Metacriticism in Yu. S. Stepanov’s Language Philosophy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the metacritical component in the scientific heritage of Yu. S. Stepanov (1930–2012) and its significant presence in modern scientific research. Metacriticism is understood as a method of an analytical revision of estab-lished linguistic concepts, opinions, and assessments related to iconic personalities and their views. This method is included in the tools of narrative linguistic historiography, along with the study of the full linguistic heritage corpus created by specific authors in a strictly chronological order, identifying a broad scientific context, ex-ploring the intellectual discourse of the era, a detailed acquaintance with the linguistic journals and collections of the period of interest, restoring the scientist’s library according to his / her writings, reconstructing his / her conceptual chronology, interviewing eyewitnesses of scientific events, students and opponents of key figures in the specific scientific school, etc. In this sense, metacriticism significantly expands its original boundaries as defined in the middle of the 19th century in the course of revising I. Kant’s critical ideas, and is represented in the works by Yu. S. Stepanov with his arguments about the accuracy of interpretations of classical concepts, terms and categories related to the philosophy of language in Russian and foreign scientific publications.