Introduction
The increasing interest of scientists in the concepts of psychological science in recent years (Guseltseva, 2023; Zhuravlev, Sergienko, 2021; Mazilov, Vlasov, 2024a; Mazilov, Slepko, 2023; Rubtsov, Kudryavtsev, 2021) has inevitably been reflected in the attention paid to the history of this issue. In contrast to M.S. Rogovin (Mazilov and Vlasov, 2024b), the activities of B.F. Lomov and K.K. Platonov devoted to studying the conceptual space of psychological science are reflected in relevant literature (Artemyeva, 2016; Zvereva and Noskova, 2016; Zhuravlev and Sergienko, 2021; Kornienko, 2016; Shingarov, 2007).
It is known that Konstantin Konstantinovich Platonov (1906-1984) was a prominent scientist who made significant contributions to various branches of psychology (general, aviation, medical, personality psychology, etc.). It is also known that he was a major methodologist of this science, striving, following the testament of V.M. Bekhterev, to restore order in it instead of the “Dolinean chaos” (Platonov, 2005, p. 219). He solved this problem in two main ways — by developing a system of branches (sections) and by developing a system of concepts (categories) of psychology.
As mentioned above, modern researchers have given attention to the second aspect of K.K. Platonov’s work, which is the development of concepts. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that, withoutdetracting from the significance of such works for science, the features of the general scientific and psychological contexts in which K.K. Platonov conducted his research on the subject under discussion are not sufficiently reflected in the literature on the history of psychology.
The most significant works of K.K. Platonov that address the problem of psychological concepts include On the System of Psychology (Platonov, 1972), The System of Psychology and the Theory of Reflection (Platonov, 1982), and A Short Dictionary of the System of Psychological Concepts (Platonov, 1984), all created since the 1970s. By this time, psychology in the USSR was experiencing a period of prosperity both from a socio-organizational point of view— such as reducing ideological pressure, the productive functioning of established scientific institutions specializing in psychology and the creation of new ones, organizing congresses and conferences, increasing publication activity, improving training systems, strengthening cooperation with foreign colleagues— and from a philosophical and methodological standpoint—such as developing the philosophical foundations of Soviet psychology, creating and empirically testing basic theories, and actively developing various problems within psychological science. All these factors likely influenced the results of K.K. Platonov’s methodological work.
The purpose of this research is to examine K.K. Platonov’s ideas on the system of concepts in Soviet psychology in relation to its philosophical and methodological background during the 1970s and 1980s. Comparative historical, bibliographic, and categorical analysis methods were employed in this study.
The theory of reflection as a philosophical and methodological basis of Soviet psychology
In Soviet philosophy and psychology, one of the leading theories with both ontological (reflection as an inherent quality of matter) and epistemological (reflection as a process of cognition) status was the theory of reflection, often called “Leninist” or, synonymously, “Lenin’s theory of knowledge” (Vislobokov, 1971; Rosenthal, 1966). The main provisions of this theory were outlined in V.I. Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Lenin, 2021). Published in 1909, it was directed against the Russian Machists (A.A. Bogdanov, P.S. Yushkevich et al.) and had a pronounced polemical character. Although it was later claimed that this work by the Bolshevik leader made a significant contribution to philosophy, this statement seems far-fetched. This is partly because many of Lenin’s ideas were not original—French materialist Diderot and German idealist G.W.F. Hegel had written about reflection—and partly because Lenin did not consider himself a philosopher and hardly believed he had created any kind of “Leninist” theory of reflection.
After Lenin’s death, the texts he wrote were canonized. Strictly speaking, he had only one philosophical work, the above-mentioned “Materialism and Empirio-criticism”, since the “Philosophical Notebooks” (Lenin, 2022) are summaries of the works of other philosophers (albeit with important comments) and were not intended by the author for publication. Therefore, starting from the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, when, after the defeat of the mechanicists and the Deborin group, it was decided to strengthen the development of Lenin’s legacy, quotations from this monograph began to appear more and more often in philosophical and psychological literature: “There is nothing in the world but moving matter, and moving matter cannot move except in space and time” (Lenin, 2021, p. 171), “Our sensations, our consciousness is only an image of the external world, and it goes without saying that a representation cannot exist without the displayed, but the displayed exists independently of the reflecting” (Lenin, 2021, p. 67), “Matter is an objective reality given to us in sensation” (Lenin, 2021, p. 142), “Matter is a philosophical category for denoting objective reality, which is given to a person in his sensations, which is copied, photographed, displayed by our sensations, existing independently of them” (Lenin, 2021, p. 125), etc.
