Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

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place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 55
number of outstanding writers, who, like Keynes, were both theoreticians of the
first rank and the instigators of numerous practical experiments. In such cases it
is obvious that application draws the maximum advantage from the progress of
basic research, since it stimulates the latter.
Branches of study such as psychology, in which basic research work can be
pursued using experimental methods without necessarily having recourse to
application, is quite different. Nevertheless, experimental psychology has given
rise to a large number of applications almost since its beginnings, and great
writers such as Binet have initiated both important basic research (on intelli-
gence, for instance), and widely used practical processes (such as his intelligence
tests). Obviously, the main reason for this is that any psychological theory
concerns human life, and that circumstances are such that psychologists are
constantly being calIed upon to solve some practical problem or other. But
another reason may be found in the example of medicine, with which psychol-
ogy has always been closely related, and which owes a good deal of its informa-
tion to the study of applications, although its bases lie in general physiology and
biology.
We must therefore draw a distinction between two problems with regard to
the relations between basic research and application in psychology: the problem
of the contribution made by the latter to the former, and that of the contribu-
tion made jn the contrary direction. These two problems, however, are relatively
linked, and in the last resort are such as to cast doubt upon the very idea of
‘applied psychology’ from the standpoint of both its theoretical interpretation
and the advantages of application for its own sake.
On the whole, these applications of psychology have contributed little to
psychological knowledge itself, except in the sphere of pathological psychology,
in which disease is a kind of natural experimentation (for instance, the dissocia-
tion of the speech factor in aphasia, and so on), and applied research assumes a
heuristic value, similar to that we saw in the case of economics. But in the other
spheres it would be impossible to cite a discovery that was due to application;
Binet, for instance, deduced nothing from his tests related to the interpretation
of intelligence. Yet, as we have seen, ‘applied psychology’ is almost as old as
psychology, and could have contributed to the development of the latter. But
for this very reason it did not always succeed in taking advantage of the basic
research work that would have been useful to it, because it evolved too early
and because it constantly sought to apply the knowledge gained in a particular
sector before the subject had been thoroughly investigated. Consequently,
attempts were made to evaluate achievements and results before the formative
mechanisms were known, and the result was often mutual impoverishment.
Tn addition there have been the effects of the formation of ‘schools’. Applied
psychology organizes its own congresses, and has a tendency to become a kind
of state within a state, with all the disadvantages of relative isolation in science.
To take the sphere of application alone, this means necessarily limiting the
scope of problems, and those which would ultimately be the most interesting to
resolve, for the sake of application itself, are sometimes neglected because, in
their initial form, they appear to relate only to basic research or theory.