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

Mathematical models and methods 555
to identify certain fundamental developments in the recent history of the social
sciences.
In practice, structure is the sign that the social and human sciences have
successfully achieved a scientific approach to the analysis of systems, that is of
complex objects made up of elements whose particular features are compre-
hensible only in relation to the whole of which they are parts. Instances of
systems are organisms, personalities and societies.
It might be said that this definition of ‘system’ is so broad that almost nothing
is left which cannot be termed a system. But we should note that the scientific
achievements which served as examples to the present social sciences - the law
of falling bodies, or the law of gravitation - do not imply the system concept.
They express relations between quantities, rather than systems of relations,
whereas in the structural analysis of the marriage rules of a society, for example,
the problem is to show that each of the rules implies another, that they form a
coherent whole and that changing one of them would modify the general econ-
omy of the whole. It is the same in linguistics, in the theory of grammars, when
we seek to demonstrate that the set of grammatical rules and exceptions of a
natural language makes up a system of reciprocally implicit elements.
It can thus be said that the notion of structure reflects the importance to
social and human science of the notion of system. In the writer’s view, the
notion of structure simply designates the class of theories permitting analysis
or explanation of the interdependence of the elements of an object conceived
as a system. Again, if the notion of structure is recent, at least as a widely used
instrumentality, this means not that the concept of system is not an old one, but
that it is only of late that we have succeeded in producing theories of a scientific
character to explicate it.
In a word, the notion of structure and its relatively recent acceptance are the
sign that we have contrived to work out the beginnings of a scientific answer
for the long standing preoccupation with the analysis of systems, where formerly
that preoccupation found expression in sterile philosophic doctrines like vital-
ism, or in explications on teleological lines. The elements of the answer are to be
found in the methods of structural linguistics and anthropology, or in the
economic or sociological methods which permit of the analysis of economies
and societies in their quality of systems of interdependent elements. With these
methods, it can be said that the social and human sciences have found a middle
way between the mechanistic and the teleological explications, or more precise-
ly, that they have succeeded in explaining what on the contrary used to serve
as an explanatory law : i.e. that systems seem to be governed by final causes.
The notions of structure and structuralism are thus a sort of common denom-
inator at a fairly undifferentiated level between extremely diverse methods.
Expressing the same idea in other terms, we can say that structuralism is not so
much a method as a way of looking at things.
For this reason we shall have to refer separately to two scientific movements
where the interest is centred not on the explication and analysis of individual
systems but on systems in general. The first is cybernetics. This is the study of
automatic control systems defined by collections of variables linked by circu-