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

12 Jean Piaget
scientiiic spirit to all branches of knowledge. It was against this background that
Taine, for instance, attempted to base literary criticism on naturalist considerations
and wrote a work on Intelligence, which he sought to reduce to a ‘polyptree
of images’. In fact, this philosophic factor has tended more towards a
general attitude or motivation of belittlement than to detailed objective research.
On the other hand, a second factor, more or less bound up kith the
lirst in some authors but quite distinct in others, consists in the inhence of the
‘models’ used in the natural sciences, the success of which led people to wonder
whether they might not be utilized with similar good results in the sciences of
man.
The early stages of experimental psychology in the field of perception provide
a clear example. The physiology of the nervous system offers a variety of processes
in which an external stimulant triggers off a reaction; the sequences can be
analysed both qualitatively and quantitively. In cases where the reaction is
accompanied by such states of consciousness as sensations or perceptions, it
was obviously necessary to attempt an objective evaluation and to determine
the exact relationship between the physical stimulus and the way in which it was
perceived. This led to ‘psycho-physics’, many of whose results are still valid
today: a trail was blazed in the middle of the 19th century by such men as
Weber, Fechner, Helmholtz, Hering and many others, which is still not exhausted
and whose basic problem remains the co-ordination of physiology and
psychological analysis.
In the same way, Galton’s anthropometrics raised general problems of measurement
involving methods of statistical analysis and correlation, and this
effort can be taken as one of the starting points of the techniques of testing.
We shall pursue this matter no further at the present stage since section 6
below deals with the general problem of the relationship between the sciences of
man and the natural sciences. It may be noted here, however, that while the first
effects of this convergence were characterized mainly by a tendency to reduce
the new problems, the later stages in the historical development of this research
showed, first, that the use of models taken from the natural sciences in no way
precluded consideration of the specificity of higher phenomena; and secondly,
that several of the techniques developed in the field of the sciences of man had a
reverse influence on the biological and even the psycho-chemical disciplines. As
early as the 19th century, Darwin’s ideas on selection were partly suggested by
economic and demographic concepts and not just by the artificial selection
methods of stockbreeders.
IV. The essential factor in the scientific development of subjects which, like
psychology and sociology, broke away from the original common trunk of
philosophy, was the tendency towards the delimitation of problems, with the
methodological demands that this implies. Positivism considers - and this is its
chief originality - that unchanging frontiers mark the boundaries of science,
thus making it possible to distinguish by their very natures between scient&
and philosophical or metaphysical problems. In fact, an examination of histori-
cal developments leads to two sets of conclusions. The first is that these fron-