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

232 Jean Piaget
dissociation from the complex. Now (and this amounts to the same thing) the
most elementary mental operation is that of addition, which inclines one to
believe that any complex system is but the product of an addition of simple
elements. Unelaborated empiricism is therefore always liable to misrepresent the
mental reality by reducing it to artificial ‘atoms’, instead of arriving at overall
structures. This was what happened with the classical form of associationism:
after simply breaking up perception into sensations (without seeing any problem
or the need for any justiiication) and by postulating the conservation of prior
sensations in the form of images, it remained only to reduce the activity of the
subject to a system of associations intended to link the sensations to the images
or the latter to each other in order to arrive at the concrete and effective total
entities of perception, concept, judgement and so on.
The current stimulus-response (or S+. R) model, which for many writers
has replaced the artificial ‘association’ of the past, may or may not lead, as the
case may be, to the same atomistic drawbacks. This alone at once goes to show
that in planning his experiment the research worker projects into it a whole set
of problems whose very existence points to the difficulty of adhering strictly to a
positivist ascesis. If the experiment is broken up into small discontinuous and
independent stimuli, the S +. R schema brings us back to strict associationism
(but of course between perceptions and movements, without any further reference
to problematic images). If, on the other hand, we have the talent of Skinner
and we choose as a stimulus a complex situation introducing an entire causali-
ty - in short a universe where the pigeon’s activity can develop more freely -
then the S --f R schema reveals instrumental forms of behaviour that no longer
have anything to do with simple associations.
The general tendency today therefore is to regard the S+ R schema as
essentially complex and, by itself, ambiguous. To begin with, one essential fact
revealed by animal psychology and electro-encephalographic examination is
the existence of spontaneous activities of the nervous system (waves) and of the
organism (research carried out by Adrian and others) that are not reactions to
a stimulus. Increasing emphasis is placed on the fact that if the organism
responds, when there is an S 4 R reaction, it is because it is sensitized to the
stimulus. This prior condition of sensitization to the stimulus comes out very
clearly in instinctive reactions (where stimulus works only if there is ‘appetence’)
and equally so in learning, if we follow the subject step by step during his
development and observe the first signs of sensitivity of a stimulus to which he
was previously indifferent. This sensitization indicates the presence of a new
inclination, which in fact leads to the response. This therefore inclines us more
and more to think that the S -+ R schema is not linear (+) but circular (S s R),
which makes it impossible to ignore the living organism (Or). Hence the complex
relation S (Or) R and the theoretical impossibility of ignoring the intermediate
variables.
Moreover, even sticking to the strictest positivist schema, it must be recognized
that experimentation intended merely to describe inputs and outputs (by
means of repeatable relations or laws, but without causal explanation) is
the product of a partly arbitrary dividing up. We have already noted that the