Ontology of Humanitarian Knowledge in the Information society

Abstract

The Humanities, throughout the formation of the cultural experience of humankind, depended on the environment in which they developed, and on the concepts of reality that prevailed in this environment. Modern Humanities are in a state of uncertainty as concerns its roles, including those associated with the rapid evolution of the contemporary information society. The purpose of this article is to overcome this uncertainty. The author presents the main stages of interaction evolution and the ontology of humanitarian knowledge in the digital society in the last two decades. The article is a partial representation of the results of intercollegiate research conducted in 2019 at the Faculty of Free Arts and Sciences of Saint Petersburg State University: “Narratives of public communications in modern Russia”. The process of studying the ontology of humanitarian knowledge in the digital environment is a continuous one because reality is changing dynamically. Researchers are in a dual position: it is possible to study and generalise the observed results during the period of transition from post-industrial society to the modern concept of reality; to model the future conceptual sphere as a set of entities and categories that are in event interaction as a communicative environment with predetermined parameters. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the social reality of modern society has already formed its interdisciplinary specificity, which is subject to ontological understanding.