal information — that is, direct perception by the sense organs — into second-signal information, which is represented in language, not necessarily verbal. These remarks give grounds to understand information as the code of form. And conversely, in many cases form can be conceived as the materialization of information. For example, when a designer hands the drawings of an aircraft to the workers — and drawings are information in graphic form — the workers extravert this information into the aircraft, which is its material equivalent. And the effective functioning of the aircraft is the criterion of the truth of the information corresponding to it.

As a result of the above reasoning we have obtained a preliminary notion of three basic essences defined ostensively. But in connection with the concept of the information paradigm and its possible variations, one must bear in mind that every material essence, every object, has its objective informational reflection in the energy-material spheres. One may therefore speak of the existence of two worlds — the physical world of things and the informational world of their field codes. The information space exists objectively as the set of codes of everything there is in the World. The subject, in the process of adapting to the medium of existence, finds a way to read off the information he needs and to use it, filling it with his own subjective senses. A living being deals with two worlds — the physical and the informational. Its body is immersed in the physical medium and intimately connected with it, while the carrier of its subjective principle — its psyche as an energy-information complex securing the living being’s adaptation to the medium — is in direct contact with the informational world. The physical component of the world provides the living being with material-energy resources, which in physiological processes are utilized for building bodily structures; while the informational component is utilized in the processes of information metabolism (IM) in psychic structures. With the transition to developed social life, the problems of informational life acquire ever greater weight for the subject.

The problem of truth belongs to the informational problems. The information paradigm (IP) removes many problems connected with the existence of what philosophers assign to abstract essences. Within the IP, abstract categories receive the status of informationally existing essences. Informational existence is as real as it is capable of influencing material-energy processes and the subjective world of living beings.

In socionics it proved possible to find productive terminological equivalents for the two interconnected strata of our world — the material and the informational. The material part of our world is described by extraverted informational aspects, its informational part by introverted ones. It is also interesting that the IP permits speaking not of two parts of the world but of three: between the material world and the subject’s ideal world lies the world of signal codes. A more detailed disclosure of this theme can be found in [26] and [29].

Understanding the objective and subjective sides of information processes makes it possible to define information, respectively, from the side of the subject and from the side of the object. In the first case information is that which changes the state of the subject; in the second, as already said above, information is the code of form.

The field part of the proposed paradigm, however strange it may seem at first glance, is so closely connected with its informational part that it makes sense to unite them within a single construct — the Information-Field Paradigm (IFP). This part is considered in some detail in [26], so here we shall give only a summary. The basic idea is that, having supposed as the basis of our World a primary energy field (PEF), we — in accordance with the notions available in modern physics — ascribe to it the capacity to quantize. At this level of generalization the concept of quantization can also be generalized and understood as a process of spontaneous or motivated change in the structure of the energy or material substrate, realized as any law-governed fragmentation, transformation or formation of inhomogeneities in field substrates which, however, do not destroy the primary wholeness of the PEF. The PEF may also be called the Primary Basis of the World (PBW). Such a hypothesis does not contradict modern scientific notions in physics, though as yet there are no instruments by which this field could be identified. The most generalized property of the PBW is wholeness, whose conceptual variant is unity. And this concept can be designated as the first archetype of existence. The first archetype, however, is preceded by the zeroth ARCHETYPE OF BEING, which cannot be defined by the means of language but is directly perceived by the subject as basic presence. The zeroth archetype in the subject’s consciousness may also be interpreted as NOTHING, since it is empty — but it is an emptiness filled with potentiality. More extravagant, from the standpoint of materialism, is the supposition that the PEF — the same as the PBW — possesses consciousness. This is not hard to imagine, since all people have the direct experience of the combination in one being of physical and spiritual properties.

But for the PBW this situation is not dualistic, because the archetype of unity does not permit it. Psychic activity, whose phenomenology is more or less known to the corresponding branches of science, does not appear suddenly from nowhere — it is the transformed varieties of the primary property of the PBW. Such a supposition makes it possible to overcome worldview dualism completely. There may be many scenarios of the quantization of the PBW, but the thermodynamically minimal one is the scenario of antisymmetric dichotomy, that is, division into opposite poles. True, a “zero scenario” is also possible, by which no quantization occurs; but the existence of our World indicates that the “zero scenario” was not realized.

Although after quantization a multiplicity appears, unity, or wholeness, does not disappear anywhere, and in the changed conditions continues to play the role of the mechanism uniting the newly forming multiplicities into systemic conglomerates.

The result of the first quantization of the One (PBW) is the appearance of the first multiplicity, which consists of two antisymmetric poles — and these poles are the INNER and the OUTER. These first essences need no definitions but can be identified in the ostensive procedure of direct perception. With this step of dichotomous quantization is connected the second archetype — the ARCHETYPE OF POLAR OPPOSITION. The aspects INNER and OUTER remain at all subsequent steps of dichotomous quantization in accordance with the principle WHAT WAS ATTAINED EARLIER REMAINS, IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER, THEREAFTER. This, in particular, explains the appearance of polar constructs in theories.

