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

16 Jean Piaget
present situation as a very modest beginning in relation to the work that has still
to be performed, and to their legitimate expectations.
In addition to the difficulties shared by all experimental disciplines, the scien-
ces of man are faced with an epistemological situation and with methodological
problems which are largely peculiar to them and which must be closely examin-
ed. The difficulty is that the human sciences, whose object is manin his countless
manifestations and which are the product of man’s deliberate actions, are placed
in the special position of having man both as their subject and their object,
which naturally poses a series of specific and difficult problems.
It should, however, be pointed out at the outset that this situation is not
entirely novel and can be paralleled in the natural sciences, in which solutions
have been worked out that can sometimes be of assistance. Naturally, when
physics deal with things at our common level of observation, the object may be
regarded as relatively independent of the subject. It is true that this object can
only be known through perceptions, which have a subjective aspect, and through
calculations or metrical and logico-mathematical structurations, which are also
subjective activities. But a distinction must at once be drawn between the individ-
ual subject, centered on his sense organs or his own actions - and hence on the
ego or egocentric subject as a source of possible deformation or illusion of a
‘subjective’ type, in the basic meaning of the term - and the decentered subject
who co-ordinates his actions as between them and those of others; who meas-
ures, calculates and deduces in a way that can be generally verified and whose
epistemic activities are therefore common to all subjects, even if they are re-
placed by electronic or cybernetic machines with a built-in logical and mathemat-
ical capacity similar to that of the human brain. The whole history of physics
is about decentration, which reduced to a minimum the deformations introduced
by an egocentric subject and based this science to the maximum on the laws of an
epistemic subject - which comes back to saying that objectivity became possible
and that the object was made relatively independent of the subject.
However, on the larger scale, such as that adopted under the relativity theory,
the observer is influenced and modified by the phenomenon he observes, with
the result that what he perceives is in reality related to his particular situation,
without his being aware of it until he has undergone further decentration (for
instance, Newton regarded space-time measurements taken at our own scale as
universal). The solution then lies in decentration at higher levels, in other words
in co-ordinating the co-variations inherent in the data produced by different
hypothetical observers. On the microphysics scale, it is in fact well known that
the intervention of the experimenter modifies the observed phenomenon (a
situation reciprocal to the previous one), with the result that the ‘observable’ is
a combination including the modification introduced by the experimental activ-
ity. Here again, objectivity is possible because of co-ordinating decentrations,
which separate the invariables from the established functional variations.
The position in the sciences of man is far more complex, however, since a
subject who observes or experiments on himself or others may not only be modi-
fied by the phenomena he observes but may also generate modifications affect-
ing the progress and even the nature of those phenomena. It is because of such