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

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 479
of symbols belonging to the mechanism of messages. Without mentioning the
language of animals (bees, etc.), which raises all kinds of problems of comparison,
it should be remembered that the appearance of representation in individual
development is not due to language alone but to a much wider semeiotic
function also including symbolic play, mental image, drawing and all forms of
deferred and interiorised imitation (the latter constituting the transitional term
between sensori-motor functions and representational functions). Further,
language - which constitutes, so to speak, a system of messages to the power of
one - is accompanied in collective life by systems to the power of two, such as
myths, which are simultaneously symbols and semantic characters carried by
verbal or graphic sign-vehicles. Thus general semeiology gives rise to interdisciplinary
problems of the broadest kind.
XI. STRUCTURES AND RULES (OR NORMS)
Having posed the problems in their most general forms in sections I to 4, let
us now try to go into the details of common mechanisms by following the
plan provided by the distinction between rules, values and signs.
5. Concepts of structures
One of the most general trends of avant-garde movements in all the human
sciences is structuralism, which is taking the place of atomistic attitudes or
‘holistic’ explanations (emergent wholes).
The method intended to master problems of wholes -which at first seems to
be the most rational and rewarding because it corresponds to the most elementary
intellectual operations (those of assembling or adding together) - consists
in explaining the complex by the simple, in other words in reducing phenomena
to atomistic elements the sum of the properties of which is supposed to
represent the whole which has to be interpreted. Such atomistic methods of
posing problems eventually lead to the laws of the structure as such being forgotten
or distorted. They have by no means disappeared from the field of human
sciences and may be found for example in psychology in associationist theories
of learning (school of Hull, etc.). Generally speaking authors frequently revert
to these types of additive constructions when a certain empiricism or a mistrust
of theories which they consider premature impels them towards what they believe
to be greater respect for directly observable facts.
The second trend which can be observed in a number of separate disciplines
is one which, in the face of complex systems, consists in stressing the characteristics
of ‘wholeness’ peculiar to these systems, while considering that wholeness
to be directly ‘emergent’ from the assembly of elements and as imposing itself
upon them, by structuring them, as a result of this constraint of the ‘whole’;
above all, it consists in considering the whole to be self-explanatory by the mere
fact of its description. Two examples of such an attitude may be given, one