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

228 Jean Piaget
must be sought then on a more specific point, which is still a point of method,
but which concerns solely the rBle of the ego of the researcher himself. Objectiv-
ity, as meant by the current movement of psychological science, is not at all
neglect or abstraction of consciousness or of the subject, but ‘decentring’ in
relation to the ego of the observer. Whence the three main lines of research or
the three main viewpoints characteristic of the most general trends in contem-
porary psychology. First there is conduct, i.e., behaviour, includingconsciousness
or realization. Introspection alone is not enough, because it is both incomplete
(it grasps the results of mental processes and not their intimate mechanism) and
distorting (because the subject who introspects is both judge and party, which
plays a considerable part in affective states, and even in the cognitive sphere
where one’s own philosophy is projected into the introspection). However, con-
sciousness remains a basic phenomenon if placed in the overall context of con-
duct, and from this point of view we shall examine the process of cognition.
Claparkde has shown that children, at an age when they over-generalize, find it
harder to distinguish the similarities between two objects (a fly and a bee for
instance) than their differences, with cognition thus reversing the actual order
of procedure, going from the periphery (disadaptation of the action) to the
centre (intimate mechanism) instead of the reverse. Secondly, there is the genet-
ic point of view, in the sense of ontogenetic development: taking first the adult,
only already constituted mechanisms are observable, whereas if we follow their
development, we arrive at their formation, which alone is explicative. Thirdly,
there is the structuralist point of view, which is not yet accepted by everyone
but which we shall see is an increasingly profound and compelling approach.
It is the search for structures of behaviour or structures of thought resulting
from the gradual interiorization of actions, but structures whose effects can be
established experimentally, while the subject himself, though having constructed
them by his very activity, is not conscious of their existence as structures.
Gestalt psychology paved the way for this kind of research, which is going on
today in the most varied subjects : psycho-linguistic and psycho-social struc-
tures, structures relating to the operations of the intelligence, etc.
This being so, we then appreciate better the frontiers between scientific and
philosophical psychology. It is neither the problems nor the subjects of study
that separate them, and any question tackled by philosophical psychology can
or could come within the scope of scientific psychology, just as we see philos-
ophers studying behaviour, development or structures. The only difference is
due to the ‘decentring’ of the ego: where the psychologist claims to advance only
hypotheses that can be verified by everyone, by furnishing in his carfully differ-
entiated techniques the means of control, the philosopher works on the notion
that he knows himself by means of a series of supposedly primary intuitions
pre-existent to all psychological knowledge, and the introspection he uses is
therefore an introspection centred on his ego. It was from such a view-point
that Maine de Biran thought he had grasped a cause and a force in the sense
of effort, whereas P. Janet and others have since shown that the ‘guiding’iof
effort (and not the consciousness of it) is a regulator of the activations of the
action, which distributes but does not generate the available energies. It was