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

470 Jean Piaget
of false problems and, on certain points, achieve an as yet very small measure
of collaboration.
As for the hierarchies which might be established between the human scien-
ces, this of course remains an open question so long as the central problem of
sociology, that of society considered as a whole and the relations between the
sub-systems and the whole system, is still not solved. Meanwhile, each disci-
pline employs parameters which are strategic variables for other disciplines,
and this opens up a vast field of research for interdisciplinary collaboration;
but as there is no linear breakdown of the system into sub-systems, collaboration
is only too often reduced to mere juxtaposition. On the other hed, it is very
likely that new light will be thrown on the problem of the hierarchy of scales
of phenomena and the related studies by the future progress of two essentially
synthetic disciplines and their repercussions on the question of infrastructures
and superstructures. These are ethnology, the multidimensional character of
which is manifest, and history, regarded not as the mere reconstitution of
events, but as interdisciplinary research dealing with the diachronic aspects of
each of the fields studied by the various human sciences (see Part II, section 9).
As these various aspects are of course interdependent, it can be hoped that, when
history eventually achieves nomothetic status, its lessons combined with those
of ethnology and sociology in general, will bring us nearer to solutions of the
central problem of the relations between the sub-systems. The future of inter-
disciplinary research in the human sciences (with or without hierarchy) depends
not only on these solutions, but on many internal questions peculiar to the
various disciplines (macro- and micro-economics, etc.).
2. Convergence of problems within the human sciences and their relative afinity
with those of the life sciences
A number of circumstances explain why interdisciplinary research in the
social and human sciences, although generally recognized as having a great
future, is not taken nearly so far as in the natural sciences. We have just had
the two main and basic reasons. But to these must be added at least two kinds
of contingent circumstances which have, even if contingent, played an un-
disputed historic r61e. One is the tragic splitting up of courses among university
faculties which are more and more cut off from each other, or even among
sections within these faculties, but watertight nonetheless. Whereas in a science
faculty the training of any specialist requires a more or less extensive culture, a
psychologist may know nothing about linguistics, economics, or even sociology.
If an economist is trained in a law school, he may be completelyignorant of
linguistics, psychology, etc. Whereas some universities, such as that of Amster-
dam, for instance, in an effort to combat this partitioning, have placed philoso-
phy in an inter-faculty institute so as to re-establish contact between it and the
natural and social sciences, nothing similar yet exists, to our knowledge, to co-
ordinate the disciplines with which we shall be dealing here.
The second factor of a general nature which has weighed on the human scien-