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

478 Jean Piaget
realization of functional utility which we mentioned in section 3 above. The re-
markable thing, showing once more the profound unity of reactions of all living
beings in the social and human as well as the biological spheres, is that the
distinction between primary utility or utility relative to the qualitative aspects of
production or of the conservation of structures, and secondary utility or that
relative to the energetics of functioning, recurs in the sphere of experienced values
in the form of what we shall call ‘values of finality’ and ‘values of yield’.
Values of finality include, in particular, normative values which are deter-
mined by rules: a moral value such as those which, in all human societies,
distinguish actions judged to be good from those judged to be bad or indifferent,
refers of necessity to a system of rules. The same applies a fortiori to legal values.
In the sphere of individual or collective representations, judgements are valor-
ized as true or false (bivalent values) or true, false, or plausible but not yet
determinable, etc. (trivalent or polyvalent values) in terms of the accepted rules.
Notions are elaborated, accepted or rejected by virtue of multiple value judge-
ments and, while constituting structures, are constantly valorized, but once
again in terms of overall normative structures. Aesthetic values do not depend
on rules as imperative as these, but nevertheless refer to more or less regulated
structures. On a more individual level, a subject’s interest in a particular group of
objects or a particular kind of work in the form of miscellaneous finalities may
be remote from any normative structure and depend solely on regulations, but
may also be organised according to more or less stable scales of values.
However, there also exist values of yield linked with the costs and profits of
functioning. It may be argued that economic and even praxeological values are
all more or less hedged around by legal norms : an individual who does not pay
his debts is proceeded against and another who steals, i.e. practices what
Sageret jocularly described as the most economical form of conduct (maximum
of profit with minimum of expense), is punished by law. But the definition of
the frontiers between what is permitted and what is forbidden is one thing and
the actual determination of a value by a norm is another. Economic value obeys
its own laws which legal rules cannot determine and which do not in themselves
lay down any obligation (a norm is recognisable by an obligation which may be
honoured or violated, as opposed to a causal determinism which constrains but
does not ‘oblige’ in this normative sense). Economic value is of course insepar-
able from all kinds of values of finality and normative values; likewise, the
internal praxeology of an organism or of individual behaviour (that ‘economy’
which certain psychologists hold to be the principle of elementary affectivity)
is connected with many questions of structure. But the general problems of
cost and profit are quite distinct from those raised by other forms of evaluation
and cannot but lead to multiple interdisciplinary research, as the numerous and
increasingly widespread applications of the theory of games demonstrate.
Thirdly, in all spheres of human behaviour there are systems of meanings or
messages, the essential part of which is studied by linguistics within the collec-
tive system of language. But while language has played a rBle of the first im-
portance in human societies by the oral and written transmission of values and
rules of every kind, it does not constitute the only system of signs and especially