Transdisciplinary Research Program of N.I. Zhinkin: Inner Speech and Its Experimental Projections

Abstract

The philosophical and theoretical legacy of the famous Russian philosopher, psychologist, film theorist Nikolai Ivanovich Zhinkin (1893–1979) is compre­hended in the article as an integral cultural and historical phenomenon. Based on his fundamental works and archival materials (letters, drafts, abstracts of re­ports and articles), the authors attempt to reconstruct the main characteristics of his transdisciplinary research program and demonstrate its current experimen­tal projections. This approach allows us to show that in the early philosophical, phenomenologically oriented works N.I. Zhinkin, speaking about the “thing” as a fundamentally social and historical phenomenon, outlined a methodological path, which he consistently implemented in the humanities and sciences – psy­chological, semiotic, logical and ethological – research of the late period. The authors pay special attention to experimental ethological studies, which N.I. Zhinkin carried out in the Sukhum monkey nursery in the 1950s. In addi­tion to the traditional interpretative and translational strategies that made it pos­sible to clarify the specific meanings of social “things”, he experimentally recorded the presence of a communicative system in the acoustic screams of monkeys. Thus, the relevance of the methodological path of N.I. Zhinkin (his transdisciplinary research program) lies in the fact that he used the experi­mental method to study social “things”, i.e. sign-symbolic reality (language, thinking as inner speech, language memory, information)