It is precisely through the OUTER and the INNER, as primary informational codons, that all other concepts can be defined. For example, the concepts of subject and object coincide almost completely with the inner and the outer respectively — only small content coefficients are needed, but they must be made on this very basis of the primary codons, which are the INNER and the OUTER. The terms “OUTER” and “INNER” in Latinized terminology have been known in psychology since Jung’s time as extraversion and introversion. Relying on the information paradigm, one can say that every object exists in both forms. For example, for energy these are its kinetic and potential states. Further details can be found in [26] and [29]. Of course, this theme awaits its further development.

The IFP makes it possible to understand that the three natural essences — energy, matter and information — are derivatives of the PBW. Properly speaking, energy is from the outset identified with the PBW. Matter is transformed energy, the result of its quantization. Form is the direct inhomogeneity of energy and material substrates, and information is the code of form — that is, its reflection in whatever modulations of one or another component of the medium.

Since the PBW presumably possesses consciousness, which is the basis of subjectivity, one more hypothesis is needed, connected with the direct perception and understanding by the Primary SUBJECT — whose carrier is the PBW — of the inhomogeneities arising in the processes of quantization as having sense. What is important for us here is that the forms arising in the PBW are simultaneously modulations of its substrate, and hence codes of themselves — that is, that which for the PBW is information. The absence of inhomogeneities the Primary SUBJECT perceives as the experience of wholeness. But this same absence of inhomogeneities may be perceived by the PBW as EMPTINESS and as NOTHING.

The philosophical experience of generations makes it possible to characterize information sources by their reliability. Already in ancient times the information given us by the sensory system was subjected to doubt (Sextus Empiricus, 3rd century BC). In Ancient Greece the limitedness of logical reasoning also became clear. Besides various tricks, there are real limitations of logic, which is incapable of compensating for the absence of empirical data. There are numerous flaws in intuition as well, which is rather easily deformed by subconscious influences. The least protected source of information is testimony — which, unfortunately, constitutes the basis of historical knowledge. Many philosophers placed their hopes on practice as a criterion of reliability, and various varieties of philosophies of pragmatism were even built on this. But a remark can be made here. If practice were a hundred-percent source of reliability, all practitioners would long ago have attained Absolute Truth — but this is not observed. Modern methodology proceeds from the fact that truth does not reduce to individual arguments from this or that source: only a system of arguments that are necessary and sufficient, and that moreover meet the requirements of completeness, consistency and independence, secures the truth of a theory. This must be borne in mind when Truth is at issue, in the natural as in the humanities sphere.

The IFP which socionics permits formulating excludes arbitrariness in the interpretation of subjectivity, explaining it as given by certain parameters of typological, biographical or psychoanalytic nature. This can make it possible not only to take subjectivity into account but to compensate for it in the construction of algorithms of individual and group behaviour — that is, to make such algorithms adequate to the habitat and to the task of survival in it. The IFP makes it possible to formulate a notion of truth as a law-governed systemic reflection of reality in human consciousness securing one or another form of survival. Moreover, one may speak of the psyche of the animal, in which a certain degree of reliability likewise obtains, allowing it to survive in its habitat. While subjective, perception at the same time bears a law-governed systemic character, which makes it possible adequately to compensate possible distortions and to restore an invariant picture of the world — or, what is the same, a picture of the world resting on invariants rather than on arbitrary conjectures. Truth is a methodologically verified, law-governed systemic model of the medium or the world, permitting the construction of practices adequate to that medium and directed at the survival of humanity. This is the global definition. Subjective projections, meanwhile, may take account of the interests of individual human groups and individual people. Thus the subjectivist notion of truth in the humanities is disavowed.

Defining truth; the four aspects

Now let us return to the definition of the concept of Truth. First of all, note that the concept of Truth, like all philosophical categories, is variable. Such a possibility, on another methodological basis, was provided for in historical materialism. But the variability of a concept can also be taken into account axiomatically, if all possible variants of change in the content of the corresponding categories are provided for. Since the set of such variants may prove large and may even tend to infinity, it can be described by suitable formulas. We shall proceed from the fact that the choice of a generalized form of worldview occurs under the influence of various external and internal circumstances which are the consequence of social development — which is what constitutes the history of humanity.

The reflection of this development in the system of concepts leads to change in the content of concepts. The fundamental postulate here is that the constancy of concepts is relative, while their change bears an absolute character. To the change of concepts corresponds the change of life circumstances. But these circumstances, despite their outward diversity, lie within the bounds of generalized parameters that play the role of primary constraints — that is, laws. These parametric laws have an alternative character. This means that a person must have the possibility of choosing — and this can be regarded as the realization of his freedom; but his choice always occurs within the bounds of the primary alternatives, and this is a consequence of the first archetype of being, whose content is the WHOLENESS of the World, the UNITY of all its parts [26]. The content of the second archetype is the POLAR OPPOSITION of the possibilities of existence, in accordance with the first antisymmetric division, as a result of which the Primary Basis of the World (PBW) divides into the OUTER and the INNER.