In the pre-war period, the largest work on this topic was the monograph of the Bulgarian Marxist T. Pavlov “Theory of Reflection” (Pavlov, 1936). Since the 1950s, the development of the theory of reflection has been intensified largely due to research in special sciences, among which physiology and psychology should be especially noted, as well as for ideological reasons — in the course of the struggle against the cult of personality of I.V. Stalin proclaimed a return to Leninist norms in various areas of public life in the USSR, including in science (and thus the “theory of reflection” officially became known as the “Leninist theory of reflection”). As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the following were added to the basic statement about the reflex nature of matter: reflection is an active, not a passive process; reflection is mediated by the characteristics of the reflecting body; during the reflection process, changes occur in the reflecting body, in which a “trace” of the reflected is formed (Shingarov, 1974); reflection is the process of mutual reflection of two systems, at each “turn” of which changes in another object and changes in oneself caused by this object are reflected (Ukraintsev, Platonov, 1966); reflection can be understood as the process of information transfer (Tyukhtin, 1972).
The reception of Lenin’s theory of reflection by the Soviet psychological community was expected from both ideological and theoretical and methodological points of view. One of the leaders of Russian psychology, A.A. Smirnov, wrote: “Lenin’s ideas about cognition as a reflection of reality are extremely important for all branches of scientific knowledge, including psychological science” (Smirnov, 1987, p. 26). And further: “For Soviet psychologists, Lenin’s theory of reflection is an unshakable philosophical foundation, an indestructible theoretical foundation of psychological science” (Smirnov, 1987, p. 33). Similar assessments of the role of Lenin’s theory of reflection can also be found by other major Soviet psychologists — A.N. Leontiev (Leontiev, 1983), B.F. Lomov (Lomov, 1999), G.S. Kostyuk (Kostyuk, 1988), K.K. Platonov (Platonov, 1972; Platonov, 1982) and others.
Given the style in which this assessment is conducted, one might get the impression that such praise of Lenin’s theory of reflection is exclusively “political” in nature, as a kind of “ritual of loyalty” of psychologists towards the Soviet government, and nothing more. However, this is not the case. The theory of reflection had a profound impact on Soviet psychology, not only ideologically or philosophically, but also logically.
Thus, the psyche, being the basic concept of Russian psychology and its subject since the mid-1930s, was understood as a property of highly organized matter, consisting in reflecting objective reality; this definition was approved in Soviet psychology by S.L. Rubinstein (Rubinstein, 1940; Rubinstein, 1997) and then repeatedly repeated in the works of such major scientists such as A.N. Leontiev (Leontiev, 1983), B.G. Ananyev (Ananyev, 2007), K.N. Kornilov (Kornilov, 1946), B.M. Teplov (Teplov, 2019), A.V. Zaporozhets (Zaporozhets, 1959) and a number of others. Consciousness in Soviet psychology was also interpreted as the highest form of reflection of reality, as written by S.L. Rubinstein (Rubinstein, 1997), A.N. Leontiev (Leontiev, 1983), E.V. Shorokhova, V.M. Kaganov (Shorokhova, Kaganov, 1963) and other scientists. B.F. Lomov put the concept of reflection in the first place in his system of categories (Lomov, 1999), and E.V. Shorokhova (Shorokhova, 1961) and B.V. Zeigarnik (Zeigarnik, 2021) argued that reflection is the subject of psychology, that is, psychology is the science of reflection. Thus, these facts speak not only about the ideological or philosophical, but also about the substantive, logical, scientific influence of the “Leninist” theory of knowledge on psychology in the strict sense of the word.
Systems theory as a philosophical and methodological foundation of Soviet psychology
In the Soviet Union, there were prerequisites for the creation of a general theory of systems, since system ideas were contained in the famous book by A.A. Bogdanov “Tectology: A Universal Organizational Science” (Bogdanov, 2021); however, it, like other works by this scientist, were criticized and then forgotten, and not so much for purely scientific reasons, how much is known for ideological reasons (the political and then philosophical confrontation between the author of “Tectology” and V.I. Lenin in the pre-revolutionary years is quite well known (Steila, 2013)). The persecution of cybernetics in the late Stalinist period did not add to the popularity of the systematic approach in scientific circles (Yurtaeva, 2008). However, when the Soviet leadership finally realized that due to the neglect of this topic, the USSR risked falling behind the West, in whose countries this approach was used in almost all sciences from mathematics to sociology, the accelerated and large-scale development of systems theory and the purposeful implementation of its results in various fields of the national economy began. Since 1969, the profile journal “System Research” began to be published, in 1976 the All-Union Scientific Research Institute for System Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences was established, developments in this field were carried out in a number of other institutions, such as the Institute of the History of Natural Sciences and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Cybernetics of the Georgian SSR, etc. (Blauberg, Sadovsky, Yudin, 1969).
