Signs and Symbols in the Subject's Understanding of the World

Abstract

The article shows that signs, cognitive and existential symbols are internal conditions of mental activity of a subject who understands the world. The psychological bases for understanding each reality — empirical, sociocultural, existential — are signs, cognitive symbols, and existential symbols, respectively. It is proved that the heterogeneity of understanding, its disparity and apparent divergence can not be considered a lack of psychological analysis of this phenomenon. On the contrary, the multiplicity of understanding, its focus on different types of signs and symbols when generating meanings of events and situations, is a characteristic of its completeness and variability. The difference in understanding is determined by the multilevel reality of the human world, which consists of at least three of the above-­mentioned realities. It is argued that with the emergence and development of the psychology of the possible, scientists are increasingly paying attention to the implicit, hidden, non-obvious and even secret sides of the human world. Their identification and description is possible only on the basis of scientific ideas about the multiple nature of the determination of the natural and social worlds. Moving in the study of understanding from empirical reality to the understanding of existential reality, psychologists are forced to move from linear Laplace determinism to account for the natural randomness and unpredictability of many events and phenomena of natural and social reality. When understanding empirical reality, signs are represented in the psyche of the understanding subject as "cognitive knowledge" (Foucault, 2007). It reflects, but it does not transform: it does not change anything in the subject who knows reality. Cognitive symbols allow the subject to understand the multiplicity of variants of the understood socio-­cultural reality. A cognitive symbol can point to different objects, but the understanding subject has not formed a personal attitude to them. In contrast to the cognitive, the existential symbol expresses something subjectively significant for a person. The existential symbol is inexhaustible and unlimited in its meaning, because it denotes something hidden, secret, often understood by people as only possible, but not real. Such a symbol indicates the existence of another reality that is not perceived by the senses.