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

480 Jean Piaget
corresponding to certain current psychological trends and the other connected
with a sociological school which is now extinct. The first example is that of
certain adherents of ‘Gestalt’ psychology which was principally the product
of experimental studies on perception but was extended by W. Kohler and M.
Wertheimer into the field of intelligence and by K. Lewin into that of affectiv-
ity and social psychology. According to some of these authors we proceed in
all fields from an awareness of wholes preceding any analysis of the elements,
these wholes being due to effects of ‘fields’ which determine the forms by quasi-
physical principles of equilibrium (minimum action, etc.) ; the whole being
distinct from the sum of its parts, Gestalts then obey laws of composition which
are non-additive but are of qualitative predominance (Prugnauz) (the ‘best’
forms prevail by reason of their regularity, their simplicity, their symmetry,
etc.). The prevalent opinion today is that this method offers good descriptions
but not explanations and that, if one advances from perceptive or motive
Gestalts to forms of intelligence, these latter constitute systems which are
additive but which nevertheless involve laws as being complete systems (which
puts the problem in terms of algebraic structures or systems of transformations
and no longer in terms of Gestalts).
In an entirely different field, Durkheim’s sociology proceeded in a similar
manner by seeing in the social whole a new totality emerging on a higher scale
from the assembly of individuals and reacting upon them by imposing on them
a variety of ‘constraints’. It is interesting to note that this school, whose twofold
merit was to emphasize with particular vigour the specificity of sociology as
distinct from psychology and to supply an impressive body of specialized work,
likewise died a natural death for the lack of a relational structuralism which
might have supplied some laws of composition or construction instead of refer-
ring unremittingly to a totality conceived as ready-made.
The third position, then, is that of structuralism, but interpreted as relational,
that is to say as positing systems of interactions or transformations as the pri-
mary reality and hence subordinating elements from the outset to the relations
surrounding them and, reciprocally, conceiving the whole as the product of the
composition of these formative interactions. It is of great interest, from our
interdisciplinary point of view, to note that this trend - which is increasingly
evident in the human sciencesI2 - is still more general and manifests itself just as
clearly in mathematics and biology. In mathematics the Bourbaki movement
has led to breaking down the frontiers between the traditional branches in order
to identify certain general structures regardless of their content and to draw,
by combinations or differentiations, the details of particular structures from
three mother-structures. And although this process of fusion has today been
replaced by analysis of ‘categories’ (classes of elements with their functions),
that is again a form of relational structuralism, but one which comes closer
to the effective construction characteristic of the work of mathematicians.
In biology ‘organicism’ similarly represents a tertium between pseudo-mecha-
nistic atomism and the emergent wholes of vitalism, and the most convinced
theoretician of organicism has created a movement of ‘general theory of sys-
tems’ with interdisciplinary aims as regards, inter alia, the field of psychology