CATEGORY OF SECONDARY POTENTIALITY IN LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY

• Published in: Koncept: filosofiâ, religiâ, kulʹtura Vol. 4; no. 8; pp. 47 - 61
• Main Author: Druzhinin, A.S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: MGIMO University Press 01.12.2018
• Subjects: epistemic reference point; linguo-cognitive modeling; reference state; secondary potentiality; theoretical importance
• ISSN: 2541-8831; 2619-0540
• DOI: 10.24833/2541-8831-2018-4-8-47-61

The problem of categorization in mind and language has always been a topical subject of massive studies, among which cross-discipline research is gaining particular importance in the era of technological and scientific development. The article presents a lingvo-philosophical analysis of the category of secondary potentiality traditionally referred to as subjunctive mood or counterfactuality. Language as a phenomenon of human cognition predetermined by the functioning of distributed neural networks in the two operational modes, actuality and potentiality, allows secondary, recursive circumscriptions to emerge in the referential domain of a languaging organism. These circumscriptions, or markers (units of organism-environment interactions) as purely interior semantic entities lay a basis for, or rather concur with lingvo-cognitive categories (categories of mind), one of which is the category of secondary potentiality. Its epistemic nature consists in the description of accumulated cognitive experience in relation to potential behavior within one and the same referential state. Perceiving time as a “rupture’ of spatial isotropy (G. Auletta), the organism experiences (represents) the past as a reference that does not coincide with the current, actual state of the living system. Cognitively abled to enter and newly enter into causal interactions with the inner semantic images as if they were independent entities and recursively form new, secondary descriptions, the organism generates a conceptually new epistemic unit making it possible to “convert” (reconsider) non-actuality into potentiality. The once experienced past as a cause becomes a teleonomically anticipated future effect, concurring with it in one semantic entity. As a result, the organism comes to generate a secondary potentiality - potentiality causally mediated by the subjective experience of its own realization/actualization. The findings of the lingvo-cognitive modelling of the category of secondary potentiality, first conducted in terms of lingvophilosophy and guided by the data of natural sciences, offer an apparent theoretical and applied research prospect for subsequent studies into its form-content structure.