Therefore at the level of the second archetype only two types of worldview can exist: those oriented toward the inner (introverted) and those oriented toward the outer (extraverted). The subsequent division into finer varieties of worldview occurs within these two spheres and is determined by the archetypes corresponding to the further stages of the quantization of the PBW. In accordance with the idea set out here, only definite types of worldview are possible in society. The choice of a worldview by a person — or its formation in a person’s consciousness — occurs at the level of the subconscious as social programming. At the level of ultimate generalization within the IP, a worldview can be defined as a metaprogram of human behaviour; and within the metaprogram, taking its content into account, programs of smaller scale operate — down to the operational programs on whose basis concrete actions are realized.

The human being from the moment of conception is programmed genetically. This means he does not himself choose the parameters of his organism — in particular, of his body. Height, build, facial features, colour of hair and eyes, physical capacities, sex and the like, being genetically fixed, can change either artificially (one can dye one’s hair) or within the genetically given parameters. One can lose weight or gain it, one can train one’s muscles — which will already depend on social programs — but the generalized biological parameters will remain constant. Incidentally, a person’s information type (TIM) is innate and not subject to change, though people of one type may have many differences — but their typical parameters will be the same. There is, however, yet another type of programming — self-programming. It is not fully independent, because it depends on social and genetic programming. But a person’s personal will, however it may depend on circumstances, nonetheless has a relative independence, which can be linked with responsibility. There exist acts which a person can do and can not do; and however limited this choice may be, there is in it a part that does depend on the personality.

Truth is a theoretical model of an object adequate to its essence. Knowledge is a totality of algorithms which can be realized in technological schemes, turned into technologies. Thanks to socionics, four aspects of truth can be indicated:

1. the sensory — the object must be detected and recognized; when this aspect is ignored or distorted, sufficient grounds are lost.
2. the intuitive — the subject must penetrate into the essence of the object and comprehend it; when the intuitive aspect is ignored or distorted, sense is lost.
3. the logical — the judgments of truth must satisfy the formal requirements of correctness; when the logical aspect is ignored or distorted, reliability is lost.
4. the ethical — the judgments of truth must satisfy moral requirements and the requirements of consensus; when this is ignored or distorted, the moral criterion is destroyed.

With the above in mind, the possible definitions of truth can be divided into types, the choice among which constitutes human freedom; but a person cannot go beyond the generalized boundaries — he has freedom of choice, but that choice is limited by the poles of the dichotomies.

kaizersoso (a person from the Internet, spelling preserved) writes: Truth is an objective phenomenon (in my understanding). Therefore a phrase cannot be truth it can only subjectively reflect with varying degrees of reliability the objective truth. It may be sufficiently reliable or not, someone may agree with its reliability and someone not, but truth remains true independently of its comprehension by subjective consciousness.

Here is an example of the intuitive reasoning of a person expressing his opinion on the concept of truth. In saying that “Truth is an objective phenomenon,” he evidently identifies real objects and processes with their subjective description — to which alone the predicate “true/untrue” can apply. This alone may serve as a sign of his insufficient acquaintance with the history of the question, which makes his reasoning home-grown. In specifying that this is “in his understanding,” he confirms the intuitive status of his revelation. When he writes that “a phrase cannot be truth” (incidentally, without the comma before “it”), he confuses a concrete assertion with its possible truth evaluation. Moreover, he at once discards the variant that a judgment may be wholly true. From what follows it is evident that the author does not distinguish truth and reliability and, without giving any definition of truth, undertakes to judge its objective status.

Among the many definitions of truth, perhaps the simplest is understanding it as the totality of knowledge corresponding to reality. And everything would be in order if someone gave a definition of what reality is and added to it an algorithm by which one could establish whether the available knowledge answers to it or not. In two and a half thousand years philosophers have not managed to answer the last two questions irreproachably. Therefore many of them grew disillusioned with the search for truth and went in the direction of discrediting everything that concerns it. Some deny the possibility of attaining it even if it existed — these are the sceptics. Others simply disregard it, because they consider that it has no particular significance and that one can live without it — and most people live exactly so — these are the agnostics. And there are those who are certain that it does not exist at all — these are the nihilists. Still, they enjoy a certain success with part of society and thereby secure themselves a comfortable life. There may be many causes for such an attitude to truth, including at the level of the subconscious; but all together it constitutes a capitulation before the difficulties of cognition. In the final account, over many centuries we observe what may be called the cumulative effect of knowledge. We observe scientific-technical progress: aircraft fly, trains run, we already have intelligent machines, mobile telephones by which one can contact any country within a few minutes. This means that our knowledge in technology more or less corresponds to reality, though not one hundred percent. But, unfortunately, in the humanities there are directions in which we have not advanced even in comparison with the ancient Greeks.

