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

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 5 I 3
tude of meanings (space-time patterns, permanent objects, causality, etc.) which
provide the sub-structure of verbal semantics.
Furthermore, the interiorization of the sensori-motor intelligence in image
or thought is not just a matter of language but of the entire semeiotic function.
In this respect psycho-pathological data are of great interest and much is
still awaited from co-operation between linguists, psychologists and neurologists.
Without going into the highly complex problem of aphasia, on which
much work is still being done but which has so many neurological incidences
that the language and thought factors cannot easily be isolated, it is interesting
merely to note the case of children deaf-and-dumb, or blind, from birth, but
otherwise normal. Among the former there is, of course, some delay in the
development of the intellectual operations as compared with children capable
of speech, but the fundamental Operations of classification, seriation, correspondence,
etc., are not missing at all up to a certain level of complexity, which
testifies to a pre-speech organization of those acti0ns.3~ Among blind children,
on the other hand, the delay appears to be greater because of the lack of a sensorimotor
control during the formation of the action patterns, and although
language makes good that lack to some extent, it is not enough to replace
general co-ordinations and depend upon the latter while their build-up is
necessarily retarded.
I 6. Linguistic structures and logical structures
The links between linguistics and logic are of unquestioned importance and are
still in process of fdl development, particularly as they impact upon longstanding
arguments between psychologists and sociologists.
This, it should first be noted, is no accident. The convergence between the
basic ideas of a linguistic doctrine like F. de Saussure’s and a sociological
theory like Durkheim’s is quite remarkable : language is a collective ‘institution’
transmitted from the outside and imposing itself upon individuals; any innovations
made by the latter must accord with common rules established before them,
and their initiatives are subject to the approval of the linguistic group, which
may reject or accept them, but in the latter case only because of needs related
to the overall equilibrium of the system, etc. Now Durkheim drew from his
ideas on the social totality the conclusion that the rules of logic are imposed by
the group upon the individual, in particular through language, the shaper of
intelligences and the holder of structures which are imposed from childhood
through education.
Current trends in social and cultural anthropology are moving in the same
direction, and we all know how much the structuralism of L6vi-Strauss has been
influenced by Saussurian linguistics and by phonology (Troubetskoy and Jakobson),
in that the system of meanings seems to him to throw light both on the
economic exchanges of tribal societies and on the relations of kinship, the latter
comprising a logic that is at one and the same time collective and a source of
individual manipulations (hence his opposition to LBvy-Bruhl’s pre-logic which
Durkheim also contested for similar reasons).