Imaginative thinking in science (based on the material of V.O. Klyuchevsky’s essay “The History of Russia”)

UDC 81`42

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.4-22.048  

Valentinova Olga I.,

Doctor of Philology,

Professor of the General Linguistics Department

Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia

e-mail: ovalentinova@yandex.ru

The article investigates the functions of image and figurative thinking in an academic text. The research material was the classic work by V.O. Klyuchevsky “A History of Russia”. The empirical material has shown that the relationship between logical and figurative thinking in an academic text is not definitively hierarchical. In V.O. Klyuchevsky’s discussing of the most significant events in the Russian history, logical and figurative thinking are either in the relationship of complementarity, or figurative thinking compensates for the restrictions of logical thinking. While retaining the essential ability of expressing a complex thought, the image in an academic text performs a cognitive function, including the cases when an image or a series of images is used to explain or reconstruct the historical outlook of an era. In this latter case, the image also remains a way of knowing the abstract through the concrete. In this way the intratextual function is superimposed on the immanent function of the image. The analysis of explanatory analogies has revealed different principles of their presentation, the objective and the subjective ones,, which in turn has made it possible to reveal a varying degree of reflexivity of consciousness in creating an image in an academic text. An organic synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious underlies the historical image constructed in accordance with the principle of chronotopic homonomy. At the same time, the article establishes a criterion for distinguishing between an image as a method of cognition and an image as an element of rhetoric. The study of figurative academic thinking allows, on the one hand, to reach the supercategory of the author’s persona, and, on the other hand, to get a more complete picture of the object of cognition, which means that this research is significant not only for philology, but also for the field of knowledge to which the studied academic text belongs.

Keywords: image, imaginative thinking, way of cognition, author’s persona, academic text, V.O. Klyuchevsky.

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