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488 Jean Piaget
(which would mean going from the fact to the norm, or ‘psychologism’, as little
valid as the inverse movement or ‘logicism’) but with a view to its general epis-
temology. If it is the nature of logic to be a construct, it becomes difficult to inter-
pret it epistemologically as a simple language and moreover a strictly tauto-
logical one as logical positivism proposes. That is why logicians who no longer
believe this thesis or have never believed it are turning in the direction of psy-
chological or psycho-social construction of structures. It should be noted how-
ever that this is not simply a formalisation of ‘natural’ thought or logic, which
is of limited interest (except in situations where it develops specific techniques
such as that of argumentation, which has been analysed by Perelman): first
because natural logic is generally poor compared with the richness of axiomatics,
but especially because it constitutes only a highly imperfect realization of the
underlying structures. What these logicians are seeking is therefore less an
analysis of the consciousness of subjects than a study of structures, in their
filiations and formations, which then makes it possible to show the stages
whereby one arrives, starting with elementary behaviours, at the algebraic
structures of logic itself (Boolean algebra and network, etc.). This is the subject
studied by the logicians working at the International Centre of Genetic episte-
mology in Geneva: L. Apostel, S. Papert, J. B. Grize, C. Nowinski, etc.
One of the reasons why the problem of the epistemology of logic thus forms
a bridge between logic and genetic psychology, is that the latter has for years
gone out to meet problems of this kind. For it is impossible to study the devel-
opment of the intelligence from the first years of childhood to adolescence or
to the adult state without coming up against a certain number of findings which
fall within the sphere of logic. The first of these findings is that even in the
pre-language stage there exist, at the level of sensori-motor action patterns,
certain structures of interlocking, order, correspondence, etc., which prefigure
logic and display its links with the general co-ordination of action. Later we
find that by a process of successive balancings the common operations of
classification, seriation, correspondence or intersection come to constitute
(towards 7-8 years) formalisable structures halfway between ‘groups’ and ‘net-
works’, which we have called ‘groupings’. We find above all that at a third
stage (I 1-12 years) these groupings are co-ordinated simultaneously in a
quaternality group and a network of interpropositional connections. For
interdisciplinary research it is of interest to note that this ‘group’ of proposi-
tional transformations, widely studied by logicians since 1950, was discovered
in genetic psychology before it was analysed in its logistic formalisation.
Relations between logic and economics are of two kinds, thanks to the theory
of games. O n the one hand the logician may take an interest in games theory
as in any other logico-mathematical procedure in order to establish its axio-
matics. On the other hand, however, induction (in other words the full range
of inferences applied to a field of experience where contingency intervenes) is a
‘game’ between the experimenter and nature, and it is possible to conceive of a
theory of induction based on strategies and decisions. Since several authors
regard deduction as an extreme case of induction, we thus see the connexion
between logic as a whole and epistemology. There is no need to recall that this