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

General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 523
facts with zoopsychological data as to the way in which animals learn about
numbers (experiments carried out by W. Kohler and others).
Another instructive example is that of notions of space, for which we have
ample ethnographic and historical data, but again insufficient information
about the way in which they were arrived at. But in this sphere we find a some-
what paradoxical situation as regards relations between history and theory. For
the history of geometry shows that the Greeks began by systematizing the
properties of Euclidean space in a remarkable way. They also had certain
intuitions about projective space, but did not succeed in establishing an analogy
or in evolving any really topological theory. Projective geometry did not emerge
as an independent branch of science until the seventeenth century, and topology
finally came into its own in the nineteenth century - at the time when non-Eucli-
dian geometries were being discovered. But from the standpoint of theoretical
construction, topology is the starting-point of the geometrical edifice, and from
it proceed projective geometry on the one hand and general metrics on the other
(whence the differentiation between Euclidian and non-Euclidian). Now genetic
psychology and studies of perception show that natural development is actually
nearer to theory than to history, the latter having inverted the genetic order by
starting with the results and only subsequently going back to the sources (a
common proceeding, which of itself demonstrates the value of comparisons
between psychological genesis and historical evolution). For on the one hand
the study of the formation of space structures in children shows that topological
structures precede the two others and are the pre-requisite of their formation,
whilst later on projective and Euclidian structures emerge concurrently. On the
other hand, Luneburg thought he could prove that elementary perceptive space
was Riemannian and not Euclidian (perception of parallels, etc.), which is
perhaps an exaggeration, but at least appears to show that there is an undifferen-
tiated situation from which Euclidian structures are only organized secondarily.
Many other examples could be given concerning the notions of time, speed,
causality and so on, and physicists have even been known to use the findings of
psychogenesis as to the initial independence of ordinal ideas of speed as related
to duration. Thus the facts that have been ascertained, taken together, show
that interdisciplinary collaboration is possible in the sphere of the epistemology
of the human subject in general, and that this epistemology of natural thought
links up with the great problems of the epistemology of scientific knowledge.
This is a special case of the study of structures (under 1), but it has a very wide
significance.
20. Re-combination through ‘hybridization’
The foregoing considerations show that the human sciences, in so far as they
necessarily include in their field of study the subject of knowledge - the source
of the logical and mathematical structures on which indeed they depend - do
not merely maintain a set of interdisciplinary relations between one another, the
need for which we attempted to demonstrate in Parts I-IV, but are part of
an extensive circuit or network that really covers all the sciences (this was clear