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

482 Jean Piaget
tions’. The same goes for the unquestionable advantage to be found in looking
among social phenomena for those which do or do not relate to a particular
type of structure, which amounts in the end to delimiting what is amenable to
logic and what is a matter of guesswork and readjustment.
In this connexion attempts can be made (and we have tried to do this in
genetic psychology) to establish ‘partial isomorphisms’ to facilitate such com-
parisons between structures, in particular by specific fields. Such a concept
has no meaning from a purely formal point of view, which requires that an
isomorphism must be total or not exist at all; after all, anything is partially
isomorphic with anything else. But the method acquires concrete and genetic
meaning if two preliminary conditions are set for such research: I) that one can
determine the transformations which are necessary in order to pass from one
structure to an adjacent one, and especially, 2) that one can show, genetically
or historically, that these transformations are effectively achieved in certain
situations or are sufficiently probable (by direct affiliation or by collateral kin-
ship, the common trunk from which the branches diverge being specified).
b. This leads us to the second of the major intradisciplinary or interdisciplin-
ary problems raised by structuralist research. Whereas the explanation of ;wholes
by atomistic methods leads to a geneticism without structures and the theory of
emergent wholes leads to a structuralism without genesis (which is also partially
true of Gestalt theories or of any irreducible social view in sociology), the
central problem of structuralism in the biological and human sciences is that
of reconciling structure and genesis, since every structure involves a genesis and
every genesis must be conceived as the (strictly formative) transition of an
initial structure to a final structure. In other words, the fundamental problem is
that of the fliation of structures, and the triad of algebraic, cybernetic and sto-
chastic structures immediately raises the question of the possibilities of transition
from one of these categories to the others.
There is above all the problem of relations between cybernetic and algebraic
structures, and in this connexion genetic psychology supplies some highly
significant indications. Between the elementary levels where cognitive conduct
proceeds by trial-and-error or immediate perceptive intuitions (two forms im-
plying regulations in the sense of cybernetic circuits) and those levels where,
towards 7-8 or 12-15 years, algebraic structures recognisable by the strict
co-ordination of ‘operations’ are constituted (as actions which are directed in-
wards, reversible and related to overall structures with their laws of composition),
one finds all the intermediary stages in the form of pre-operational representa-
tions still involving simple regulations but tending towards a form of operation.
From this one may conclude that operation constitutes the limiting stage of
regulation in the sense that the latter, being at first a correction of error as the
result of action and later a correction of action as anticipating its possible
deviations, finally becomes pre-correction of error, which is the function of
operational deduction: feedback is then promoted to the rank of an inverse
operation and the system by its composition alone ensures all the possible com-
pensations. Although it is not possible at present to say whether this process is
peculiar to the field under consideration or can be more generally applied to