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

236 Jean Piaget
cerned with the relations between mental life or behaviour and physiological
or biological life. There have always been in psychological science certain essentially
reductionist trends, and there was a time when psychic processes were explained
by association and it was sought to show that the latter were the direct
reflection of nervous associations (the name of which has remained in the ‘association
fibres’ of the cortex) or of facilitations, and so on. When Pavlov discovered
conditioned reflexes, he did not hesitate to consider them as ‘completely
identical’ with the ‘psychologists’ “associations” ’, and people naturally began
to regard the conditioned reflex as an all-purpose explanation whereby all
mental life was reducible to nervous conditioning. Only a few years ago a Swiss
doctor, who was also a psychologist, attempted to show that the conditioned
reflex was the sole cause not only of habit, language, pictorial design, etc., but
of the intelligence as a whole and of the will. Though not reaching this degree of
reductionism, there are still some schools of thought, however, which postulate
without discussion a possible reduction of higher behaviour to the behaviour of
rats or pigeons. Though it should naturally be assumed that there are a number
of common mechanisms, it cannot be decided in advance how far they go and
especially what they become once integrated into more complex and evolved
behaviour, without running the risk of a kind of ‘animalization’ of man.
U. In order to understand how interactionist or relational trends are now tend-
ing to replace this reductionism, there can be nothing more instructive than to
go over the general history of the conditioned reflex in physiology and psycho-
logy, which are both parallel and, ultimately, interdependent.
In physiology Pavlov’s great discoveries led to the definition of scales of
phenomena and to the recognition of the influence of higher level actions on
lower ones and not just the reverse. The assimilation of the ‘psychologists’
“association”’ to conditioning was a reduction from the higher to the lower,
but immediately afterwards Pavlov demonstrated the effects of higher nervous
activity (i.e., of conditioned reflexes) on the visceral mechanisms, which is a
higher-scale influence on lower-scale phenomena. Then he discovered the two
systems of signalling, one purely sensori-motor and the other linked to language,
and Soviet psychologists found more and more examples of the influence of
verbal signalling on lower-scale conditioning and even on physiological reac-
tion of a peripheral level.
Thirdly, electro-physiological techniques have shown that the conditioned
reflex is not purely cortical, but also concerns reticular formation and therefore
involves diencephalic integration, which supposes that there is interaction
between the cortical associative system and the lower-level systems. Further,
Soviet physiologists and psychologists have ceased to regard conditioning as a
mere sequence of associations and now provide cybernetic feedback models of it.
The great advantage of this is that a lower-level mechanical pattern is replaced
by patterns comparable to trial-and-error behaviour or cognitive perception in
general, which does not in any way prevent these regulation patterns from being
common on the various physiological planes and from thus showing relational
analogies between the many scales that resist reductionism.