TYPOLOGICAL OUTLINES OF TRANSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN MODERN CULTURE

The problems of cultural and civilizational transition and the anthropological catastrophe, predicted by leading scientists and thinkers, are now becoming much more acute and clear. The events unfolding before our eyes in the socio-cultural, political, economic and even biological life of modern society testify to a deep systemic crisis of modern civilization. In this regard, attempts at analytical comprehension of the crisis state of culture, identifying cause-and-effect relationships that have led to this state, as well as the experience of anti-crisis modeling and searching possible ways to overcome the crisis seem to be in demand and relevant. This work, relying on the culturological approach and using the method of culturological hermeneutics, presents the experience of theoretical fixation of the types of responses to the crisis state of culture common for transition periods, the semantic content of which can be determined in three main ways: 1) inversion mechanisms, where human consciousness tends to transfer ready-made, well-known cultural models to the new cultural ground; 2) mediation mechanisms, implying human acceptance of transforming reality; 3) eristic principle — a situation of semantic pluralism up to the shift of value poles.

Ēdiens kā sociālā slāņa un nacionālās piederības robežzīme

Taking into account the research conclusions in social and natural sciences, gastropoetics as a research method allows to examine a literary text in-depth revealing the causal relationships and nuances of the psychological portrayal of characters, as well as analyse semantic pluralism providing more diverse interpretation opportunities of a literary text. In Andrejs Upīts’s novel “Bread” (Maize, 1914) the portrayed passengers of the third class train wagon are a micromodel of Western society, where food, sharing the food or its denial precisely reveal the hierarchic structure of community and the differences in social stratification, as well as human behavioural principles, which are based on the tradition that has evolved over thousands of years and can also be cross-compared with the behavioural principles observable among animals. Other aspects include the social undermining of certain social groups, for instance, older people, children, foreigners, as well as the marginalisation of these groups denying them the freedom of choice or action, equal rights, etc. Upīts in his novel constructs a social situation of a small community, accurately revealing the hierarchic structure, as well as collaboration and relationship models of the community.

Semantic Pluralism

What is the content of a sentence in context? At most one proposition, says the standard view of propositionalism accepted in much of semantics. A set of propositions, says the hitherto little-explored view of semantic pluralism. The aim of this book is to motivate, develop and defend semantic pluralism. To achieve this aim, the book puts forward two arguments against semantic propositionalism. It spells out two versions of semantic pluralism: flexible pluralism, which takes many expressions to be context-sensitive, and strong pluralism, which denies that context-sensitivity is widespread. And it shows how pluralist theories can reply to several objections that have been lodged against non-propositional semantic theories.