The collective characteristics of scientific creativity: the cognitive and social aspects

The study discusses the collective aspects of scientific creativity in contemporary philosophy of science. It is associated not only with the institutional nature of science, which translates the problem of scientific creativity into the professional efforts of the scientific team, but also with the communicative and discursive characteristics of research activities that play the role of cognitive factors in the development of scientific knowledge. In this paradigm, the social studies of science develop; they focus on the synthesis of sociological, historical and cultural methods for analyzing science as an integral phenomenon in the unity of its social and cognitive properties. The anthropological and ethnographic studies of laboratory life proposed within its framework made significant changes to the understanding of the scientific community, demonstrated that it was wrong to identify the scientific community exclusively with the professional sphere, and offered to review the subject of science as an integrity being constantly reproduced in communicative acts. The concept of scientific community is operationalized through such indicators as communication, social practices, scientific discourse, and professional culture, which makes it possible to deconstruct the classical epistemological research methods for scientific knowledge.