Уроки пандемии: методологические заметки

Abstract

Pandemic COVID-19 affected the crisis in many areas of public life – in the economy, politics, family, consumer relations, and culture. It has become a challenge for social sciences, especially for sociology. If in other areas of social research, the meaningful gaps can still be compensated by speculations, the increase in sociological knowledge without empirical research is simply impossible. But in the face of restriction of full-time communications, the use of a number of methods and techniques is either completely impracticable or requires significant procedural correction. In addition, the need to correct the content of sociological representation of the total and local objects becomes obvious. The way, the society as a whole, its subsystems, institutes and cohorts, face the pandemic, requires reformulating the axiomatics, and hypothesis of sociological research. Within the frames of this article, the author focuses on several themes, which relevance is aggravated with shifts in social life caused by the pandemic. The first theoretical and methodological “lesson” is the need to rethink the paradigmatic ratio of illusion / objectivity of social law, since there is no secret that the objective contamination of the population is in close connection with the intensity of generating the spread of various prejudices in the public consciousness. The second “lesson” affects the disciplinary status of sociology of medicine, the significance of which in the regulation of social functioning has immeasurably increased. In this regard, the perception of people as a population is a kind of demand for the paradigm status in terms of the sociology of medicine. The third “lesson” is associated with the problem of the rationality of social behavior of a person, because the social design of the pandemic stroke seriously shakes confidence in the sanity of a man. The fourth “lesson” is an attempt to bring in methodological character into the suspicion of the scenario nature of the unfolding global pandemic. Any scenario has its own scriptwriter who has something to say about social laws in general and about the nature of human capital in particular.