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

CHAPTER III
Psychology
JEAN PIAGET
Though the science of psychology is amenable to methods of experimentation
proper, which are hardly (or much less) applicable to such disciplines as lin-
guistics or economics, it has taken longer than they have to determine what its
specific aim in research should be. For this there are two reasons, which are
really complementary. Firstly, being concerned primarily with human beings,
psychology was for a long time subordinated to philosophy, which was why the
realization of the limits of introspection and the need to assign a place to
consciousness in the general scheme of ‘behaviour’ was a fairly slow and labo-
rious process. Secondly, once it had ceased to centre exclusively on introspec-
tion, the science of psychology first found in man only a mixture of biological
and social elements, before the contemporary structuralist movement re-
discovered a wider and deeper mental specificity than consciousness, though at
the same time it took in the latter, preserving its links with the organism and
with collective life.
The task of describing the trends in contemporary psychological science wil
therefore first of all involve analysing the reasons for its dissociation from
philosophy (with an exception being made as regards its constantly renewed
contacts with epistemology). Then it wil be a question of reviewing its early
empiricism, which comes out again even now whenever authors are distrustful
of explanatory theories and confine themselves to the description of observables
or laws. The next stage will be to show how the search for an explanation often
leads to attempts at reduction in the direction of organic life, or even, beyond
this, of general physical mechanisms or of social life. The final stage wil be to
identify the various types of research that aim at defining specific characteristics
of mental life or of behaviour either in the direction of internal qualitative facts
(psychoanalysis), overall and quantifiable observables (behaviour), genetic
structuralism, or abstract models. Such a survey will naturally give in addition
information on inter-disciplinary trends in psychology and on the many appli-
cations of this branch of the human sciences.