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

230 Jean Piaget
I. In this connexion, the associationism that marked the beginnings of psychol-
ogy in the nineteenth century and sought to explain everything in terms of
mechanical associations between prior atomistic elements constituted by sensa-
tions and images perhaps rendered greater services through its exaggerations
and initial imperialism than it would have had it been presented in a moderate
form as one hypothesis among others. As a reaction it led to American func-
tionalism, the source of behavioural psychology, to German Denkpsychologie
and especially to the Gestalt theory, which are at least partial sources of con-
temporary structuralism, not to speak of psychoanalysis, the work of Binet
(who began with associationism to turn right away from it in I903), of P. Janet
and many others who showed the way leading to genetic psychology.
However, amid this dialectics of conquering but hazardous theories and of
more profound doctrines supplying the omissions of the former, there is a
periodic trend that is worth mentioning at the beginning of this chapter because
it is continually springing up again and has both contemporary and historic
representatives. This is the positivist trend, which is solely interested in observ-
ables and in establishing between them repeatable relations, without bothering
to go beyond general facts or laws by searching for explanations or elaborating
interpretative theories.
As we are not concerned with history but with the main trends in contempo-
rary psychology, as far as the past is concerned it will be sufficient to note the
somewhat striking contrast of which one is aware on thumbing through the
proceedings of the first international congresses on psychology and comparing
them with present day congresses, or to compare the present state of American
psychology with what it was some forty years ago. Whereascontemporaryresearch
is very largely conducted with a view to solving a problem and its results are
then often expressed in terms of more or less general or abstract models, the
procedure that was for a long time adopted was to compile facts, as though the
problems or the solutions to them would emerge subsequently. It was possible,
for example, to find in a laboratory (even in 1929) admirable documents com-
piled year after year on the same school children and presenting] a very full
longitudinal table of their performance as assessed by all theknown tests, though
their painstaking and scholarly authors had no idea what they were going to
get from them. Today a longitudinal study is carried out only to check the
necessary order of succession of stages or variations in the rate of development,
etc., and only if the problem is precisely stated can the facts selected for the
purpose be used.
Such artlessness is no longr to be found in contemporary positivism, and one
of its best known and most qualified representatives, F. Skinner, has posed a
number of precise problems relating, for example, to the process of learning in
animal and human psychology. However, wishing to offer only definite facts,
Skinner deliberately and methodically confined himself to two kinds of observ-
ables in his analyses: the inputs or stimuli presented to the subject, and the
outputs or the resulting observable and measurable reactions. Between the two
there is, of course, the organism with all its psychological or mental interme-
diate variables, but Skinner systematically ignores them and compares the