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

264 Jean Piaget
generally tends to reinforce the trend towards structuralism. We saw our first
example of this in connexion with organicism (section 3), where an essential-
ly associationist concrete model at the beginning, like the conditioned reflex,
was expressed as a ‘subordinate stochastic lattice’ involving both the algebraic
structure of the lattice, probabilist sequences and links with neighbouring sys-
tems. The physicalism peculiar to Gestalt theory is naturally expressed as field
equations, but has also been continued by Lewin and his successors as a kind
of topology, which incidentally is more subjective than mathematical, and in
models of vectors. Social psychology expresses the structure of small groups
in all kinds of algebraico-probabilist models or in ‘graphs’, and so on. Psycho-
analysis itself found an abstract theorist in D. Rapaport, who would certainly
have continued his researches (had it not been for his untimely death) in the
direction of a still more elaborate form of energetics (and he was already refer-
ring to d’Alembert’s theorem for constant cathexis).zz The theories of learning
have given rise to probabilist and algebraic elaborations, and the psychogenetic
study of the intelligence naturally makes use of general algebra and logic.
Needless to say, the structures used in these various branches of psychology
are not all identical. This diversity also holds out great promise, for sooner or
later the problem of their co-ordination will arise, and the differences as well as
the possible transitions from certain structures to others will have to be taken
into account. It is perhaps from such a system of transformations and inter-
change that psychology will develop a fundamental unity, though it is still only
a remote dream to-day.
I. Abstract models are thus coming into more or less current use in every branch
of psychology, and the specifically psychological study of them provides material
for specialized journals and frequent seminars. It is therefore essential to ask
what lies behind this trend and especially where it is leading to as regards the
general interpretative methods that form the basis of our science in its reactions
to the facts it discovers.
Originally, the abstract model is simply the result of an effort to give an exact
definition of laws, thus making accurate qualitative and quantitative forecast-
ing possible. Fechner’s logarithmic law or Hull’s first laws of learning are still
at this first stage of abstraction. As soon as there are a number of laws to co-
ordinate there further occurs an overall process of deduction, and it was this
level that Hull next reached with his formalized system. If the word model is
often improperly used, even to the point of embracing any deductive process
used in psychology, the term assumes its full meaning only once there is a more
general framework than the laws contemplated in the experimental area under
study, and a framework capable of providing not only a formulation and the
possibility of forecasting, but also a source of explanation in so far as the opera-
tive transformations of the model match the real transformations of the phenom-
enon that has to be explained. For instance, a probabilist model of the Weber-
Fechner law will be explanatory if the additive series of evaluations of the
subject are matched by a recording mechanism (encounters, and so on), the suc-
cessive probabilities of which can grow only multiplicatively.