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

6 Jean Piaget
general application, as in the study of ethics, where the sociologist is not con-
cerned with the validity of the norms accepted by the subjects but seeks to
discover the process which has led them to consider themselves bound to ob-
serve those norms. In the same way, ‘normative facts’ are studied in genetic
psychology when the question is to discover how subjects who were originally
insensitive to certain logical norms come to regard them as essentials through
a process depending partly on their life in the community and partly on the
internal structuration of the action envisaged. In short, although the legal field
may generally be considered as normative, it is found to give rise, as in the
other nomothetic fields, to factual studies and causal analyses of individual or
collective behaviour related to the given norms, and such studies are then
necessarily of a nomothetic nature.
In particular, when a legal school considers that the ‘sollen’ of a norm of
law does no more than express the will of the State and through it, that of the
social forces or classes governing the society, the law cannot be included in the
category of ‘must be’, but belongs to the field of purely material relations which
can be studied objectively. For those concerned with norms, however, this
would belong to legal sociology.
Chapter VII provides other examples of relations between the legal sciences
and research on various other categories, in particular logic.
IV. Finally we come to the group of philosophical disciplines, which are particu-
larly difficult to classify, if only on account of the lack of agreement among
its proponents as to the scope and extent, and even the unity, of the various
branches usually included under this heading.
The only statement that cannot be challenged, since it appears to be common
to all schools of thought, is that the purpose of philosophy is to attain a general
co-ordination of human values, that is to say a concept of the world which
takes into account not only acquired knowledge and a critical evaluation of
such knowledge, but also the sum of man’s multitudinous convictions and values
in every context. Philosophy therefore goes further than the objective sciences
and places them in relation to a group of evaluations and meanings ranging
from customs to metaphysics in the strict sense.
The divergences of opinion start from the point at which the nature of this
postulate is studied in relation to the totality of reality. For certain thinkers,
philosophy is essentially a form of wisdom, a ‘setting into motion’, as Jaspers
says, whereas all clearly-established knowledge clearly falls into the field of
specialized learning in the strictest sense of science. For others, including several
dialecticians, the study of philosophy calls above all for awareness of dialectical
processes arising from ‘science on the march’ and from a commitment to take
options. For others finally, like Husserl, philosophy attains real wisdom, higher
than scientific knowledge - although positivism and several non-positivist
writers contest that possibility from an epistemological point of view.
We need not enter into the debate at this point (it will in any case be referred
to later in connexion with the relationship between the nomothetic sciences and
philosophical trends (section 5 below)) but shall confine ourselves to deter-