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5 I 4 Jean Piaget
But these trends in linguistic sociology have come up against a completely
different tendency. The vast logical positivism movement (developed by the
‘Vienna Circle’) has attempted, while reducing experimental truths to simple
perceived facts, to make allowance for the logico-mathematical arrangement
of knowledge, but without seeing in it a source of truth in a strict sense: it
conceived of it, in the nominalist tradition, as mere language, while characteriz-
ing this linguistic status more precisely. R. Carnap began by proposing that all
logic should be reduced to a general syntax, which the natural languages would
reflect with various degrees of faithfulness but the exact image of which would
be supplied by the formalized language of modern symbolic logic. Tarski,
followed by Carnap, then showed the need for a general semantic system or
meta-language designed to establish meanings; and finally Morris, though not
with everyone’s support, proposed the constitution of a ‘pragmatic’ system,
though purely in the sense of the establishment of the rules of such ‘languages’.
These concepts have been applauded by a number of linguists and in the
Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences Bloomfield vigorously applauds the disappear-
ance of the naive idea that concepts must still be sought beneath the logical or
mathematical liaisons : nothing exists except the observable, perceived fact
and the system of signs, whether natural (current languages) or scientific, used
to describe or connote it.
Yet this dual sociological and linguistic movement (whose unity through
convergence is, however, still remarkable, despite the wide gap between the nor-
mative realism of Durkheim and the more or less conventional nominalism of
the ‘logical empiricists’) is in fact being contested, and in senses that are again
convergent but opposed to the previous ones, by a great deal of research now
being conducted by psychologists, linguists and logicians.
On the psychological plane the author for years has been trying (and these
studies are in full swing with the co-operation of linguists) to show that the
sources of the logico-mathematical structures are to be sought at a deeper level
than language, i.e. at the level of the general co-ordination of actions. At thelevel
of sensori-motor intelligence one finds indeed, in the make-up of the patterns of
action and in the co-ordination of those patterns, structures of interlocking
elements, of order correspondence, etc., which are already of a logical nature and
which lie at the start of future thought operations. Moreover, the operations
themselves are more closely connected with the interiorization and regulating
mechanisms than with the purely verbal influences. It is not until we reach the
higher levels that a logic of ‘propositions’ becomes possible in liaison with the
handling of hypotheses enunciated verbally; whereas a whole period of ‘concrete’
operations, i.e. operations bearing directly upon the object, points to the lasting
liaison between those operations and material action.
From the linguistic point of view it then becomes possible to carry out
precise experiments on the correlations between the linguistic structure of the
verbal expressions used by the child and the latter’s operational level; the results
of those experiments tend much more to prove that the language employed is
subordinate to the operational structures than vice-~ersa.4~
As regards that interminable ‘dialogue of the deaf’ between sociologists and