During the “systemic turn” in Soviet science in the 60s and 70s of the last century, the basic principles of this approach (integrity, functional and structural organization, development, etc.) were formulated and a number of theories were developed in various fields of knowledge — the theory of functional systems (P.K. Anokhin), parametric general theory of systems (A.I. Uemov), general Urmantsev’s theory of systems (Yu.A. Urmantsev), the concept of general theory of systems (A.I. Kukhtenko), the theory of highly organized systems (F.E. Temnikov) (Volkova, 2024), etc. An important role in the formation and development of a systematic approach in the Soviet Union and the convergence of ideology and general scientific philosophy and methodology was played by V.P. Kuzmin, a consultant to the Science Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, who showed in his works the presence of the principle of consistency in the works of Karl Marx (doctoral thesis on philosophy 1974 “The principle of consistency in the theory and methodology of Karl Marx”).
E.G. Yudin rightly notes that Russian psychologists, for example, L.S. Vygotsky, S.L. Rubinstein, A.N. Leontiev, expressed ideas consonant with the systemic approach before the corresponding “turn” took place (Yudin, 2016). However, B.F. Lomov became the recognized leader of a new trend in Soviet psychology, who wrote: “It seems to us that the nature of the psychic can be understood only on the basis of a systematic approach, i.e., considering the psychic in the multitude of external and internal relations in which it exists as an integral system. Numerous fields of psychological science can be combined only on thebasis of a systematic approach” (Lomov, 1999, p. 67). He also formulated the principles of a systematic approach in relation to psychological science: (1) mental phenomena must be considered in the system of their relations with other internal and external phenomena; (2) in the course of planning and conducting psychological research, it is necessary to take into account that consideration of mental phenomena in one coordinate system leads to the identification of some of their properties while ignoring others; (3) consideration of the system of mental phenomena should be carried out taking into account their level and hierarchical organization; (4) when describing a person’s mental properties, it is necessary to take into account the multiplicity of relationships in which he exists; (5) a systematic consideration of the psyche requires the rejection of linear causal determinism; (6) mental phenomena should be considered in their development (Lomov, 1999).
As in the case of reflection theory, systems theory has both an ontological (“systems everywhere,” as L. von Bertalanffy argued) and an epistemological (a method of system analysis as a way of studying reality) status.
General characteristics of the problem of concepts of psychological science
Having identified two philosophical and methodological theories that had a strong influence on Soviet science in the 60s and 80s of the last century, let us turn to the consideration of K.K. Platonov’s ideas about the features of the conceptual space of psychology as a whole.
K.K. Platonov, following the “logic of clarification”, begins by defining the concept. According to him, the concept is the reflection of the essential in objects or phenomena fixed in the word; accordingly, understanding something is a process of thinking, during which the essential properties of objects or phenomena are revealed (Platonov, 1972).
Concepts, according to the scientist’s point of view, form the basis of science, since science is a system of theories, and theory is a system of concepts (this thesis shows the influence of a systematic approach). In addition to scientific concepts, there are also everyday concepts that anyone inevitably uses. One of the problems of psychology is that for some of its scientific concepts, words are used (which, like a “hammer”, forge concepts (Rubtsov, 2024)), which are also everyday words, which can cause some confusion (naturally, a scientist-psychologist and a layman in the field of psychology will interpret differently personality category).
The specificity of the conceptual space of psychology is that the same concepts can be interpreted by scientists in the framework of this science in different ways, due to their different theoretical and methodological orientation (a polyphony of opinions rarely found in other fields of knowledge). And it’s not even that domestic and foreign psychologists have different points of view on concepts named in the same way, but that there may be differences in such views even among scientists who formally belong to the same field (for example, to Soviet psychology).
Scientific concepts, like everyday concepts, can be modern or outdated. Thus, in Soviet psychology, the concept of the psyche replaced the concept of the soul, which retained its use in everyday, artistic and religious fields. Thus, the “life” of scientific concepts can proceed in different ways: some of them, having become operational scientific concepts for a short time, soon become obsolete and become scientific archaisms; others, on the contrary, become so entrenched in the conceptual space that they become the principle of science (Platonov, 1972). These include the principles of determinism, the unity of consciousness, personality and activity, development and historicism, and the system-structural principle (Platonov, 1982).
