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

5 I 6 Jean Piaget
systems capable of taking account of the self-correction proper to logical
mechanisms. N ow cybernetics, which can supply such models, is a synthesis
of the information or communication theories and of the guiding or regulatory
theories. It is thus on this two-fold plane that a more natural relationship than
a simple and straightforward assimilation can be established between linguistics
and logic. On the one hand language is information, and various relationships
are conceivable between the praxeological aspects of the codes and their logical
structure. It was along these lines that L. Apostel studied language as a system
for the pre-correction of errors. Again, logical operations constitute the extreme
case of thought regulation, and there can be many intermediate stages, capable
of influencing the language, between the weakest forms of such regulation and
the strictest or operational forms. It can thus be seen how interdisciplinary
research, in this field also, is both necessary and promising.
17. The higher symbolisms
The general semeiology advocated by F. de Saussure provides, as we saw in
section 15, for systematic comparisons between the sign systems and various
symbolisms or signallings inferior in nature to articulated language. But it also
presupposes comparisons with what could be called symbolisms to the second
power, or of a nature superior to language, that is to say using language but
constituting ‘signifants’ whose collective meanings are ideological and situated
on a different scale than verbal semantics: such, for example, are the myths
folklore stories, etc., which are conveyed through language but each of which is
itself a symbol with a religious or affective meaning conforming to very general
semantic laws, as their surprising and frequently intercontinental dissemination
shows.
However, the problem is not an easy one to master or even to set. In a nomi-
nalistic conception of logic and mathematics, it could be said that any concept
or particular structure is still a sign which symbolizes, together with but in
addition to the words designating it, the objects to which it applies: thus the
notion of a mathematical ‘group’ would merely be a higher symbol whose
meaning would be reduced to the different displacements, physical states, etc.,
which can be described by it. In the operative sense, on the other hand, the
‘group’ or any other logical or mathematical concept constitutes a system of
actions impacting on the real, which are true actions even though interiorized
and which would therefore have nothing symbolic in themselves, the symbolism
coming in the arbitrary signs designating the operations but not in the opera-
tions as such.
If this latter interpretation is accepted, not all thought is necessarily symbolic,
but symbolism reappears in all forms of thought whose value is not linked to
its operative structure but to its affective content, conscious or unconscious:
in such an interpretation there is nonetheless an immense field of human produc-
tions, with the more or less individual ‘symbolic thought’ studied by the psycho-
analysts of different schools, the mythological and folklore symbols, the art