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

226 Jean Piaget
I. Scientific psychology andphilosophy
From an objective review of the facts and trends, two points emerge. Firstly,
the International Union of Psychological Science, to which belong national
psychological associations with a total membership of approximately 40,000,
has never wanted to join the International Council for Philosophy and Human-
istic Studies. Not, of course, out of any lack of interest, but because it wishes to
maintain an attitude of reserve as far as philosophical speculation is concerned,
while the latter does not threaten linguistics or demography in any way. Second-
ly, there are people who think that psychological science alone cannot attain a
knowledge of man and needs backing up by a ‘philosophical psychology’
(also called ‘philosophical anthropology’). If we are to understand the trends
in contemporary psychological science, we must therefore first pick out the
differences between these two tendencies and identify the requirements peculiar
to psychology as a science.
I. For many writers, particularly those with positivist leanings, the difference
between psychological science and philosophical psychology (and then they
generally dispute that the latter has any meaning) lies in the nature of the
problems they are concerned with, for psychological science, like any other
science, is supposed to be concerned only with ‘observables’, whereas philos-
ophy supposedly seeks to arrive at the nature of things and ‘essence’.
This is indeed how things would appear to stand at fist glance. Everyone is
agreed, for example, that the problem of the freedom or absence of freedom of
the human will is a problem for philosophy and not for psychological science
(even when psychologists acknowledge through method a methodological deter-
minism as far as phenomena are concerned), while everyone concedes that the
laws relating to memory or perception are a matter for scientific research. How-
ever, the very history of psychology shows at once that the boundary between
what are regarded as philosophical problems and scientific problems has con-
stantly shifted in unforeseen directions. For instance, at the end of the last centu-
ry psychologists were little concerned with the working of judgement in connex-
ion with the intelligence, or dismissed it as relating to the association of ideas,
leaving it for logicians to enlarge on the subject. When Marbe proceeded to
study this, he merely considered that in addition to the association factor there
was an ‘extra-psychological factor’ or logical factor, which was of no concern
to psychologists. Today, on the other hand, there are numerous theories of the
intelligence, and no one contemplates excluding judgement from the purview of
psychology. It would therefore be extremely hazardous at the present time to
divide up psychological problems into scientific and philosophical ones, and the
most common tendency is to regard science as mitely open and deciding it-
self at every moment which problems it is concerned with.’
Why then, at a given moment in history, are certain problems considered to
be within the realm of psychological science and others not, it being possible to
leave these to philosophy to deal with? Quite simply because there are questions
that can be sufficiently defined for a solution to be reached through experiment
and calculation and because the solutions thus arrived at are capable of winning