Let us consider the variants of change in the content of the category of truth depending on worldview choice. These materials were partly discussed in [28]. We shall distinguish truth and Absolute Truth. The first category has a limited scale and relates to the assessment of local situations, while the second has a global character. Under certain conditions these two instances may be identified, degenerate, mix and negate each other. The category of truth is a variable concept whose content depends essentially, above all, on the scientist’s worldview basis. Even if this concept is formulated in the very same words, it will have a different — sometimes directly opposite — sense. Thus a materialist may hold that truth is determined by the correspondence of knowledge to the object it models, while for an idealist it is exactly the reverse: it is the object that must correspond to his idea.

For solving the problem posed in this section it suffices to understand Truth as a model of an object which can be transformed into technological processes of the object’s reproduction in human practice.

The Churyumov–Jung axiomatics as the basis for a deductive construction of socionics

Let us show, using the example of socionics, how a theory and its basic concepts can be constructed with reliance on the deductive approach. This task is solved on the basis of the CHURYUMOV–JUNG AXIOMATICS, which was presented at the 23rd international socionics conference.

For the deductive construction of socionics as the general theoretical foundation of psychology, the axioms must:

• bear a fundamental character;
• be plausible;
• their plausibility must rest on common sense;
• they must have no causal explanation within the given subject domain;
• their set must be consistent;
• their set must be necessary and sufficient for solving the task posed.

T. N. Prokofieva in her book [Socionics, 1999], attempting to sum up the search for a fundamental basis, proposes her variant of a socionic axiomatics, which takes the form of 5 propositions:

1. The eight psychological functions described by Jung constitute the apparatus of IM and process all information.
2. The structure of this apparatus is conditioned by the hierarchical arrangement of the Jungian functions in the model of each type.
3. The structure of the subconscious is organized in the same way as the structure of consciousness.
4. The functions in the information system work in blocks.
5. Information is transmitted from one person to another between identical functions.

• Of course, any scientist — under conditions of pluralism, multi-window vision and democracy, as well as freedom of speech — may consider any assertions to be axioms, provided he gives in advance a definition of the concept of axiom that justifies such a conviction.
• The absence of an adequate definition belongs to the logical defects, and this disavows the scientist’s position.
• An axiom is an elementary sense, not further decomposable within the given subject domain.
• However, the first of the cited propositions contains a contradiction, consisting in the fact that Prokofieva apparently does not take into account that the psychic functions considered in socionics — and Jung did not know socionics — are connected not with one but with two semantic fields: the positional and the aspectual. Neither semantic side of the socionic function is elementary, since they can be derived deductively from simpler assertions, which was done by me in [29, chapters 2 and 3]. → Error — the scope of the concept is restricted…
• Moreover, Prokofieva’s assertion that Jung described eight functions — which she calls psychological — is not indisputable; they are psychic functions, while it is the types that are psychological. Thus his pupil Marie-Louise von Franz writes: “Psychological Types is one of Jung’s early books. He wrote it while being in many respects a pioneer. Since its creation, the idea of the four functions of consciousness (my emphasis — S.Ch.) securing the conscious activity of the human personality has proved its enormous productivity” [Marie-Louise von Franz] — that is, the talk is of four functions, part of the primary functions considered in psychology, not of the eight functions represented in socionics, which appeared many years after Jung’s work. → Error — change of context…

V. Zelensky, surveying Jung’s notions of psychological types, speaks of Jung’s basic concepts as magnitudes: “These magnitudes or dimensions are the following: the attitudes — extraversion, introversion — and the functions — sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling,” from which it is clear that in Jung two attitudes and four functions are not one and the same. → Jung had not 8 but 4 functions…

Thus one has to state that Jung speaks first of all of four functions, which as such can appear in the extraverted and the introverted attitude — which, according to Jung, gives only quantitative differences. Extraverted and introverted functions in Jung do the same thing, but with a different attitude. → Does not satisfy the requirements for axioms (???)

Whereas in socionics extraversion and introversion, acting as attitudes for the personality and being integrated into the semantics of the functions, change their product. Thus introverted thinking yields as its product algorithms — that is, introverted forms of behaviour and technologies — while extraverted thinking is behaviour itself, or the technological process itself. → …different content

