Methodological and Structural Transformations of the Contemporary Science

The article analyses the structural changes in the contemporary science and research methodologies at the new stage of social dynamics and in connection with the development of a new scientific paradigm - technoscience. Significant changes in the contemporary science are characterized as a shift of the scientific rationality paradigms. The observed changes involve both substantive and structural aspects of scientific knowledge. It is shown that disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are forms of the structural organization of knowledge associated respectively with the classical, non- classical and post-non-classical paradigms of scientificity. Within the framework of the classical paradigm, scientific knowledge is disciplinarily structured. In the non-classical paradigm within the structure of science, an independent layer of knowledge is designated - interdisciplinary knowledge. Informatics, general theory of systems, cybernetics, synergetics have an interdisciplinary status. The post-non-classical paradigm of science corresponds to a new level of knowledge integration - transdisciplinarity. The development of science is also characterized by changes in the methodological research strategies in the three considered paradigms of science. The classical methodology of science sought to combine knowledge about activity and thinking with knowledge about the objects of this activity and thinking. In disciplinarily structured scientific knowledge and in interdisciplinary research, the horizontal movement of thought in the plane of the object is maintained, despite the extensive expansion of boundaries and connection between the disciplines. The methodology of interdisciplinary research can be characterized as uncovering the horizontal connections of reality. When human-dimension systems become the subject of cognition, parameters that characterize not only the object, but also the sphere of its social functioning are included in the constructed model of reality. It is post-non-classical rationality that encounters a different type of objectivity (not an objective one), but it affects the human world; therefore, post-non-classical scientificity is associated with a stage defined by the term “technoscience”. Technoscience forms a model of interaction between knowledge and society, in which knowledge is socially and practically conditioned, the production of knowledge is provided by the digitalization of science, the coalescence of science and production. Transdisciplinarity entered the practice of science and is particularly relevant in connection with technoscience and convergent technologies. In transdisciplinary studies, the reductionist methodology is complemented by approaches such as holism and emergentism, and cognitive activity is characterized as a complex systemic thinking. The cognition methodology of this kind of reality (complex self-developing systems involving a human) is called the methodology of complexity cognition.

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