PSYCHOLOGICAL TRADITIONS ACCORDING TO THE PROBLEM OF UNDERSTANDING THE FICTION

Abstract

The article describes the directions of the researches of understanding the text from a psychological point of view. The process of understanding textual material in the paradigm of different psychological theories of intellectual activity was described. The levels of understanding the text were highlighted. It was noted that understanding in Psychology was one of the cognitive processes, which was the disclosure of really existing, essential connections between objects and phenomena of objective reality. It was shown that in accordance with the psycholinguistic approach in Psychology it had been identified that understanding was the construction of text’s projection. Within this area the understanding of the text is the hierarchy of predicates or hierarchy of informative-target blocks which have being investigated. So, in the article macro- and microstructure of the text were distinguished. The basic regularity of understanding the text is the ability of the information to collapse, in the process of which the textual material is translated into internal speech. In this case, the highest degree of understanding of the message, according to the scientist, is characterized by the possibility of free presentation by the subject of the information understood by him/her in his/her own words, and it is possible only if the received information is translated into the internal code of the addressee. It has been shown that the decisive feature of the cognitive approach to the study of comprehension is the position that language is only a small part of the holistic phenomenon that speakers seek to learn. The process of cognition is based on the complex interaction of memory processes, physiological properties of the person, his/her knowledge of the world, social context of statements, ways of interaction of all activities of the person in general and the organization of all types of knowledge in particular.

It has been emphasized that the realization of understanding can occur in three cognitive fields. The first field directly and fragmentarily presents the natural conditions and social situations in which the person exists and operates. The dominant place is occupied by objects and relations between them, reality is fragmented, and certain connections need to be thought out and completed. In the second field, the sequence of proved judgments are unfolded, relations between concepts are dominated, and sufficiently stable logical constructs are actualized. The specificity of comprehension in the second field is a characteristic of various texts, among which scientific ones, of course, prevail. It has been determined that understanding has so called “level character”. The authors of the article highlight three basic levels of understanding. The first level is “the fixation of sign forms”, that is, their recognition of the text’s content; the second level is identifying social significance of the context; the third level is the manifestation of personal meaning, that is, in general, the manifestation of the appreciative attitude and the experience of a particular emotional state of the author of the text. The gradual transition from material context through object and semantic meaning to evaluation and experience (from the external form – to the internal one, from the social meaning – to the personal one) is one’s own understanding. This interpretation of understanding is in accordance with the accepted today in Psychology concept of semantic understanding of the text.