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494 Jean Piaget
maintained long ago that ‘the function creates the organ’, whereas the neo-
Darwinian theory of fortuitous variations and of selection after the event tended
to deprive Lamarck‘s formulation of any significant content; but the contem-
porary views according to which the phenotype is a ‘response’ of the genome
to the tensions of the environment tend to go beyond both terms of the alterna-
tive by creating a new synthesis. In the psychological and social disciplines the
conflict is equally general between a functionalism some of whose adherents
see in the ‘structures underlying the observables’ no more than simple abstrac-
tions created by theoreticians, and a structuralism some of whose adepts
regard the functional aspects of behaviour as secondary characteristics without
explicative meaning. It is therefore a major interdisciplinary problem to identify
the common mechanisms which might be capable of co-ordinating functions
and structures in all human behaviour. This problem naturally leads to that of
utility or values as objective or subjective indices of functioning, and also to the
problem of the possibility of a general theory of values based not on a priori
reflation but on possible convergences that may emerge from mutual con-
nexions between research in all our fields.
IO. Functioning and functions. Aflectivity and praxeology
We must first ask ourselves whether the conflicts between functionalism and
structuralism do not in part stem from too narrow a conception of structures
which emphasises only their characteristics of totality and internal transfor-
mations but overlooks their essential property of self-adjustment. For if this
property is neglected, the structure takes on a static aspect which devalorises
functioning, thus giving the impression that with structure one has established
a kind of permanent ‘entity’ related to the unchangeable properties of the
human spirit or of society in general. Hence the scepticism of functionalists
vis-&-vis such a hypothesis, which can in effect lead to anti-functionalism.
But if one distinguishes between formal or formalized structures whose ad-
justment is due to the axioms conferred upon them by theoreticians, and real
structures which exist independently from theory, it is necessary to ask how
structures are conserved and how they act, which comes down to raising the
question of their functioning. Their self-adjustment can in some cases be
assured by rules or norms, as we have seen under II, but then these rules already
represent a function, that of maintaining the integrity of the structure by a
system of constraints or obligations. On the other hand it may be that the struc-
ture is not completed; in its formative stages its self-adjustment will of course
not as yet imply a system of rules but a self-regulation whose functioning may
involve multiple variants. In particular it may happen that a structure is not
capable of ‘closure’ but depends on continual exchanges with the exterior (see
section 3). It is in such situations that functions are distinct from structures
and that functionalist analysis becomes necessary to such a point that its par-
tisans sometimes forget that it is difficult to conceive of functions without organs
or overall structure.