• Moreover, Prokofieva uses the term “function” in the general psychological sense, without distinguishing — at least in the given case — the positional and the aspectual semantics, which casts doubt on the possibility of understanding the functions as an “apparatus of IM,” since an isolated psychic function, superstructured over a physiological organ, is connected only with the processing of a signal, not of information. The processing of information is a psychological, not a physiological, process. → …confusion of concepts
• In physiological processes physiological metabolism takes place, since substance and energy are transferred and transformed there — as, for example, in the combustion of petrol in a car engine, which obeys physical laws and lies within the competence of physics and chemistry. Fuzzy formulations lead here to a confusion of subject domains, which belongs to the category of logical errors and is consequently subject to correction. → …confusion of subject domains
• Obviously the human psyche does not process ALL information… We humans see only in a limited range of electromagnetic radiation and hear in a limited range of acoustic frequencies.
• So the first of Prokofieva’s assertions cannot be considered an axiom, since it does not satisfy the requirements imposed on axioms.
• In Prokofieva’s second proposition the talk is, one must suppose, of the structure of the psyche — which likewise cannot be considered an axiom either in form or in content, since this structure, together with its hierarchy, is also derived from simpler suppositions [29].
• The third proposition in Prokofieva’s axiomatic list could be accepted in socionics as an axiom on condition that it had been verified in psychology — but that was not done there; not to mention that Prokofieva uses the concept of consciousness by default, without giving a definition, which leads us into the domain of blurred meanings.
• One may “try to guess” that the talk is of the conscious part of a person’s inner world — but, alas, that part belongs to the content of consciousness and is not consciousness itself. Moreover, it is entirely unclear why Prokofieva needed this “axiom” at all, since socionics does not work with the concept of the “subconscious” widely used in psychoanalysis. → …definition absent
• As for the fourth assertion, it is likewise unclear why its author needed it: as an axiom it requires categorical fulfilment, and that would mean that, for example, thinking by itself — autonomously — never works at all. Has that really been proved in psychology?
• Nor is it clear what Prokofieva understands by a block. If the talk is only of two adjacent functions, this is a needless restriction — for the four functions of each ring, and all eight functions, can of course also be regarded as blocks in which the functions work jointly.
• The fifth assertion does look rather like an axiom, and moreover it looks plausible. But here again we run into a fuzzy concept: which functions does Prokofieva consider identical — those identical positionally, or those with the same aspectual content? It appears she means the second; but of course such functions cannot in the general case be considered identical.
• Why do certain socionists consider this assertion an axiom? Answer: because they cannot explain it. Clearly, if they could give it an explanation, it would not be an axiom for them. But this assertion by no means looks like a world riddle — can no causal explanation really be found for it? → they cannot explain it…
• But why, after all, should such functions interact and “transmit information to each other”? The simplest idea on which the interaction of functions with the same aspectual content could be grounded is that such functions work on identical subject matter and use identical codes or carriers of those codes, which presupposes that it is “easier” for them to understand each other. That sounds plausible. → …not proved.
• A somewhat different grounding of the assumption under consideration could rest on the notion of vibration-energy fields connected with intertype relations (IR), when one could say that such functions “work in one frequency range” and resonance arises between them — which, one would have to admit, may have a positive or a negative character. This explanation differs considerably from the previous one, but also sounds plausible — with one limitation, however: such fields still have to be identified. → …not verified
• Aušra, in assessing relations, joined by a transactional link functions with the same aspectual content — which most socionists assessed as the interaction of the TIM carriers along those functions. For Aušra, the identical aspectual content of different functions was a heuristic hint that the comparison of the semantics of these functions contains a basis for assessing the semantics of the relation.
• Such an approach does not require the direct interaction of the functions — deferred interaction suffices. Moreover, an integral reaction of one TIM to another is possible: the carrier of one TIM simply finds it pleasant or unpleasant to be near the carrier of another TIM, which is often observed even before people have begun to say anything to each other or to perform joint work. → …another explanation is possible
• It is also known that partners between whom, according to socionic concepts, there should be, for example, “good” relations may feud and openly hate each other. A vivid example here is the pair Stalin (lS) – Trotsky (Ei), who were duals. Moreover, they were in close contact within the BETA quadra, which also included Lenin (Sl) and Bukharin (iE). It is well known with what suspicion Lenin regarded Stalin, and how Stalin dealt with Bukharin and Trotsky — and yet their informational aspects complemented one another. → So much for the quadra…
• And finally, I have managed to show on the model of the relation that a considerably more exact assessment of the semantics of relations can be obtained by the direct comparison of identical functions — that is, functions with the same positional semantics, though with different aspectual content.
• One more argument against the “fifth” point may be that both duals and conflictors can use (and of course do use) as the channel of information transmission speech, produced by the speech apparatus and perceived by hearing — which looks very much like the interaction of the same functions in both cases; yet the result comes out different. → maybe…
• Thus the set of assertions proposed by Prokofieva for the role of a socionic axiomatics proves unsuitable for that role — above all because of the logical defects present in the set. These defects in the given case are of a subtle character and are therefore not always caught by the intuitive intellect.

…one more approach

• A. V. Bukalov approached the problem of axiomatizing socionics in almost the same way. In his book [The Potential of the Personality] the author writes, verbatim: “To show the simplicity and fundamentality of the initial concepts of socionics, we present its simplest axiomatics.”
• The assertion of the greatest simplicity of the presented axiomatics is, as we shall see below, unfounded. Simpler variants are possible. Bukalov’s axiomatics (BA) is tantamount to a direct recognition of the thesis of the truth of socionics by default, which from the methodological point of view is an unfounded simplification.

