Sketch-program of social rationality research of the epoch of demarcation wars and disciplinary disputes in 19th-20th centuries

The sketch-program of social rationality research is aimed at studying the analytical abilities and limits of sociological explanation of the original intellectual creation. This sketch-program encompasses the whole complex of theoretical and methodological issues associated with clearing the nature and the character of the relationship between the ''social'' and the ''rational'' and related research areas such as theory and history of ideas, intellectual history, sociology of scientific knowledge and social epistemology. The sketch-program is built on a broad and hybrid base that includes elements of cultural sociology of J. Alexander (recognition of cultural determinants as an independent causal force of intellectual creation), the theory of social order and rites of E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, A. van Gennep, V. Turner, M. Douglas, E. Goffman, D. Marshall (rite is considered as an elementary form of rationality), the praxeology of P. Bourdieu (recognition of all types of rational entities as social entities) and ethnomethodology of H. Garfinkel and R. Hilbert (application for micro- and macro-structures of social order and the search of social-rationality parameters in everyday practices of intellectuals). Priority area of social rationality research is the history of Western European academic community in the 19th-20th centuries. It was the epoch of active demarcation processes and disciplinary war that broke out between various associations of researchers, when many questions related to immediate changes in research practices and with the search for new forms of social solidarity among researchers demanded solutions. The demarcation process and disciplinary war unfolded against the background of philosophical reflection on the foundations of science related to such Western European intellectual trends, as neo-Kantianism, empirical psychology, the psychology of mental acts, phenomenology, logical positivism, critical rationalism, scientific realism and social constructivism. Designed according to the principles set in the sketch-program the social rationality research will describe and explain the mechanisms that allow reflection on the foundations of science as an incentive and the starting point of the demarcation process. This reflection and ideas created on its basis about the nature of the disciplinary differences legitimized everyday disciplinary research practices and guaranteed its differences and mutual irreducibility.

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