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

472 Jean Piaget
genes’), information theory in general, and cybernetics to the extent that it
concerns communication, guidance or control.
This being the case, it is evident that these three problems of transformation
(particularly diachronic transformations), balancing and exchanges are also
the three principal questions encountered in all the human sciences. Not only
are they encountered in very spec& forms in each of those sciences, but the
relations between the diachronic and the synchronic dimension differ very
significantly according to the type of phenomenon studied: structural linguistics
has thus revealed, since F. de Saussure, that the meaning of words at a given
moment in history depends much more on the total system of the language seen
from the standpoint of its synchronic balance than on its etymology or its
history. In the psychological development of an individual, on the contrary, the
final balance of the structures of the mind, for instance, depends much more on
the balancing process which characterizes the whole of its previous develop-
ment. Economic history, for its part, when it studies the price of wool on the
London market in the thirteenth century or that of pepper in Lisbon in the
sixteenth, does not see an explanation of the prices of these commodities on the
same markets today, but attempts to throw light on these examples from history
by recourse to the synchronic dimension, which predominates in questions of
values.5 On the other hand, problems of economic structure, as opposed to
economic situations, depend upon another kind of relationship between the
diachronic and the synchronic. Exchange problems, too, whether they be
exchanges with the environment in physical or mental production or exchanges
between individuals, are common to all the human sciences. And they combine
in very different ways with the various processes - diachronic or evolutionary
and synchronic or self-controlling.
This convergence of problems does not of course mean that the human scien-
ces can be reduced to the life sciences. The former remain specific because of the
existence of cultures transmitted socially and involving an inextricable complex
of factors. But if this specificity in itself raises a question, this is no reason for
not starting with common problems, all the more since, as we shall see, their
solutions are neither uniform, which would render their terms simply trivial,
nor uniformly different from one discipline to another, which would deprive
their comparison of interest, but are to be differentiated from one type of
structure or phenomenon to another, which means on the contrary that inter-
disciplinary research is essential.
3. From problems to general processes: structures, functions and meanings
The first question to be discussed in connexion with the principal problems
which have just been mentioned is that of the criterion for this choice and
consequently of its exhaustive or arbitrary nature. We have a striking example
to guide us in this connexion: that of the determination of elementary structures
(so-called ‘mother-structures’) by the Bourbaki school in mathematics. In order
to determine these fundamental structures, from which all the others are supposed
to derive by combination or differentiation, these well-known authors,