The way to psychology: on the development of experimental psychosemantics

The article presents the history of the creation and formation of experimental psychosemantics - a research approach developed by Viktor Petrenko and his colleagues and employees on the basis of the laboratory of communication psychology and psychosemantics of the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov. This approach is developing within the framework of the methodological school of L.S. Vygotsky, A.N. Leontyev and A.R. Luna based on the ideas of G.A. Kelly (personal construct theory) and C.E. Osgood (semantic differential technique). The events of the second half of the 1960s and 1970s which laid the foundation for the future research approach followed by the main stages of its development in the 1980s and 1990s as well as at present daysare described in detail. Psychosemantic methods are used to study the content of consciousness, ideas of a person in the field of politics, economics, law, ethics, art, his ideas about himself, other people; individual and ethno-social characteristics of categorization and construction of the image of the world in relation to the consciousness of both an individual subject and social, ethnic or professional communities and groups. In recent years, the focus of research work in the field of psychosemantics has shifted to the physical aspects of the categorization problem, methodological comparisons of the approaches of psychosemantics and quantum physics.