This paper focuses on three concepts – commensurability, bicultural, and domestication, aiming to consider their epistemic significance in sociocultural anthropology. All classical non-relativistic anthropology rested on the idea of commensurability, while the incommensurability as a problem did not even exist there: “savage” and “civilized” cultures were assumed by default to be commensurable. For convenience, I will refer to such positivistic “commensurability by default”, which is before or outside relativistic and interpretive anthropology, as “commensurability-1”. However, there is another – the hermeneutic – understanding of commensurability, developing in the “post- relativistic era” of anthropology; I will call it “commensurability-2”. This is a more reflexive and critical form, which assumes that understanding comes not through an exact knowledge or translation of a representative of an alien culture, but rather as an intermittent process of a continuing “long talk” that changes the interlocutors. This “long conversation” can be investigated, for example, as a sequence of communicative situations. The question of commensurability in interpretive anthropology and interpretative sociology involves the study of epistemically obscure, “muddy” communication situations between representatives of different cultures. These are situations in which uncertainty, ambiguity, anomaly, illusions and errors in understanding are considered epistemically constructive, rather than negative, phenomena (from the positivist viewpoint). Such situations can be depicted through the concept of epistemic murk (Michael Taussig), that characterizes a state of anthropologists on the road to biculturalism, entering into the alien culture. Domestication, in all likelihood, can be considered as a mechanism for achieving biculturalism.

The article aims to describe the main problems that can become a substantive basis for the journal thematic section “The Discussion Questions of the Language of Science” actualizing in the context of the semiotic paradigm. The author has set and achieved two major objectives, which determined the general logical and semantic structure of the article. These objectives include reviewing the main Russian journals published on the language of science and the actualization of the problems of the ideal language into possibilities including the language of science through the semiotic model proposed by Charles Morris. The syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the ideal sign-language system are used as grounds for differentiating the synchronic and diachronic problems of the language of science. As shown in the article, the main semiotic problems of the language into possibilities and the language in reality include questions related to the peculiarities of using the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic rules. For syntactics, such rules are the requirements concerning the procedure for constructing and transforming a language system. For semantics, these are rules for applying signs to designated objects. For pragmatics, these are rules of interpretation of signs. The overall positive assessment of Morris’ meta-language model as a normative language matrix bases on the absence of generally accepted and stable theories of language differing from the semiotic language doctrine. At the same time the modern semiotics does not limit the range of its cognitive interests to the level of speech discourses of the sign-language system, the standard of semantic correctness of which includes the language of science. Today the object of semiotics covers various types of language practices, which being implemented in the language are not limited to it. In this context, the article attempts to encourage interdisciplinary discussion platforms focusing on the actual debatable problems of the language to be created within such advanced forms of periodicals, as philosophically oriented e-journals.

The article discusses the methodological conception of the Scottish thinker William Whewell, created in the middle of the twentieth century. Whewell believed that man has some innate ideas, which imposing on sensory perceptions generate knowledge. Among the fundamental ideas that guide human knowledge, Whewell distinguishes the ideas of space, time and number. They are studied and developed by «pure» sciences. In other sciences, these fundamental ideas are complemented with the ideas of causality, environment, similarities, etc. In his methodological constructions, Whewell relied on a thorough study of the history of practically all the developed sciences of his time, therefore he anticipated a turn towards the history of the philosophy of science, which took place in the second half of the twentieth century. The conception of Whewell included of idea of a hypothetical-deductive structure of scientific knowledge, the idea of «theory-ladeness» of facts, and empirical verifiability as a most important criterion of scientific nature. It is a pity that the conception created by the founder of the philosophy of science was forgotten for a long time.

The article continues the philosophical discussion on the recent significant work by Vladimir Kutyrev. In his critical analysis of it, Vadim Rozin accepts the key points of V. Kutyrev’s book and scholarship, such as the concepts of “being”, “non-being”, “negative consequences of scientific and technological development”, “philosophical discourse”; still, the conclusions are denied. The understanding of “being” and “non-being” by V. Kutyrev comes in line with Parmenides’ onto- logical discovery and M. Heidegger’s criticism of metaphysics. The novelty of V. Kutyrev’s ideas relates to the situation in which contemporary scientific and technical changes maintains the possibility of post-human and beyond-human transformations along with a possible termination of human history. Parmenides’ abstract «being» is transforming into “otherness” of post-humanity and artificial intelligence superseding human be- ings. “Negative consequences of scientific and technical development” is a form of transition of technogenic civilization into a posthuman exist- ence. Hardly anybody is able to know the future – yet, the transition from human to posthuman seems to be getting more pronounced. Obviously, we have to reconsider all philosophy starting with Thales for its connection to human being or non- being. Classical rational strategies of philosophical discourse should be supplemented with non- classical ones. An essayistic and even artistic character of V. Kutyrev’s scholarship appears a worthy example of such reconsideration. To my mind, his recent book once again confirms his sta- tus as a leading philosopher in the field of under- standing and solving the crucial issue of modern humanity: to be or not to be?