Describing the situation in the field under consideration as a whole, K.K. Platonov notes that “the reason for the still lingering discord lies in the uncertainty of psychological concepts and terms expressing them, in the lack of proper attention to them and, most importantly, in the absence of even attempts to build a system of psychological concepts” (Platonov, 1972, p. 10). Moreover, K.K. Platonov believed that representatives of this particular science, in comparison with others, are particularly careless of their own concepts. M.S. Rogovin had made a similar “diagnosis” of the state of psychology concepts three years earlier (Rogovin, 1969).
The system of concepts of the Soviet psychological science
K.K. Platonov points out the connection between basic psychological concepts and philosophical categories: “Psychology uses philosophical categories because they apply to all sciences and collectively reflect the most general forms of being, types of connections, and laws of movement and development of the objective world. These are matter, motion, space and time, quantity and quality, contradictions, causality, phenomena and essence, necessity and chance, form and content, possibility and reality, internal and external, etc.” (Platonov, 1982, p. 24). These philosophical categories are generally recognized, but within the framework of dialectical materialism they are given special importance (Rosenthal and Shtrax, 1957; Andreev, 1959). Thus, K.K. Platonov, like B.F. Lomov (Lomov, 1999), demonstrates loyalty to Marxist ideology and the “rules of the game” in force in Soviet science.
In the process of analyzing the conceptual apparatus of psychological science, the scientist divided its main concepts into general psychological (whose volume coincides with the volume of all psychology) and specific psychological (whose total volume is the volume of the corresponding general psychological category). General psychological and specific psychological categories according to K.K. Platonov: mental reflection (sensations, perception, memory, thinking, emotions, feelings and will), mental phenomenon (mental processes, states and personality traits), consciousness (experience, cognition and attitude), personality (orientation, experience, features of mental processes, temperament, character and abilities), activity (action, purpose, motive, mental act) and mental development (maturation and formation, phylogeny, anthropogenesis, socio-historical development, ontogenesis of the psyche) (Platonov, 1984). Specific psychological categories, in turn, form subsystems of “their” concepts, for example, memory — long-term, short-term and operational, mechanical and semantic; sensations — visual, gustatory, tactile, etc.
Some branches (sections) of psychology operate with concepts that “belong” to related sciences. Thus, social psychology uses concepts of sociology (group, social role, social status, communication, etc.), and medical psychology “borrows” concepts from medicine (health, disease, prevention, rehabilitation, etc.) (Platonov, 1982).
Platonov’s ideas about the conceptual space of psychology bear a pronounced imprint of a systematic approach. The categories proposed by him form a system characterized by integrity, hierarchy, and specific relationships between its components. Due to the fact that the meanings of the concepts of psychological science have changed, as well as the connections between them, we can say that the principle of development is applicable to a system of this kind, when viewed historically; in this case, we can talk about the history of the concepts of psychology (Vlasov, Mazilov, 2023).
It is also necessary to focus on the influence of reflection theory on K.K. Platonov’s ideas about the conceptual space of psychology. Like B.F. Lomov (Lomov, 1999), the central place in the system of concepts of psychology is occupied by the category of reflection, which he defines as follows: “So, summarizing the modern understanding of various types of reflection and relying on the understanding of V.I. Lenin, reflection as a universal property of matter can be defined in the first approximation as a form of interaction of phenomena in which one of them, the reflected one, while maintaining its qualitative certainty, creates a specific product in the second reflecting one: the reflected one” (Platonov, 1982, p. 58). This definition is quite consistent with the results of the development of the theory of reflection in the USSR and the socialist countries.
Conclusion
The research examined K.K. Platonov’s ideas about the system of concepts of Soviet psychology in connection with the philosophical and methodological context of its development in the 1970s and 1980s.
It was found that the theory of reflection had a significant impact on the leading role that the concept of reflection played in K.K. Platonov’s methodological constructions. It seems that there are several explanations for this. First, and it would be strange to deny it, the theory of reflection, called “Leninist” in Soviet philosophy, was a good ideological defense for Russian psychologists. Secondly, she partially solved the psychophysical problem (in its psychophysiological concretization) in the spirit of materialistic monism. Thirdly, the theory of reflection provided an answer to the question of the evolutionary meaning of the psyche, explaining it as a mechanism of adaptation of the organism to the environment. Fourth, it brought psychology closer to physiology (Sechenov-Pavlov reflex theory), giving it a more natural-scientific appearance. Fifth, if a number of mental processes (cognitive and emotional-volitional) are understood as reflections, then a significant part of general psychology is “tied” to this category. Finally, sixth, concepts can be understood as a reflection in thinking of the essential properties of objects and phenomena of reality, which means that the theory of reflection has not only ontological, but also epistemological significance. Taking into account all the above considerations, it becomes clear why K.K. Platonov considered the category of reflection to be central in his system of concepts of Soviet psychological science.