BA1 (Bukalov’s axiomatic basis, axiom 1)

“1) the information stream perceived by the individual or social psyche divides into 8 different semantic aspects, just as white light decomposes into the different colours of the rainbow. The combination of these aspects is perceived by consciousness as ‘semantically coloured’ information about the surrounding and inner world.”

• This formulation consists of 3 parts.
• The middle one is a metaphor and may be regarded as a non-rigorous explanation.
• The first part itself consists of 7 senses, each of which may claim axiomatic status:
  1. An information stream (IS) exists;
  2. An individual psyche exists;
  3. A social psyche exists;
  4. The individual psyche perceives the IS;
  5. The social psyche perceives the IS;
  6. The individual psyche divides the IS into 8 semantic aspects;
  7. The social psyche divides the IS into 8 semantic aspects.
• The third part is represented by 2 senses and may likewise claim axiomatic status:
  1. Consciousness exists;
  2. Consciousness perceives the semantic aspects (SA).
• The author has renounced the attempt at a logical justification of the existence of the informational aspects (IA) as objective realities, since the semantic aspects (SA) perceived by the individual or social psyche remain subjective impressions — which limits the natural-science status not only of socionics but of psychology. The comparison with the colours of the rainbow further strengthens the subjective status of the aspects. Colours, if anything, are indisputably the result of subjective perception.
• True, such a position does not contradict the phenomenological notions current in science of the barrier of subjective perception limiting the human psyche’s direct contact with the “thing-in-itself.”
• At the same time, the author’s formulation does not satisfy the requirements imposed on axioms, since an axiom must contain an elementary sense, whereas the IA must and can be derived from more fundamental premises.
• The author also speaks of the information stream AS REALLY — NOT SUBJECTIVELY! — existing, but holds that its division into IA occurs subjectively in the individual or social psyche. He therefore finds it possible to rename them SA — semantic aspects — which leads to a subtle substitution of their sense.

BA2 (Bukalov’s axiomatic basis, axiom 2)

“2) these eight aspects of the information stream the psyche perceives and processes with corresponding specialized psychic functions, the so-called functions of information metabolism (exchange) — a kind of special processors forming a hierarchical structure.”

• This axiom partly repeats the assertion of the perception of the IA by the psyche, but specifies exactly how this perception is carried out. This connection between the first two axioms indicates that they are not independent — one is determined by the other, which contradicts the requirement of the elementarity of axioms.
• The identification of the functions of information metabolism (FIM) with processors bears the character of an explication, and at the level of an axiomatics is not only superfluous but negates the axiomatic character of the author’s assertions.

BA3 (Bukalov’s axiomatic basis, axiom 3)

“3) any integral sphere of the psyche that perceives and processes the information stream consists of all eight functions forming a hierarchical structure. Depending on the sequence of the functions, different types of psyche, thinking, world perception and behavioural strategy arise.”

• This assertion consists of two parts, the first of which is represented by three elementary senses:
  1. The psyche is represented by a set of integral spheres.
  2. Each of them consists of all eight functions.
  3. In any such sphere the functions form a hierarchical structure. → Non-elementarity of the assertion…
• The second part of the 3rd axiom: Depending on the sequence of the functions, different types of psyche, thinking, world perception and behavioural strategy arise.
• The number of functions was not directly introduced in the preceding axioms, though indirectly it might be presumed connected with the number of aspects. But such a connection cannot be considered unambiguous a priori — it must either be introduced axiomatically (which is naive) or derived from the accepted axioms. Therefore the expression “consists of all eight functions” is incorrect owing to the quantitative pronoun “all.” The underlined assertion is incorrect in substance, since the sequence of the functions in the models of all TIMs is the same. TIMs differ in the sequence of the IA — or, as the author designated them, the SA.

BA4 (Bukalov’s axiomatic basis, axiom 4)

“4) psycho-informational interaction takes place along functions connected with the processing of one and the same informational aspect. The kind of interaction — from attraction and cooperation to repulsion and conflict — is determined by the places of these functions in the structures of the interacting psyches.”

• This assertion is identical in content with Prokofieva’s 5th axiom, with the same defects.
• The assumption contained here, like the three preceding ones, is not elementary, since it can be refined by reference to the causes of interaction “along functions connected with the processing of one and the same informational aspect.”

“BA5” (Bukalov’s axiomatic basis, axiom 5, by default)

“These four axioms fully describe the basic principles of socionics and serve as the base for the rigorous modelling of the overwhelming majority of phenomena connected with the humanitarian and socio-political sphere of the personality and society. In addition to this one must know the concrete specifics of the 8 aspects of the information stream (their semantics) and the structure of the hierarchy of the psycho-informational functions, expressed in the form of an 8-element table — the model of the psyche.”

