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

248 Jean Piaget
processes) that corrects the evaluation by reducing the momentary values to the
more or less permanent scale of values, hence the apparent change from the
weakest to the strongest.I7
In conclusion, in every branch of psycho-sociology that began with attempts
at simple reduction of the mental to the social, we now find three and not just
two kinds of levels: the organic, the mental and the social. This trichotomy,
however, leads to two corresponding dichotomies. On the one hand, the organic
and the mental give rise to differential specializations that distinguish individuals
from each other (according to the combinations of heredity, aptitude and
history), while, on the other hand individuals share certain common general
structures (mental operations, etc.), which are formed and developed in a fairly
uniform way. As to the relations of the mental and of the social, we must also
distinguish, on the one hand, the social diversities which set societies against
each other according to their ideologies, history, and the like, and, on the other
hand, the general structures of social co-ordination. The great lesson of relational
analysis, in contrast to the various forms of reductionism that were cultivated
when research first began, is that general mental structures and general social
structures are identical in form and therefore show that there is a natural affinity
between them, the origins of which are no doubt partly biological (within the
broadest meaning of the interactions referred to in sections 3 and 4). When
Gvi-Strauss wished to characterize the structures of affinity, etc., and to give
an adequate expression of his anthropological structuralism, he resorts to the
larger structures of general algebra (groups, lattices, etc.) so that the sociological
explanation thus coincides with a qualitative mathematization similar to that
which occurs in the setting up of logical structures, the progress of which can
be followed in the spontaneous thinking of children and adolescents, though
not in their school learning. Thus the discovery of the interactions between the
general and the social leads to much deeper explanatory tendencies than the
ideal of simple reduction, which is paralleled by what we saw in the context of
organicism and physicalism.
6. Psychoanalytic research into mental specificity
Although mental processes are not reducible either to mere organic life or to
social life, yet a number of tendencies of contemporary psychology aim at read-
ing them by specific methods: psychoanalysis via direct study of the content of
representations and affects, behavioural psychology by establishing laws govern-
ing behaviour or its interiorization, and genetic psychology via general analysis
of the successive structures of development. W e shall deal with them in this
order, even though the various forms of psychoanalysis claim to be genetic, and
shall do so in order to show the progress of structural tendencies (developments
in which we have already touched on under previous headings), and especially
in order to show how such progress is bound up with that made in what may be
called constructivism as opposed to reductionism.