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476 Jean Piaget
Special mention should be made of the ‘signals’ (indices significatifs) which
release instinctive behaviour (Lorenz, Tinbergen, Grass6 and others).
It is therefore essential to take into account the idea of communication in
addition to the structures and values of functioning, insofar as it is possible that
a given element cannot be integrated as such, at least at once, in an existing
structure or may have no direct or immediate functional value, but can constitute
the representative or announcer of subsequent structurations or functioning.
Two cases have then to be distinguished: a) the representative is not recognized
as such by the organism, in other words, it does not affect behaviour, but
participates in a kind of storage or reserve of information, which is used later - it
is in this sense that we speak of genetic information etc.; or the transmission of
information which characterizes the feedback as opposed to the main energetic
process the adjustment of which is controlled by the feedback; b) this representative
is used in ‘behaviour’ and thus becomes a signalling stimulus, etc. This
brings us to the threshold of the systems of messages affecting human behaviour.
In all, we thus have before us three broad categories of ideas: structures or
forms of organization; functions, sources of qualitative or energetic values; and
messages. All three of course give rise to problems which may be diachronic,
problems of evolution and construction, or synchronic, problems of balance and
control, or problems of exchanges with the environment, but obviously the
relations between the diachronic and the synchronic dimensions cannot be the
same, according as to whether structures, functional utilities or messages are
in question.
What should be done in order to enter upon the analysis of the common
mechanisms considered by the various human sciences is thus to translate this
general theory into terms of human behaviour. Here a preliminary remark is
called for. The production, regulation or exchange which occurs in the forms we
have just reviewed may as much be organic, as mental or intra-psychic, and we
started speaking of the organic as our initial frame of reference. Now we saw
in the ‘Introduction’ (section 7, m) that although most of the human sciences dealt
with human behaviour without attempting to delimit in detail what is conscious
and what is unconscious, the disciplines in which an explicit relationship
between mind and body can continually give rise to problems, as in psychology,
have moved in the direction of parallelism and isomorphism. We proposed
(‘Introduction’ section 7, m) to interpret the ‘psycho-physiological parallelism’
in terms of a more general isomorphism between causality, the field of application
of which is actually restricted to matter, and implication in the broad sense,
which is the sui generis relation uniting messages peculiar to the conscious state.
Here again the few general ideas referred to in the present section should be
viewed in terms of conscious implications.
4. Laws, values and signs
While all the human sciences deal with production, regulation and exchange
and all use for this purpose the ideas of structure, functional utility and meaning