The article continues the exploration of “non-ideal” epistemology by focusing on collective epistemic attitudes such as prejudice and stereotypes. These attitudes are examined in terms of their epistemic status, distinct from moral evaluation. The article challenges the view of prejudices and stereotypes as inherentlyfalse by analyzing their functions of cognitive economy and social legitimation, first noted by W. Lippmann. The distinction between the truthfulness and correctness (validity) of a stereotype as an epistemic attitude is emphasized, where the priority is given to the procedural aspect of belief formation. The article supports a probabilistic approach to assessing stereotype accuracy, treating stereotypes as “generic statements” whose truth should be assessed empirically rather than a priori.

The paper outlines the methodological framework in which the attitude to uncertainty and risk is rational and allows, under conditions, to make prudent decisions aimed at achieving goals. The fundamental difference between the conditions of uncertainty and risk is shown. An interdisciplinary definition of risk is proposed that is not associated with any science or group of sciences. The definition is based on the idea that risk is a consequence of decisions made by a person based on his goals, assessments, and value system. The significance of normative risk assessment models is shown, since they serve as guidelines and a methodological basis for actions for a person facing difficult choice problems. Risk assessments of rare events are considered, and in particular, it is shown that they occur more often than is commonly believed

It is reasonable to assume that certain forms of activity accompany the human being throughout life, with play being the most significant. For preschoolers, play serves as both a means of personality development and a form of socialisation. Play presupposes the existence of rules that must be followed – both universal and specific to a particular game. These rules are arranged hierarchically and have either an explicit or implicit author. While the authorship of ancient games is often obscure, modern games typically have identifiable creators. ‘Following the rules’ in the common sense of the expression is a sine qua non of play. Depending on the intended agent of the game – whether a child of a certain age or an adult pursuing particular goals – as well as its linguistic status and other factors, a game may demand specialised professional knowledge. In the educational process, for example, the use of play in its various forms requires specific managerial knowledge and pedagogical expertise. Games – unless one is a developer of modern video games, which ultimately also involve a team effort – are not constructed independently but require either adherence to existing rules or the development of new ones. This happens even when a child plays alone and engages in creative activity, reconstructing and modifying forms of play or actions previously experienced with adults or other children. Play generates a special language for rule description, which develops in the course of a game, while the conceptual frameworks and play organisation rules in the language of chess and football will differ. Simultaneously, universal methodological guidelines exist for organising play. The pursuit of these universal methodological elements constitutes the central focus of this article.

Sociocultural transformation in the context of building a multipolar, multicultural world has a formative impact on the modernization of the economy, actualizes the procedures of institutionalization, programming the processes of integration and disintegration of culture and sociality. Considering the local community as an object of research, the purpose of the work is to analyze the socio-cultural conditions and factors that determine the processes of evolution of local communities. Socio-cultural dynamics determines the emergence of multi-vector poles of production and economic activity of local communities: from the desire to preserve the traditional orientation, supporting the established way of life, to the full acceptance of the meaningful qualities of an innovative lifestyle, contributing to the destruction of the   socio-cultural identity of local communities. The emerging paradigm of the development of local communities is based on the modernization of production and economic practices based on the concept of a multi-layered economy and multifunctionality

An integral feature of any theorizing about cultural phenomena is the desire to identify discrete segments of cultural products. One of the most famous examples of antiquity is the conception of Plato’s ideas. Today, many approaches in the humanities have focused around this cognitive trend, including semiotics, the history of concepts, discursive research, etc. This indicates the fundamental nature of questions about the essence, properties, relationships, and volume of these elementary units. In particular, the need to define the subject and the elementary level of evolutionary development is of fundamental importance for the development of an evolutionary epistemological theory, which in the second half of the 20th century was considered by most supporters of the theory of evolution to be a “gene”, which also turns out to be a quantity, a measure of variability. The debate about what exactly should be considered the analogy of a gene in the development of culture and science has only intensified over the past decades. This article focuses on the analysis of the historical development of the main problems that arise during attempts to conceptualize genetic and cultural evolution. Special attention is paid to the contradictory relations within the coevolution of nature and culture.

The paper aims to show that turning to the original works of William Whewell, the author of the hypothetico-deductive model of substantiation of scientific knowledge, can force us to return once again to the conversation about the content of the inference leading to knowledge. Positivists have consolidated what Larry Laudan calls «consequentialism» – the idea that the only significant form of evidential support for a theory is the empirical confirmation of its consequences. And this generally corresponds to the declared logic of the project – to focus on the logical aspects of the analysis of knowledge and to shift the focus from explaining phenomena to confirming hypotheses. In this sense, turning to the history of science, the analysis of W. Whewell’s ontology of knowledge, can be considered as a rejection of the absoluteness of the positivist’s vision and the basis for restoring the discussion of the «metaphysical» premises of the inference, but, obviously, taking into account the results obtained by the philosophy of science over the past one and a half century. The main idea is not only to focus attention on (a) which elements of Whewell’s scheme of hypothesis confirmation were rejected by positivists in the course of forming the now canonical interpretation of the hypothetico-deductive model, but also to emphasize (b) the independence of W. Whewell’s original concept of constructing scientific theories, part of which is literally the «meta-physical» interpretation of inference to explanation. W. Whewell’s theory of knowledge combines three types of inferences – induction, deduction and abduction – and as an example of a project for describing and theoretically generalizing the idea of a scientific theory that corresponds to the great era of scientific discoveries of the late 19th century, sets the task of answering questions of how a phenomenon occurs and why it occurs. In particular, abduction in W. Whewell’s theory did not imply the choice between the best hypothesis, – his criteria for the truth of the explanatory hypothesis are aimed at additional verification and correction of the hypothesis already accepted at the first, hypothetico-deductive, stage. This reflects   the idea of the dynamics of the scientific process – it provides the opportunity not only to test the generalizations that have been made, but also to make adjustments to the theory based on new evidence.