GLOSSARY

sociocracy: organising, creating a society, uniting, usually in relation to a given idea, personifying a person or a place; if it is closely connected with satisfying existential, psychological, social, spiritual needs of a community and its individuals living within its borders; it can be realised by means of systems of authority (individuals or groups), through natural evolutionary processes or revolutionary movements; it can also appear in creative and productive forms which usefully serve the society, or in pathological, destructive forms which distort, or in reformatory forms which lead to verifying the fixed assumptions and dogmas (status quo); its form and shape depend on the level, range and depth of the awareness of individuals and community, and on the ability to assimilate and integrate processes taking place outside awareness.

paradigm: is a collection of BASIC notions and theories creating the fundamentals of a given discipline. The theories and notions creating a given discipline are not questioned, AT least till the time when a paradigm remains cognitively creative – which means by means of it one can create specific theories according to the experimental (historic) data which are dela with in a given discipline. The notion used and described by Thomas Kuhn in the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962.

The paradigm is different from a dogma in number of properties:

• it is not given once forever – but it is elaborated on in the process of many years’ reliable research and accepted on the basis of consensus of the majority of researchers;
• it is subject to constant, slow changes or, form time to time, it undergoes big changes, called a scientific revolution;
• no one states that it is surely right, however, everyone who questions it is liable to support the objection.

A good paradigm has several properties, among other things, it must:

• be logically and conceptually coherent;
• be as simple as possible and include only these notions and theories which are really indispensable for a given discipline;
• give possibilities of creating specific theories corresponding to known facts.

dogma: a statement in a given religious system or a school of philosophy accepted unconditionally regardless of the correspondence to the experience and common sense (without evidence and not subject to a discussion or criticism). In the ancient times it was also constituted by the legal arrangement of people, a senate or a decision by a superior authority of town-state (polis).

monocentric: focusing on one (most often: separated, isolated from the wholeness) phenomenon, form, function, person, organisation, region of the World, symbol, dogma, etc. Raised above other elements (enthroned); usurping the right to exclusivity, the only right, most often having the power and monopoly for truth; egocentric, socjocentric, etnocentric, etc.; orthodoxy, fundamentalism, nationalism, isolationism, sexism; monocentralisation can included both positive and pejorative features (values) (then we deal with deification or demonisation in extreme cases).

deocentric: bipolar, indicating the existence of opposites (remaining in harmony, conflict, or the relation of subordination and domination), characteristic of the disintegration, dissociation, or integration stage (reintegration at a higher level); dialogical, polemic, symbiotic, polarized, questionable, conflicting, antipodal, opposite; dichotomy, antinomy, bifurcation, dissociation, dissonance, convergence, divergence, alienation, dilemma, contradiction, liking, dislike, coincidentia oppositorum; dialectics, differentiation, distinction.

policentric: the system organised on the basis of several (many) centres from which each is autonomous and, at the same time, is associated with other centres (balance); there is no domination in this system of one centre over another one as it takes place in the monocentric pattern; the arrangement of such a system (organisation) is performed via many-sided communication (flow of information and settlement), exchange of the possessed opportunities and resources (in the case of the interpersonal relations it is indispensable to respect each individual and readiness to accept and comprehend variety of nature of miscellaneous societies); polyphony, polymorphism, polyrhythmicity, polychronemicity, polyfunctioning; harmony; organicity (organism); constallationism; polytechnica.