• Axioms are the basic principles. Unfortunately, the four axioms presented not only fail to satisfy the requirements for an axiomatic basis, but give no possibility of deriving the semantics of the aspects, functions and relations — since those are given axiomatically.
• The author’s assertion about the four axioms may itself be considered an axiom, in which it is recognized a priori that the BA “fully describe the basic principles of socionics and serve as the base for rigorous modelling…”
• Such inexactitudes in the use of the apparatus of axiomatization make it impossible to recognize the author’s assertions as axioms, since they do not take into account the subtle relations between the units of the categorial apparatus. With the same justification the author could have proposed as an axiom the assertion that “socionics is true by default.”

THE CHURYUMOV–JUNG AXIOMATICS

• Jung, properly speaking, had no axioms and no axiomatics — at any rate he did not work this theme through.
• I have singled out those of his judgments which correspond to the status of axioms, and to them added my own axioms, necessary for the completeness of the whole set.
• And since my axioms, in sense, precede Jung’s assertions, it is natural to name the whole set by a double name and precisely in this order — “four axioms of Churyumov + four axioms of Jung.”

AXIOM 1 — AXIOM OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE WORLD (AEW): THE WORLD EXISTS.

• Without this axiom all the others lose their foundation. The counter-question posed here by analytical philosophers — “And what is the world? Have you seen it?” — has a simple answer: “The world is the generalization of the concept of the environment, and the environment of existence is given to us directly.”

AXIOM 2 — AXIOM OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE PSYCHE (AEP): IN THIS WORLD A PSYCHE EXISTS.

• A definition is required here.
• THE PSYCHE IS AN ENERGY-INFORMATION SYSTEM SECURING THE SURVIVAL OF A LIVING BEING.

AXIOM 3 — AXIOM OF THE ENVIRONMENT’S ACTION ON THE PSYCHE (EAP): THE ENVIRONMENT ACTS ON THE LIVING BEING, AND THIS ACTION IS PERCEIVED BY THE PSYCHE.

AXIOM 4 — AXIOM OF THE PSYCHE’S RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENT’S ACTION (PRE): THE PSYCHE RESPONDS TO THE ACTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN SUCH A WAY AS TO MAXIMIZE ITS CAPACITY TO SURVIVE.

• GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF THE FIRST FOUR AXIOMS: (the “black box” diagram — the WORLD as an oval containing the PSYCHE as a box with an input arrow and an output arrow)

AXIOM 5 — AXIOM OF THE PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD (APW): FOR THE PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD THE PSYCHE POSSESSES A SENSORY SYSTEM (SENSING). = S/s

AXIOM 6 — AXIOM OF THE EMOTIONAL REACTION TO THE WORLD’S ACTION (AER): THE PSYCHE EVALUATES THE WORLD’S ACTION BY MEANS OF AN INSTANTANEOUS EMOTIONAL REACTION (EMOTION). = E/e

AXIOM 7 — AXIOM OF THE INTUITIVE CONSTRUCTION OF AN INTERNAL MODEL OF THE WORLD (AIM): THE PSYCHE POSSESSES INTUITION, BY MEANS OF WHICH IT BUILDS AN INTERNAL MODEL OF THE WORLD (INTUITION). = I/i

AXIOM 8 — AXIOM OF THE PSYCHE’S TECHNOLOGICAL RESPONSE TO THE WORLD’S ACTION (ATR): THE PSYCHE POSSESSES MEANS OF CONSTRUCTING AN ALGORITHM OF BEHAVIOUR IN RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENT’S ACTION (THINKING) AND CONTROLS THE ORGANS OF THE LIVING BEING SO AS TO CARRY OUT TECHNOLOGICAL CONTACT WITH THE WORLD (ACTIVITY). = L/l

Now let us show how, relying on the axioms presented, Model A of the structure of the psyche can be constructed. For this we use the “black box” scheme and turn it into a semi-transparent box.

(Diagram: the black box “PSYCHE” with input and output arrows becomes a semi-transparent box containing the sequence S ‖ E ‖ I ‖ L between the input and output arrows.)

Sensing is naturally located near the input to the psyche, and the technological capacity near the output. Emotion comes immediately after sensing, and intuition just before technology.

The environment’s action divides into the load stream (above) and the resource stream (below). The load action is countered by extraverted sensing. The information obtained here is controlled by introverted emotion (a negative attitude → “I don’t want”). Outward-directed extraverted intuition, having received the preceding information, builds the INTERNAL MODEL OF THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT (IME), and introverted thinking, closing the load chain, forms algorithms of behaviour taking the IME into account.

(Diagram: the transparent box — two parallel chains between input and output arrows: upper row S e I l, lower row s E i L.)

The resource stream is met by introverted sensing, which evaluates the consumer qualities of the resource. Satisfaction of the resource need is evaluated by positive emotion, which is registered by introverted intuition, which assesses the subject’s internal state. Extraverted thinking, closing the resource chain, realizes the algorithms of behaviour in the form of technological actions compensating the environment’s negative action or reproducing the resource.

