“Civil and Legal Nature of the Room Divider”: The Experience of the Unwritten Study (on the Certain Tendencies in the Development of Civil Law Science Methodology in the Digital Age)

The study explores the basic tendencies of civil law science methodological development driven by the transition to the post-industrial society. The author argues that over the post-soviet period, in the development of the legal methodology in general and the civil law methodology in particular, it has not devised the new conceptual approaches to the knowledge of state and the law. Consequently, due to the global digitalization that led to the new socio-legal events, phenomena and processes, the civil law science appeared to have been unprepared to the emerging challenges. To justify this proposition, the author researches the civil law science (perceived as a fragment of social culture, the fragment represented by the system of social relations concerning the reproduction of the new knowledge about the civil legal reality) from the perspective of philosophical methods (hermeneutics and dialectics), meta scientific remedies of knowledge (system approach, classical logic) and other scientific approaches (historical and genetic ones). The research results in identifying the three main tendencies in the development of the Russian civil law science methodology. Among them are the research reliance on the meaning of terms instead of the substance of concepts, the domination of philosophical positivism and positive law understanding in the system of exploratory remedies, and also the focus on the legal practice as the scientific truth criteria. The author deduces that there is the risk of the law science degradation (its turning first to the legislative jurisprudence and then – to the technical and applied knowledge). The study concludes that the overcoming of this state is primarily attributable to the development of methodological knowledge in the context of epistemological ideals of the digital revolution.