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

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 483
others, we may conceive of similar processes in the spheres of the sociology of
knowledge, sociology of law and sociology of moral facts, and possibly also in
structuralist linguistic~.~3
c. The third major problem which arises in comparative studies is that of the
nature of the structures arrived at, i.e. whether they constitute simple ‘models’
in the service of theoreticians or whether they should be considered as inherent
to the reality under study, in other words as structures of the subject or subjects
themselves. This question is fundamental, because in the eyes of authors critical
of structuralism the latter is merely a language or a computing instrument which
refers to the observer’s logic but not to the subject. This problem is often raised
even in psychology, where experimentation is relatively easy and where one can
in certain cases be fairly sure that structure reaches down to the underlying
explanatory principle of phenomena, in a sense which recalls what the philos-
ophers call the ‘essence’, but with the addition of an undeniable deductive
power. But in disciplines where experimentation is difficult, even in the broadest
sense as in econometrics, experts often stress the divergence they see between the
mathematical ‘model’ and the ‘experimental design’, a model without suffi-
cient relationship with the concrete being no more than a play of mathematical
relations, whereas a model which adopts the details of the experimental design
can claim the status of a ‘real’ structure. It goes without saying that in most
situations the models used in the human sciences are placed, still more than phys-
ical and even biological models, halfway between the ‘model’ and the ‘struc-
ture’, in other words between the theoretical design partially related to the
observer’s decisions and the actual organization of the behaviours to be ex-
plained.
Note. - Lastly, we should say a few words about a problem allied to the preced-
ing one and which we were advised to include in the list of topics covering all
the sciences of man, namely that of what some have ventured to call the ‘empiri-
cal analysis of causality’. Two questions should be carefully distinguished here,
that of causal explanation in general and that of functional dependence between
observable facts which can be identified either by dissociation of factors in ex-
perimental research or by analysis of multi-variabilities in non-experimental
research (in economics and sociology, cf. the works of Blalock, Lazarsfeld, etc.).
The second of these questions does indeed concern all the human sciences, but
from an essentially methodological point of view, without leading, properly
speaking, to the discovery of new common mechanisms unless by further refining
the concept of functional dependence as opposed to simple correlations. On the
other hand, the problem of causal explanation in general brings out the latent
conflict which will doubtless exist for a long time yet between the partisans of a
positivism wedded to observables and those authors who seek to identify,
beneath those observables, ‘structures’ capable of accounting for their varia-
tions. It goes without saying that problems of causality are reduced, if such
structures exist, to the lattices formation, their internal transformations and
their self-adjustment; seen in this light, the search for functional dependence is
only a stage towards the discovery of structural mechanisms, and the analysis
of function could not be pursued to any length without arriving sooner or