The Foundations of Semantic Genesis in the Cultural Space: Origins, Mechanism, Determinants

This article investigates the philosophical category of “sense” and its influence on the cultural space. It provides an overview of the evolution of the concept of “sense” in the history of philosophy and categorizes philosophical theories of meaning into three paradigms: word-centric, propositional, and activity-based. In text revealed the opposite tendencies of understanding sense in the analytical and continental traditions. It is typical for continental philosophy to blur the boundaries of the semantic field from individual to individual, which leads to a radical subjectivation of sense and, in the most radical theories, a rejection of objective understanding. Analytical philosophy, on the contrary, seeks to unify the semantic space by putting the subjective factor outside the brackets of theory. Recent studies in the activity-based paradigm show a tendency to overcome these extremes, understanding sense as a synthesis of individual reasoning and collective rationality. Such a definition of sense allows to deduce it from the purely epistemological space and to trace the influence of sense on the formation of the cultural space.