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

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 477
envisaged diachronically and synchronically by turns, these ideas appear in
different forms according as the researcher takes a theoretical or abstract
standpoint, or again takes into account the behaviour of the subjects and even
the way in which that behaviour impacts upon their minds. From the first of
these two standpoints the specialist wil seek the most objective language to
describe structures. This he wil do in varying terms but as a rule they wil be
capable of formalization or of mathematical expression. For instance, he will
describe kinship structures in terms of algebraic systems, in the same way as
Lkvi-Strauss, transformational grammars in terms of monoids, in the same way
as Chomsky, or micro- and macro-economic structures in terms of contingency
or cybernetic diagrams, etc. However, none of all this directly affects the mind
of the subject.
On the contrary, in the psychological research which we are pursuing concerning
the development of the intelligence in the child and the adolescent, we
also try of course to translate into abstract language the structures of intellectual
operations evidenced by the behaviour of the subjects, and we use for this
purpose various logico-mathematical structures coming under the head of
‘groups’, ‘networks’ and ‘groupings’; but we also try to discover the form these
structures take in the minds of the subjects,g insofar as their reasoning is expressed
in words and is accompanied by various intentional justifications :
what we discover is of course no longer an abstract structure but a set of intellectual
rules or norms which take the form of impressions of ‘logical necessity’,
etc. When a sociologist of law investigates why a legal system (formalisable or
codifiable as a ‘pure’ normativist construction in the manner of Kelsen) is
‘recognised‘ as valid by the subjects of laws, he is confronted with a series of
bilateral or multilateral relations such as that a ‘right’ for some corresponds to
an ‘obligation’ for others, etc., and what these facts imply is in turn expressed
in terms of specific rules. When a logician axiomatises a certain number of
operations with the consequences which derive from them, he does not have to
pay the slightest attention to the subject who performs them. But he may perfectly
well concern himself with the normative aspect of the connections he is
manipulating and may even end by constructing, with Ziembinski, Weinberger,
Peklov, Prior and others, a logic of ‘norms’1o (and even, with Weinberger,
applying it to the legal norm).I1 Likewise, linguistic structures are translated
in the consciousness of subjects by rules of grammar, even if this translation is
inadequate, as indeed are many other translations (through realization) of structures
in the form of rules.
The general and interdisciplinary problems that are going to arise in this
connexion (see sections 5 to 9 below) now become evident at once: comparison
of various types of structures, comparison of systems of rules (depending
on whether these systems come close to the methods of logical composition
or diverge from them in the direction of simple constraints or miscellaneous
dominances), comparison of various translations or realizations of structures in
the form of rules (adequate or inadequate, and why), etc.
Another major system of notions concerning the actual experiences of individuals
in their mental life or in their collective relations is the system of vabes or