It was also found that the theory of systems had a significant impact on K.K. Platonov’s ideas about the conceptual space of psychology (here we will put aside his views on the systemic nature of the psyche itself, as this requires a separate study). If the antithesis of chaos is order, then, figuratively speaking, the “Dolinean chaos” that V.M. Bekhterev spoke about at the time was replaced by the “Platonov’s order”: the scientist managed to create a consistent, holistic, coherent, fairly clear (as far as the very nature of our science allows) system of psychological concepts. In addition, it is worth noting the enormous work that K.K. Platonov carried out in the course of clarifying the meanings of the basic concepts of psychological science, including by “fishing” their definitions from the works of classics of Soviet science, and the results of which were reflected in the dictionaries he prepared (Petrov, Platonov, 1974; Platonov, 1984).
These two trends, the increased reliance on reflection theory and a systematic approach, are particularly clear when comparing two fundamentalworks on the stated topic — “On the system of Psychology” (1972) and “The System of Psychology and the theory of Reflection” (1982). Describing the second version of his categorical system of psychological science, he, for example, talks about the two-level structure of mental phenomena. He focuses on the problem of the systemic interrelation of the subject of psychology, its methods, conceptual and categorical apparatus, problems being developed, methodological principles, history and main sections (Mazilov, 2021).
At the end of this article, it makes sense to compare the systems of concepts of psychology by K.K. Platonov and B.F. Lomov. Recall that the first identified six main categories (basic concepts) (mental reflection, mental phenomenon, consciousness, personality, activity and mental development), while the second identified four: reflection (includes psyche and consciousness), activity, personality, communication (Lomov, 1999).
A comparison of the systems of concepts by K.K. Platonov and B.F. Lomov as the closest in time of creation (70—80 years of the last century) allows us to see their noticeable similarity. Two categories (personality and activity) are directly present in both systems; mental reflection, mental phenomena and consciousness in K.K. Platonov correspond to the category of reflection in B.F. Lomov. With this similarity, however, it should be noted that the first system lacks the concept of communication, while the second lacks development.
Regarding the concept of communication, it should be noted that B.F. Lomov wrote about the lack of elaboration of this topic in psychology. This may indicate that this concept had not yet become a generally accepted category at the time of K.K. Platonov’s creation of his system.
The fact that Lomov did not classify “development” as a basic concept may seem difficult to explain—especially from the perspective of materialistic dialectics, which was understood as a doctrine concerning the development of nature, society, and thought—and particularly considering Lomov’s ideological stance. However, attention should be paid to the collective monograph published in 1978 titled “The Principle of Development in Psychology” (Antsyferova, 1978), approved for publication by the Institute of Psychology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where B.F. Lomov was director at that time. The explanation for his exclusion of the concept of development from the list of basic concepts for psychology may be as follows: for B.F. Lomov, “development” is primarily a principle of Soviet psychology and is used as an operational concept, while for K.K. Platonov it is both a principle and a meaningful concept, as we wrote above; therefore, the latter and he included it in his system of basic concepts.
To summarize, the following should be said. Productive philosophical and methodological activity in the field of any science requires the skill of a double focus of attention: it requires focusing on both empiricism and theory. Unfortunately, it often happens that a scientist either concentrates on specific research (and then he has difficulty generalizing their results at the theoretical level and creating a theory in principle), or, overly abstracting, loses the “ground under his feet” (and then his theoretical constructions break away from empiricism). A true philosopher and methodologist of science, including psychology, must combine both qualities; such were the great Soviet psychologists — L.S. Vygotsky, S.L. Rubinstein, A.N. Leontiev, B.G. Ananyev, B.F. Lomov. The hero of our study, K.K. Platonov, can be attributed to this category — after all, he was both a researcher, as they say, “on earth”, and a major methodologist of psychology, whose crowning activity was the development of a system of concepts of psychology. As you know, the creation of a system of knowledge is a large-scale and difficult work in terms of intensity (for example, many works have been written about how G.W.F. Hegel tortured his system). Therefore, it must be assumed that in Russian psychology, for more than a hundred years of its existence, only three full—fledged category systems have been developed — K.K. Platonov, B.F. Lomov, A.V. Petrovsky and M.G. Yaroshevsky. Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Konstantin Konstantinovich Platonov, solving the problem of the concepts of Soviet psychological science, accomplished a methodological feat, the significance of which remains in our time.