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492 Jean Piaget
The fact remains that structures and rules develop, that they were formed
little by little, and that even in the case of progressively acquired stability new
structures or norms can modify the meaning of preceding ones to a more or
less deep extent, even if they do not replace them. W e are thus confronted with a
new major problem of interdisciplinary comparison, that of the uniformity or
variety of relations between diachronic and synchronic factors depending on
different types of structures or norms.2z
Taking logical norms first, these may appear to constitute the prototype of
unchangeable structures since a variety of philosophers from Plato to Husserl
have linked them with Ideas, apriori forms or eternal or at least timeless funda-
mentals. A. Comte, one of the precursors or founders of scientific sociology,
described the development of fundamental concepts in his Law of the Three
States (whose value we are not called upon to discuss here), but maintained
that this development concerned only the content of human reason whilst its
forms, in other words the actual processes of reasoning or ‘natural logic’,
remained invariable. A trend which is fairly general today, due to the history of
sciences and techniques, to work on comparative sociology and on genetic
psychology and especially to the evolutionist viewpoints which are now domi-
nant in ethologyand zoopsychology, leads us to think on the contrary that reason
was built up by stages and continues to evolve, not without reason or reasons
but in such a manner that not only is the evidence transformed but even that
which appears logically demonstrated or rigorous at a given stage may sub-
sequently appear doubtful and may give rise to considerably greater degrees of
rigour.
On the other hand, if reason evolves, the progressive constructs to which it
may give rise constitute an extremely remarkable type of development in the
sense that the previous structures are not set aside or destroyed but are integrat-
ed in the subsequent ones as specific casesvalid in a certain sector or at a certain
scale of approximation. The same is not true of the experimental sciences,
starting with physics where a theory can be contradicted by another or retain
only a limited degree of truth. But in the field of logico-mathematical structures
no structure which has been demonstrated as valid at a moment in history is
subsequently abandoned, the error consisting merely in believing it to be unique
and in that sense necessary, whereas later it becomes the sub-structure of a
richer and broader whole. From the point of view of relations between the
diachronic and the synchronic we thus have here an exceptional situation in
which the existing equilibrium appears as the product of a historical process of
more or less continuous balancing (crises or momentary imbalances being no
more than crises of growth or break-throughs to new problems).
If we compare this situation with that of a system of legal norms, the contrast
is striking. A well-made system of such norms does, of course, provide for its
own modification in the sense that as soon as a constitution exists, and at every
stage of normative construction provided and implied by it, there is a possibility
of revision or modification. In a certain sense therefore there is continuity in
normative creation, and in this respect we find here the connexion between the
diachronic and the synchronic which is peculiar to systems of rules as opposed