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General problems of interdisciplinary research and common mechanisms 527
this fact the observer merely notes it without himself adopting any position normatively,
i.e. without evaluating the norm of the subject under study.
16. This example is already quoted in the ‘Introduction’, 3, IV but from a different
point of view.
17. The r6le of language in colour perception has been studied but the effect is arguable.
Bruner and Postman’s celebrated experiments on estimations of the diameter
of a dollar coin or of any disc, varying with the subject’s economic level, have
not been generally confirmed and are moreover open to other interpretations
(centration effects) in those cases where they may possibly have been verified.
18. Exception should be made for N. Chomsky who believes that grammars have an
‘innate fixed nucleus’; but one is entitled to wonder from the psychological point
of view whether the rational fixed nucleus does not result from the balancing of the
sensori-motor mechanisms whose constitution precedes language and is only
partially programmed by heredity.
19. Cf. the problem of ‘r61e conflicts’ (N. Gross, etc.).
20. Cf. inter alia ‘La theorie de l’argumentation. Perspectives et applications’, Logique et
Analyse, nos. 21 to 24, 1963.
21. We should mention the important and still lively movement created by Petrazycki,
to which we shall refer in section 12.
22. This problem coincides with one of the aspects of the question of relations between
logic and history as they are formulated in Marxist literature: the relation of historical
continuity in the formation of a system with structural dependence within the
system under consideration (this as a reaction against the ‘unhistorical’ approach
still so frequent in certain disciplines).
23. Cf. inter alia the collective work edited by T. PARSONS and E. SHILS, Toward a Theory
ofAction, in which a number of ethnologists, sociologists and psychologists collaborated.
Cf. also the comparative essay by Clyde Kluckhohn defining the r6le of
the notion of value in various disciplines (as well as the many definitions proposed
by the authors).
24. In the present-day mathematical sense function is defined as an ‘application’ or an
oriented couple, which psychologically makes its origin go back to the general
patterns of action. Cf. Episte‘mologie et psychologie de la fonction, Etudes d’Epist6mologie
gknetique, vol. XXIII.
25. Mention should also be made of the conception of ‘systems’ of a group of researchers
from the Case Institute of Technologyin Ohio (M. Mezarovitch, R. Akkof, D.
Fleming, etc.), the theory of systems developed by L. Zade (a much wider class essentially
of a technical nature), the conception of 0. Lange, and the numerous works
of theoretical research in relation with ‘man-machine’ systems (e.g. within the
framework of the System Development Corporation of California).
26. This does not mean that the translation of processes into cybernetic language automatically
allows the mathematization which might be hoped for from that language;
however, the fact that questions are formulated in qualitative terms of
interactions may in itself constitute an advance because it means a liberation from
one-way forms of causality.
27. pathology is not merely a matter of affective aspects. Let us make clear that while
affectivity as energetic functioning can naturally be the cause of accelerations or
retardations in the formation of structures (since energy affects speed among other
things), this does not mean that it intervenes causally in the structure as such, or
vice versa.
28. Cf. primary and secondary utility as distinguished in section 3.
29. See J. PIAGET, Etudes sociologiques, Droz, 1965, pp. 100-142.
30. It is not within the scope of this chapter to discuss the general problem of measurement.
In section 4 of the ‘Introduction’ we stressed the absence in the human
sciences of units comparable to those available in physics. In the sphere of values the
difficulty is overcome by the establishment of various scales (ordinal, superordinal,
etc.), examples of which may be found in Variations in Value Orientations by F. R.