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504 Jean Piaget
games has given it status under the name of ‘decision’: this is the will, the
explanation of which has never ceased to create problems and difficulties for
psychologists. Since W. James it has been generally agreed that the will is not a
simple tendency capable of isolation, unless confused with effort or intention.
The will intervenes when there is a conflict between a tendency which is judged
inferior and is momentarily the stronger (a specific desire, etc.) and a tendency
which is judged to be superior but is initially the weaker (a duty, etc.); the act of
will consists in reinforcing the latter tendency until it overcomes the former. A.
Binet concluded from this that there is a need for an additional force, and Ch.
Blonde1 suggested that this force derived from collective imperatives (a ques-
tionable solution since if such imperatives are sufficient to determine an action
there is no further need for the will, and if they are not sufficient the problem
remains intact). The solution would seem to be the following: a tendency is
neither strong nor weak in itself but only in relation to the context; so long as
that context is merely a matter of fluctuating adjustments bound up with the
perceptive existing situation, the lower tendency is likely to prevail; if the will is
interpreted as a reversible operation or as the extreme stage of normal energy
adjustments, the act of will can then be seen to consist in deflecting the subject’s
concentration from the existing situation (‘decentration’) so as to allow a return
to the permanent values of his scale. Hence having a will means being in posses-
sion of a scale of values sufficiently resistant to be referred to in the course of
conflicts. The analogy with intellectual operations (section 5) is e~ident.3~
I 3. Cybernetic circuits and economic adjustments
Values of finality play a very general part in all fields of the human sciences, but
unfortunately they are not always measurable for that reason. Values of yield,
on the other hand, are measurable by their very nature, and since economic
science is concerned with both types of values simultaneously, it is in this field
that the meaning of these two kinds of common mechanisms, active in all human
behaviour, can be most readily appreciated.
Generally speaking every value is the expression of the functioning of the
structure and every functioning is a flow subject to regulations, that term being
taken in its broadest sense to cover both the spontaneous processes of balancing
and intentional and systematic regulations such as economic regulations resulting,
for example, from a policy of stabilization or one of growth. Our problem in
this section is therefore to seek to identify the most general models of regulations
applicable to all spheres of values, and for this purpose to examine the
manner in which economists use the notions of cybernetic circuits to master
the complex systems of interactions with which they are confronted. This is not
to say, of course, that loop circuits (or feedbacks) are the result of the work of
economists; quite on the contrary, economists are only now beginning to take
an interest in the operational content of the theory of servo-mechanisms,~l not
merely as a result of intellectual inertia but owing to the difficulty of adapting
the complexity of experimental measurements to that theory. But the example