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

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 48 I
(Bertalanffy has been influenced by Gestalt theory but goes considerably beyond
it).
Having said this, there exists a whole range of possible ‘structures’ spread
over three directions, and our first problem is to understand the relation between
them (the first of these directions corresponds to what we called completed
structures in section 3 and the other two to structures in process of formation or
not closed) :
I. Algebraic and topological structures, including logical models since logic is
a particular case of general algebra (for example, the ordinary logic of propositions
is based on Boolean algebra). Thus in ethnology L6vi-Strauss reduces
kinship relations to group or lattice structures, etc. In intelligence theory we
have tried to describe intellectual operations the formation of which can be
followed in the course of individual development by defining overall structures
in the form of elementary algebraic structures or ‘groupements’ (akin to
groupoids) and then, at the level of pre-adolescence and adolescence, of lattices
and groups of assembled quaternities. Structuralist linguistics likewise has
recourse to algebraic structures (monoids, etc.) and the same is true of econometrics
(linear and non-linear programmes).
2. Cybernetic circuits which describe systems of regulations and whose use
is essential in psychophysiology and in learning mechanisms. Ashby, the designer
of the famous ‘homeostat’ which enables problems to be solved by a process
of balancing, has recently supplied in his Infroduction to Cybernetics a model of
regulation whose feedback actions are themselves determined by an imputation
table of the games theory type. This model, which he regards as one of the most
general and the simplest to be made biologically, shows a possible link between
psychological and praxeological or even economic regulations (see section I 3).
3. Stochastic models used in econometrics, demography and often in psychology.
But whereas chance plays a constant role in human events and therefore
requires to be treated on its own, it is never pure in the sense that the reaction
to the fortuitous, whether favourable or unfavourable, is in varying degrees an
active reaction, which brings us back to regulations. Thus this type 3 results
from a complication of 2, as type 2 is of I (remembering that the operation is a
‘perfect’ regulation with pre-correction of errors).
Thus structuralist research gives rise to at least three major interdisciplinary
problems (without semantic correspondence with these three types of structure
but in relation to them as a whole):
a. A problem of comparison of structures according to their spheres of
application. It is not by chance, for example, that structures of perception
(‘good forms’, perceptual constancy regarding size, etc., systematic errors or
‘illusions’, etc.) refer to models of regulations which are more or less close, or
applicable, to an assumed whole, and that structures of intelligence at various
levels of equilibrium relate to algebraic models; the reason is that the latter
involve a logic, whereas perceptual structures, despite their partial (but only
partial, while Gestalt theory postulated direct identifications) isomorphisms
with the former, contain a possibility of systematic deformation (or ‘illusions’)
which from the algebraic viewpoint constitute ‘non-compensated transforma-