Having transformed the chains into rings and taken into account the semantics of the blocks, we obtain Model A of the ILE (Don Quixote), which sets the positional semantics of all the functions, identical for all TIMs. Quantum transformations of the ILE model, connected with the admissible redistribution of the IA, generate the models of all the remaining TIMs. The ARP (aspect-feature poles) are obtained as linear combinations of the basic features, and all the remaining categories are obtained as the result of equivalent transformations of algebraic groups — which is what the sets of ARP, TIM and IR are. Moreover, the theorem on the strict orderedness of the socion is rigorously proved.

Thus, if the axioms are recognized as true, the entire system of socionic categories proves true, since deductive transformations preserve semantic equivalence.

From the socionic point of view, all the disagreements among philosophers concerning the concept of truth are connected with the fixing of some one of its eight possible sides. The logical and linguistic positivists exploit the IA l — the communicative-speech aspects of the representation of truth. All varieties of pragmatism are fixed on the aspect L — extraverted thinking — which corresponds to productive activity and the obtaining of a concrete product. Such a product may of course be understood as truth, as that which is striven for, which is the goal, and which in that case is unquestionably perceived as the criterion of truth — though it is, above all, the criterion of the effectiveness of knowledge. On the aspects E/e existentialism and numerous religious confessions build their notions of truth. The aspect S can become — and does become — the basis for assertions that “right is always on the side of the strong.” The aspect s transfers the notion of truth into the plane of the directly perceived, which is widespread at the pre-scientific level and is realized in reliance on empirics and experiment. The aspects I/i correlate, respectively, with the objective and the subjective understanding of truth. And only a full-fledged reliance on all the aspects leads to an adequate notion of truth.

In the humanities sphere the influence of the subject is considerably greater than in natural science; but the subject too obeys the primary constraints and can therefore be “computed” — and this is what should constitute the subject matter of scientific research in the humanities. Modern philosophers have halted before the problem of the representability of semantic fields, having concluded that the human intellect cannot go beyond the framework of verbal procedures, beyond the verbal circle. It was shown above that an exit beyond the limits of language is possible, and it always occurs with the use of ostensive procedures. The truth of an assertion is thereby determined by its equivalence to the functioning of the object in the world of things. The truth of complex and derivative assertions is determined through the truth of basic assertions, which are relatively easily verified in laboratory experiment or in practical activity — these being varieties of the ostensive procedure. The procedure of reducing complex assertions to simple ones is realized in science as reduction. But reduction, in order not to violate truth equivalence, must be substantive. This requirement is not met by the formal reduction of social phenomena to parametric measurements, which was easily inspired by the philosophical variants of positivism. The natural sciences — in particular chemistry and physics — found a base for the substantive reduction of their assertions: the system of chemical elements. Since the discovery of socionics, the possibility has appeared of constructing a periodic system of informational elements [29], reduction to which will be substantive and adequate to social problematics. And if we accept the paradigm of the objective existence of information, then the humanities can be understood as objective — that is, as sciences behind which stand essences really functioning in the world — and humanities judgments can be proved by the same standards of rigour as assertions in the natural sciences. A vivid example of the proof of objective truth in the humanities is the work of A. A. Zaliznyak proving the authenticity of the outstanding monument of Slavic culture, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign [7].

Conclusions

1. The problem of truth in the humanities must be solved with account taken of its solution in philosophy.

2. The solution of this problem in the modern varieties of positivism, phenomenologism, existentialism and the like cannot be considered satisfactory, from the standpoint that the humanities are opposed to the natural sciences — which is a manifestation of dualism.

3. The solution of this problem requires the expansion of the modern general scientific paradigm through the introduction into it of the field paradigm (FP) and the information paradigm (IP), which after their unification gives the information-field paradigm (IFP).

4. The discovery of the informational elements and their periodic system in socionics becomes the basis for a substantive reduction of humanities problematics.

5. There is no isolated, extra-systemic truth. Every concept acquires its concrete sense when it takes its place in a system of concepts.

6. The direct connection of meridional energetics with the semantics of psychic qualities makes the psyche a natural-science object and limits subjective indeterminacy in the interpretation of psychological phenomenology.

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Translator’s notes: TIM = type of information metabolism; IM = information metabolism; IA = informational aspect; IR (ИО) = intertype relations; ARP (АРП) = the system of aspect-feature poles used in Churyumov’s framework; ANF (АНФ) — the function position referred to in the source in the discussion of Table Pris.02; socionic type abbreviations (Se, iL, Il, Li, sL, lS, Ei, etc.) and pseudonyms (Napoleon, Balzac, Don Quixote, London, Dumas, Gabin, Dreiser, Yesenin) are retained as in the original. The two appendix tables on pp. 455–457 duplicate Tables Pris.01 and Pris.02 and are rendered once each at their point of discussion.