Culture as a system of cognitive-pragmatic programs: a brief theoretical essay

Abstract

The article considers the concept of culture as a universal that constantly generates theoretical and methodological problems and that is why it requires a special approach. The author of the article offers a comprehensive meta-disciplinary approach based on system principles and an original idea. Culture functions according to the algorithmic model of “cultural meaning — action — object/artifact of culture” in the mode of continuous process of objectification/deobjectifi cation of cultural meaning/artifact of culture. Cultural artifacts are cognitive artifacts; cognition provides interaction between consciousness and the outside world. From a cognitive point of view, culture is not an external set of alienated objects and not an “intrapsychic” systematization of them, but a dynamic “supersystem” cognitivepragmatic whole. The connecting link working with the cognitive-mental code is a thinking subject who possesses not only the “memory of culture”, but also a system of cognitive, creative competencies, capable of both systematizing cultural codes (synthesis operation) and segmenting the cultural space (operation of complex analysis of a separate cultural code/system of cultural codes). In the context of the author’s theory of cognitive-pragmatic programs (CPP), culture appears as a hierarchically organized, dynamic, polysemiotic, polydiscursive system of inextricably interconnected CPP of different types (a) metanarrative; b) derivatives; c) nationalspecific, which provide an inextricable connection of the system of universal concepts “language — culture — personality”. The core of culture is a system of nationalspecific CPP that synthesize the properties of metanarrative and derivative programs and act as the mental basis of the key ideological platforms of the culture of a person/ nation/people.

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