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

242 Jean Piaget
‘necessity’, It is then a matter of some interest to inquire whether this great
bipolarity of the cognitive functions (with all kinds of ontogenetic intermediaries
between the two extreme poles) might not correspond to what constitutes perhaps
the most important dichotomy of physical phenomena, which are divided up
into reversible processes (mechanical and kinematic) and irreversible processes
(e.g., thermodynamics).
This therefore leads us to think that as far as psychology is concerned, the
most interesting aspect of the references to physics is perhaps not the hypo-
thetical reduction of a mental structure - even perception - to a physical (field,
etc.) structure, but the analogy between the mode of composition that occurs in
the former and the mode of composition used by the physicist in knowing the
latter. In thisconnexion, the break between irreversibleand reversible phenomena
may also be a division between the sphere of largely probabilist explanation and
that of simple deduction, just as in mechanics, which can be presented equally
as a rational and mathematical discipline or as an experimental science.
From this standpoint, which is that of the latest trends in psychology, a kind
of rather impressive reversal in relation to traditional physicalism has taken
place: the theory of information, which springs from essentially human consid-
erations, has found itself partly conversing - but in a way remarkable for its
formal and mathematical apparatus - with the fundamental equations of thermo-
dynamics relating to entropy (it being possible to define information as a nega-
tive entropy); and the theory of decision or of games, the specific field of which
is economics, has found physical applications (such as Maxwell’s demons inter-
acting with entropy). Of course, in several areas of psychology attempts are being
in the ‘Introduction’, section 6, heading II, originated in the human sciences
and were diverted to physics), especially communications theory. From this
point of view, W. P. Tanner has produced a precise theory of the thresholds of
perception. Berlyne has applied the same principle to the problem of interest,
J. Bruner and myself to the strategies of thinking, etc.
5. Psycho-sociological trends and the interactions
between the general and the social
Mental life may be regarded as socialized organic life, with the mental merging,
on analysis, with its organic sources and its social projection, which can even
lead in some cases to two kinds of reductionism: organicist and sociological.
Alternatively, we can take a dialectic or relational point of view, replacing the
idealof reduction by that of a series of interactions taking the form of a hierar-
chy. Now in our discussion of the organicist and physicalist trends, we saw the
former clearly take second place to the latter, though stressing the structuralist
aspects in its explanation. In the matter of the relations between the individual
and the social group we note a similar trend: the first doctrines that stressed the
social dimension of mental mechanisms and behaviour were inclined to reduce
every thing in the higher psychism of the individual to this sociological aspect;
however, as greater progress was made in dissociating what is general and