Terminology is studied as a cognitive phenomenon in order to clarify what is changing in the understanding of the term, terminology, and terminological activity in connection with the cognitive turn occurring in recent decades in the field of epistemology and cognitive sciences. The authors draw attention to the fact that the transformation of ideas about knowledge (scientific knowledge), the nature of its implementation in the context of a change in epistemological paradigms is accompanied by changes in such key components of the cognitive process as subject, object, language. If in the epistemological paradigm of positivism a certain cognitive certainty was associated with these concepts (the subject is the central cognitive actor, the object is empirically knowable, language is directly related to the subject in its description of the object, etc.), then when moving away from the epistemological paradigm of positivism ideas about the subject, object and language lose their definition. The subject loses the evidence of rationality and cannot rely on the evidence of his own reflection, which means the loss of his autonomy and self-sufficiency. The object appears as a complex multi-level formation where each level can be described on the basis of scientific theories alone, but there are no theories that describe all levels of the world as an object of knowledge and there are no theories that would correlate their descriptions of the world with each other. Language also appears as a certain way of describing the world whose nature is playful in nature and depends on the social conditions of its use. If in the epistemological paradigm of positivism terminology appears as the culmination of a cognitive process, completing it in the form of a dictionary or reference book, then in the modern epistemological paradigm terminology appears as a decentralized functionality, the essence of which cannot be reduced to the formation of a dictionary or reference book of a professional field of knowledge or scientific discipline. Today, terminological work is rather a process of a cognitive nature with corresponding semantic, linguistic, cognitive, sociocultural and other components, within which it is virtually impossible to indicate its beginning and end. A terminological corpus is a network structure consisting of various ontologies (databases, knowledge bases, etc.) connected to each other, but this connectedness is implicit. Carrying out terminological work is the processing of databases using terminology to establish as many connections as possible between them. In other words, terminological work is associated with the construction of ontologies by inscribing the latter into social reality. The influence of the cognitive turn on terminological activity is manifested in the formation of cognitive theories of terminology, such as the sociocognitive theory of terminology by Rita Temmerman and the frame theory of terminology by Pamela Faber. These theories demonstrate in different ways the consideration of terminology as a cognitive phenomenon, but in general they reflect the changes that occur in connection with the change in the status of the latter.
