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

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 497
Certain authors have tried to reduce all economics to this question, e.g. L.
Robbins who speaks of ‘relations between rare (or limited) ends and means
with alternative uses’ (An Essay on the Significance of Economic Science, 1932)
and L. von Mises; but although economics does in certain respects constitute a
sector of praxeology, it is a sector which involves many other factors and a com-
plexity of social interactions and which cannot be reduced to these simpler rela-
tions already present in exchanges between the individual subject (or the organ-
ism itself) and his physical and inter-individual surroundings.
In order to understand the very general scope of these praxeological analyses
and their effects on the theory of values as a whole, it is necessary to start by
recalling the present state of trends as regards relations between affective life
and cognitive functions.
A highly significant fact likely to concern all the human sciences strikes us
from the outset, namely the surprising difficulty met in trying to characterize
affective life in relation to cognitive functions (insofar as these relate to struc-
tures) and especially of defining their inter-relations in the actual functioning of
behaviour. This fact immediately gives rise to the general problem as to whether
values, or at least some values, are determined by structures and in what sense,
whether these values or some of them (on the contrary or in turn) modify struc-
tures and which ones, or whether values and structures are two aspects - in-
dissociable but so to speak parallel - of all behaviours whatever they may be. It
is immediately evident that the problem goes well beyond the sphere of psy-
chology, for whereas praxeology, as the ‘general theory of effective action’
(E. Slucki as early as 1926, T. Kotarbinski 1955, 0. Lange, etc.) invokes a
‘principle of rationality’ (maximum effects with a minimum of means), that
principle concerns affective values as much as cognitive structures.
In psychology the general trend today is to distinguish in any behaviour a
structure which corresponds to its cognitive aspect and an ‘energetic’ element
which characterizes its affective aspect. But what is the meaning of this some-
what metaphorical term ‘energetic’? Freud, who was reared in the atmosphere
of the ‘energetic’ school (as opposed to atomism) of the physicist E. Mach,
himself sometimes a psychologist, saw instinct as a reserve of energies .whose
‘charges’ are stored in certain representations of objects which by that fact be-
come desirable or attractive. The terms ‘investment’ or cathexis have become
current in this connexion. K. Lewin visualizes behaviour as a function of a
total field (subject and objects) in the Gestalt manner, the structure of this
field corresponding to perceptions, acts of intelligence, etc., while its dynamics
determine functioning and eventually attribute positive or negative values to
the objects (characteristics of attraction or repulsion, barriers, etc.). But the
problem which remains is that an operational mechanism unquestionably
involves a dynamic and that it is necessary to distinguish within it the structure
of transformations as such and what makes them possible in their desirability,
interest, speed, etc.; and this second aspect brings us back to an ‘energetic’. P.
Janet distinguishes in all behaviour a primary action or relation between sub-
ject and object, which corresponds to (cognitive) structures, and a secondary
action which regulates the former as to its activations (interest, effort, etc., on