Language and aesthetics in social cognition

Abstract

This article discusses the epistemological «crisis of representation» of the social realities in psychology. The new language of social cognition (the linguistic concepts of consensus, dialogue, discourse and narrative) unifies the micro level of interpersonal interaction and communication and the macro level of social representations that describes the collective consciousness of modern society. The theoretical development of these concepts in dialogical, discursive and narrative psychology becomes the epistemological basis of the «aesthetic paradigm». There are three possible ways to define the research practice in this new paradigm: 1) the comparative historical analysis of the artistic and scientific representations of the psychological phenomena, 2) the search for the fictional and autoethnographic genres of the academic writing, 3) the use of aesthetic categories as explanatory principles in psychology. The article concludes that the meta-language of aesthetics is adequate to analyse the problems of social cognition.