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General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 52 I
behaviour, which can have considerable social significance ; it is sometimes
called ‘invention’ and sometimes ‘discovery’ in relation to logico-mathematical
structures or the structures of intelligence in general. Mathematical ‘invention’,
however, is not a ‘discovery’ (unless one is a Platonist), since it is a new combination;
the imaginary number d-1, for example, is the result of a combination,
made by Cardan, of the negative number and the extraction of the root. Nor
is it simply an invention, since once it is accomplished one must admit that it
could not have been different, and that it therefore arose of necessity from within
its own laws. It is in this third case (many examples of which are to be found
in the sphere of mental development, in the spontaneous formation of logical
structures) that synchronic re-equilibration depends closely upon previous evolution,
because diachronic constructions, even at that stage, were based on
progressive equilibration, and because the present balance is the (provisional)
termination of such a process..
V. CONCLUSION: THE SUBJECT OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES
As we saw in the ‘Introduction’, the social and human sciences have their own
series of epistemological problems. But there are two quite distinct types of ques-
tion to be considered in this connexion: questions concerning the research work-
er as such, or, in other words, those that are proper to the epistemology of his
branch of study as a particular form of scientific knowledge; and those that con-
cern the subject of study himself, who, since he is a human being, is a source of
knowledge and indeed the starting-point of all the knowledge - whether artless,
technical, scientific, etc. - available to the various societies, and which is the
origin of the human sciences. By grouping interdisciplinary problems around
realities - structures or rules, values and meanings - that are common to them
all, we have referred to the three great manifestations of the activity of this
natural subject; it remains in conclusion for us to see how the human sciences
regard this subject as a subject, for this is perhaps one of the most promising
points of convergence to be kept in mind for the future, although it has not yet
been sufficiently analysed.
19. The development of knowledge and the epistemology of the human subject
Al the social and human sciences are more or less closely concerned, in their
diachronic aspects, with the development of knowledge. The economic history
of human societies would not be complete without a history of techniques, and
the latter is of basic importance in relation to the growth of the sciences. Pre-
historical anthropology is an extension of these studies, and brings in all the
problems of the transition from behaviour involving the use of tools (which has
been studied closely among the Anthropoids) to techniques in the proper sense.
Social and cultural anthropology opens up extremely important questions
concerning the formation of group pre-logic or logic, as related to social and