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274 Jean Piaget
respects, including cases where it is sought to demonstrate that it is possible or
essential to dispense with it. However, it very often happens, especially in
those latter cases, that an epistemologist advances arguments of introspection
or of common sense in judging psychology (for, even without being a specialist
in this branch, everyone believes that he is a psychologist; yet a great deal of
technical knowledge is required, for instance, to understand the difficulties of
any psychogenetic interpretation).
A group of psychologists, logicians, mathematicians, biologists, etc., has
established an International Centre of Genetic Epistemology in Geneva for the
purpose of studying systematically the relations between epistemological problems
pertaining to the various branches of learning and the mental and cognitive
development data which are capable of clarifying them. Some twenty
volumes have already been issued by this Centre, dealingwith theepistemological
problems of logic, mathematics (numbers, algebraic structures and their filiations,
functions and categories, space, etc.), physics, and so on, and particularly
those dealt with under headings I-m in this section.
I I. The applications of psychology:
basic research and ‘appZied’psychoZogy
Psychology concerns all human activities and situations : education, patholog-
ical conditions and psychotherapy, mental health, work and leisure in nearly
all sectors of employment (particularly industrial work), school and vocational
selection and guidance, etc. From the outset, scientific psychology has thus been
involved, voluntarily or involuntarily, in application problems, and it was even
some of these problems that helped to determine its original experimental
orientation (the question of reaction times was raised by the astronomer Bessel
in connexion with individual variations he had noted among the measurements
of his collaborators and after Maskelyne had dismissed from Greenwich an
observer whose calculations were systematically 1110th of a second late on an
average, as compared with his own). In fact psychology has always been in a
position rather similar to that of medicine, i.e. obliged to work at the practical
level before having the experimental and above all theoretical knowledge on
which its applications could be based with any certainty. Is that a good or a bad
thing from the point of view of science and from that of the value of the appli-
cations themselves ?
I. From the first point of view, the need for applications obviously raises new
problems which would probably not have been considered otherwise. Had
Binet not called for the creation of special classes for backward pupils and had
the educational authorities not asked him how such pupils could be distinguished
from retarded or mentally deficient pupils, he would not have elaborated with
Simon or published in 1905 his ‘Metric Scale of Intelligence’, the first version
of the intelligence tests which have since become so fashionable. Whole chapters