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

474 Jean Piaget
of ‘norms’. There is thus no need to distinguish structures and functions (in the
biological and not the mathematical sense of the term), for the functioning of
the structure is reduced to its internal transformations. In the third place, there
are no ‘exchanges’, except those of an internal nature, which take the form of
possible (and mutual) transitions between one sub-structure and another.
On the contrary, in the case of structures in the formative stage or in the
process of continual reconstitution (as with metabolism in biology) or of mo-
mentary reconstitution, the three characteristics - production, balance and
exchanges - appear in appreciably different aspects, although the forms just
described may be regarded as the extremes of those with which we shall be
concerned, the essential distinction between the two being that the former
correspond to a stable completion and the latter to processes or developments.
In the first place, the production of the structure appears in two forms, the
second being the end-result of the first: a formation and transformations.
Consequently the organism, the thinking being or the social group, builders of
structures, are only centres of functioning (or structuration) and not completed
structures containing all possible structures by a sort of ‘pre-formation’.8 In
other words, a distinction should be drawn in this formative process between the
function as a ‘structuring’ activity and the structure as a structured result.
In the second place, in the case of structures in the formative stage, the self-
regulating system can no longer be reduced to a set of rules or norms charac-
terizing the completed structure: it consists of a system of regulation or self-
regulation, with correction of errors after the event, and not the ‘pre-correc-
tion’ to be found in the final system (where self-regulation, moreover, marks
the extreme of the self-regulation which functions during the formative stages).
Lastly, in the case of structures in the process of constitution or continual
reconstitution (as with biological structures), exchange is no longer limited to
internal reciprocities, as is the case between the sub-structures of a completed
structure, but involves a considerable proportion of exchange with the outside,
to enable these structures to obtain the supplies necessary for their functioning.
This is so with structures in the formative stage, as regards the development of
the intelligence, when the subject must constantly have recourse to trial and error
(even in the case of specifically logico-mathematical experiments, when the
information is drawn not from the objects as such but from the actions exerted
upon them). This is especially so with biological structures, which are elab-
orated solely by constant exchanges with the environment, by means of those
mechanisms of assimilation of the environment to the organism and adjustment
of the latter to the former which constitute the transition from organic life to
behaviour and even mental life.
A living structure, as Bertalanffy has shown, constitutes an ‘open’ system in
the sense that it is preserved through a continual flow of exchanges with the
outside world. Nevertheless, the system does have a cycle closing in on itself in
that its components are maintained by interaction while being fed from outside.
Such a structure can be described statically since it is preserved despite its
perpetual activity, but as a rule it is dynamic since it constitutes the more or
less stable form of continual transformations.