Nonclassical and postnonclassical epistemology in Lev Vygotsky's cultural-historical approach to clinical psychology

Abstract

This article presents a historiographic and theoretical methodological study of the establishment of the fundamental theses of L. S. Vygotsky's cultural-historical concept within the field of clinical psychology. We prove the potency of contemporary philosophical concepts that help distinguish the types of scientific rationality (classical, nonclassical, and postnonclassical) when these concepts are applied to reflection about the development of psychology and the paradigmatic cultural-historical concept suggested by Vygotsky and the L. S. Vygotsky-A. R. Luria syndrome approach. Present studies of the works of Vygotsky and his followers demonstrate that the fundamentals of the cultural-historical concept reveal not only the nonclassical but also the postnonclassical model of scientific rationality. They are characterized by the postnonclassical understanding of the object and method of psychological study and the postnonclassical mode of thinking of contemporary psychologists. The general methodological requirements formulated for the organization of mental studies, on the whole, are in line with the requirements introduced for the study of complex self-developing systems. Vygotsky produced arguments to prove that the Vygotsky- Luria syndrome approach describes mental syndromes as dynamic structures in that they display the features of self-organization, self-determination, and adaptive rationality. Hence, they can be regarded as open self-developing systems. We propose and verify the hypothesis that syndrome analysis, because of the features of postnonclassical modeling of scientific rationality that it reveals, may be regarded as a theoretically productive methodological approach in contemporary psychological studies. © Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2013 © Russian Psychological Society, 2013.