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

524 Jean Piaget
in any case owing to their relations with biology; cf. section 2). It was essential to
recall this so as to be able to shape our conclusions in such a way that they
might succeed in revealing the true significance of interdisciplinary relations.
For their significance far exceeds that of a mere tool for facilitating work,
which is all they would amount to if used solely in a common exploration of the
boundaries of knowledge. This way of viewing collaboration between specialists
in different branches of knowledge would be the only possible one if we admitted
a thesis to which far too many research workers still unwittingly cling - that
the frontiers of each branch of science are fixed once and for all, and that they
will inevitably remain so in the future. But the main object of a work such as
this, a work that deals with trends and not with results, with the perspectives
and the prospective study of the human sciences and not merely with their present
state, is rather to make clear that in fact the object of any innovatory trend
is to push back the frontiers horizontally and to challenge them transversally.
The true object of interdisciplinary research, therefore, is to reshape or reorganize
the fields of knowledge by means of exchanges which are in fact constructive
recombinations.
Indeed, one of the most striking features of the scientific movements of
recent years is the increased number of new branches of knowledge born precisely
from the union of neighbouring fields of study, but in fact adopting new
goals that impact upon the parent sciences and enrich them. We might speak
of a sort of ‘hybridization’ between two fields of study that were originally
heterogeneous, but the metaphor is meaningless unless the term ‘hybrid‘ is
understood not in the meaning it had in classical biology fifty years ago, when
hybrids were thought of as infertile, or at least impure, but as the ‘genetic recombinations’
of contemporary biology, which prove more balanced and better
adapted than pure genotypes, and which are gradually replacing mutations in
our conceptions of the mechanism of evolution. There are many fruitful hybridizations
in the natural sciences, from topological algebra to bi ophysics
biochemistry and the young science of quantum biophysics. A movement of
much smaller scope but comparable in spirit has produced several new branches
of study in the sciences of man and we may by way of conclusion describe these
hybridizations, trying to bring out their productive significance for the parent
sciences from which they sprang.
Those branches of knowledge which have come into being simply through the
refinement of mathematical or statistical methods and through being more
closely synthesized with experimentation should not be classified amongst these
new branches of knowledge born of re-combinations. Econometry, for instance,
may in one sense enrich mathematics, but solely because of the problems it produces
for mathematics to solve. The games theory was known to Emile Bore1
(1921-1927) quite apart from its applications to economics, and the mathematician
Von Neumann’s general theorem (minimum maximorurn) dates from 1928,
whereas his collaboration with the economist Morgenstern dates from 1937.
Nevertheless, as we have seen, the study of economic behaviour has established
valuable links with psychology and other sciences, and there is no need to mention
the numerous other applications of the games theory.