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The article reviews the contribution made by Pitirim Sorokin, Russian- American sociologist and philosopher, into the development of social thought during the Russian period of his work. It analyses the program of autonomation of sociology as a transdisciplinary science. It proves that Sorokin managed to anticipate many ideas of the system-communication theory being the most respected at the moment and to reveal the major conditions for crystallization of the modern communicatively differentiated society. With the achievements of science, psychology, philosophy, linguistics and evolution theory contemporary for him, Sorokin formulated a positive system-communication approach to social studies that was implemented and therefore verified in the theory of Niklas Luhmann only several decades after. The program included the analysis of the minimum manifestation of the society later referred to as "interaction", which we can rightfully equalize with our contemporary interpretation of communication

The article investigates the problem of the universally significant meaning of communi­cative messages. This framework problem implies answering more specific questions — is there a reality (correlative to the meaning of judgments) that would guarantee the universali­ty of the meanings of linguistic expressions; is there a reality behind moralizing or judgments of taste that ensures agreement on value judgments if they become the content of communica­tion. What provides the typical identity of mental states (thoughts, perceptions, representa­tions, sensations) in different individuals, when these states are thematized in communica­tion? Is there a typical correlation behind them in reality, which ensures the identity of men­tal states? The article posits that propositional attitudes act as "carriers" or frameworks of typical communicative environments, indirect contexts in which propositional content are localized as the main — intralingual — evolutionary mechanism that stabilizes key commu­nicative meanings. Indirect contexts produced in the language or the operators "I know that...", "I hope that...", "I remember that...", "I want that…", "I imagine that..." protect sentences from negation and make it possible to reproduce universally significant meanings.

The article poses the question of which science, revolutionary or normal, is more in line with the concept of modernity. We consider the claims to the modernity of both types of sciences and substantiate the conclusion that revolutionary science can be understood as a situational response of scientists to the state of crisis of normal science. The author argues that revolutionary (at some given point in time) science again brings us back to the forgotten question of truth and refer­ence. At first glance, it looks like a turn from technique and calculations, formal­ization and simplification to the world in itself, ontologically unified and inde­pendent of its presentations in certain paradigms. However, revolutionary science in its claim to turn from language to referent turns out to be a reminis­cence of the archaic "Pythagorean attitude" (to "the discovery of true truth, the true being, and design of God" in the sense of M. Weber) and, in turn, does not relieve us of excessive abstractness, loss of connection with reality, and in this sense does not correspond to the concept of modernity. Science is technicized, formalized, quantified, digitalized, and receives an increasingly complex concep­tual description, almost unrelated to natural "life-world" ontologies and realities.

The problem of the "experimenter's regress" is widely discussed in the modern philosophy of science [Collins 1985]. However, it allows generalization and can be presented as a theoretical-cognitive paradox, as a philosophical-linguistic problem of reference and as a problem of philosophy of consciousness. The reli­ability of the functioning of "reality detectors" of any kind (devices, sensual abilities, theories, language statements or mental acts) is confirmed empiri­cally if they discover new objects and adequately describe their characteristics (in the format of measurement data, sensual qualities, scientific facts, referents of words and concepts). The properties of the observed reality discovered with their help, obviously, act as a rational criterion for the choice of observational in­struments or "reality detectors". But after all, the criterion of rational selection (evaluation, recognition) of the results of observation from the array of all re­ceived data is the application of the best (more powerful, effective, reliable, and receptive) detectors of reality. This paradox of self-referral is also applicable to researchers themselves: the reputation of a scientist acts as a criterion for the se­lection of his research results (including acceptance of his publications in leading editions, etc.), and the research results obtained obviously determine his reputa­tion. Based on the systemic-communicative approach, the authors argue that sci­entific rationality does not contradict, but is based on the self-referential charac­ter of scientific communication.

In conditions of deep social differentiation, science, apparently, is not capable of internal integration. As a result, it cannot fully participate in political life as an independent and equal subject. Turning to the figure of Alexander von Hum­boldt, the author reconstructs a certain "workaround" of the possible influence of scientists on politics and science management. The importance of the Humboldt brothers for world science in general and Russia, in particular, can hardly be overestimated. Alexander von Humboldt was a specialist in the widest range of disciplines: astronomy, geology, mineralogy, chemistry, biology, and many oth­ers. He stood at the origins of modern geography. Today he is called the herald of globalized science. At the same time, during his journey, the first world global network of scientific research was finally completed, the famous network of geo­logical stations, which made it possible to simultaneously record natural and cli­matic changes in Europe, Russia, and the United States. Today, in an age of fatal environmental change, this endeavor's relevance has finally become common knowledge. The article proposes the idea of the possibility of a mutually benefi­cial "rational exchange" between science and politics, which is interpreted by the author in the systemic-communicative concept of "structural conjugation".

The article proposes a solution to the paradox of scientific progress, formulated by Max Weber. Science formulates true and objective judgments, and only this distinguishes it from the world of value judgments, ideology, religion, art. On the other hand, the "lifespan of truths" is extremely small and any statement about scientific progress looks unconvincing just in comparison with the pro­gress of value discourses, where each stage of development (style or work of art), if not replaced by the "best" at least they retain or even increase their value over the centuries. A way out of this paradox, according to the authors, can be offered by a socio-evolutionary interpretation of science, where the "criterion" of a better (or more grounded) theory is viewed as "fitness", as the ability to respond to the challenge of the external environment, to which the best theory adapts bet­ter, and as a consequence is selected. The article is devoted to the problems that the biologically based general theory of evolution is facing today when it is ex­trapolated to the problem of scientific progress. The question is investigated in what sense scientific theories can be interpreted as replacing each other and competing with each other by analogy with organic formations (genotypes, phe­notypes, populations); what the external environment of scientific communica­tion is and what institutions are responsible for the selection of the best theories; about the extent to which the autonomous mechanisms of scientific evolution are differentiated, namely, the mechanisms of random variation, natural selection and stabilization of newly acquired traits. The authors analyze the solutions to these problems in the concepts of causal individuation of the scientific theories of David Hull, the concept of semantic individuation of Stephen Gould's theory, and the possibilities of reconciliation and synthesis of these evolutionary ap­proaches in the system-communicative theory of evolution by Niklas Luhmann.