Philosophical understanding and study of reflection is necessary to explore the fundamental relationships of this process with other phenomena of life, as well as to understand its problematic areas. Our goal is to develop a new methodological and conceptual angle to study reflection.

First of all, the article presents an analysis of the term “reflection”, its etymology, the typology of use and its importance in terms of philosophy and psychology, as well as its integral understanding.

Analysis of the various philosophical traditions – the transcendental, Marxist, existential–hermeneutic – provides a basis for a new angle to explore reflection. Development of a new model of reflection (the network functional model) is based on modern methodological approaches. Based on the established philosophical and methodological grounds, we offer a new understanding of reflection as part of the cultural-historical and dialogical approaches.

We distinguish the following basic principles and approaches to the study of reflection: the axiological principle, the dialogical principle, the event-relatedness principle, development, determinism, teleology, historicism and poly-processuality. From the possible methodological approaches, we chose the functional, process, system and network approaches. Development of the network model of reflection required us to identify the basic concepts (elements), which together make up the definition of reflection. These are “I-in-reflection”, time-space of reflexive reality, reflexive position, etc.

Based on the basic provisions and network functional model of reflection as part of the cultural-historical and dialogical paradigms of psychology, we understand reflection as a way of life of the person associated with the dialogic construction of a new, whole idea of ​​reality (internal or external, material or ideal) which is manifested in its conditional separation from common ties and consideration of the reflective position of the other, so that the hidden, implicit properties and relations of this reality become apparent.