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

Psychology 263
cence. We had to wait for psychogenetics and the discovery of the various pre-
operative and operative stages through which the child and the adolescent go
before the specificity of intellectual structures could be established.
However, this structuralism is only one of the two services rendered by psy-
chogenetics. The other relates to constructivism and is no less essential. The
operative structures of the intelligence are not innate, but slowly develop la-
boriously during the first fifteen years of life in the most favoured societies. If
they are not already formed in the nervous system, neither are they in the physi-
cal world, where they would only have to be discovered. They therefore testify
to a real construction, proceeding by stages, at each of which the results obtain-
ed at the preceding stage must first be reconstructed before the process can be
broadened and construction resumed. The nerve structures serve as a medium
for the sensori-motor intelligence, but the latter builds a series of new structures
(permanent object, group of transfers, patterns of the practical intelligence, and
so on); the thought processes are based on sensori-motor action, from which
they are derived, but they reconstruct into representations and concepts what
was acquired in practice, before broadening considerably the range of initial
structures; reflexive and abstract thought restructures initial mental operations
by placing the concrete into the sphere of hypothesis and propositional or for-
mal deduction. In the creative adult, this movement of constant construction
continues indefinitely, as shown, among other things, by the forms of techno-
IogicaI and scientific thought.
9. Abstract models
Having examined the main trends in contemporary psychology, which we
distinguished between according to the kind of explanation they offer (or that
they refuse to adopt, as in the case of positivism, viz. section 2) it is now the
moment to make a fairly fundamental observation, which illuminates all that
has gone before. But let us begin by taking stock of what we have seen so far.
Without wishing to extrapolate excessively, I think it can be said that, under
their various names, ail the trends we have mentioned are bound sooner or
later to take into account the ideas of construction and structure. We have often
met in the past interpretations that accepted genesis without structure (e.g.,
associationism) or structures without genesis (Denkpsychologie). But sooner or
later every trend comes up against these two requirements. Skinner himself,
who is against theory, managed in his game of inputs and outputs to maxima-
lize the activity of his pigeons and to see them build instrumental structures.
Perhaps weak structures, but already it is no longer a case of simple association.
Organicists, physicalists, social psychologists, psychoanalysts, specialists in
the ‘theory of behaviour’ and psychogeneticians are all looking more or less
explicitly and in various forms for both constructions and structures.
The new development we should now stress is that for a number of years the
various ~oncrete~niodels that have been adduced by nearly all the schools of
thought previously mentioned are sooner or later expressed in the form of
abstract models, of, say, a mathematical, cybernetic or logical nature, which