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The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 17
situations that the fact of the observer being both object and subject creates
additional difficulties in the case of the sciences of man by comparison with the
natural sciences, in which the problem is generally that of dissociating subject
and object. In other words, the centrifugal movement required to ensure objec-
tivity is far harder to achieve where the object is composed of subjects. There are
two reasons for this, both fairly systematic. The first is that the dividing line
between the egocentric subject and the observed subject loses in definition as the
observer’s ego becomes involved in phenomena which he ought to be able to
examine from a detached standpoint. The second reason is that the more ‘in-
volved‘ the observer becomes and the more he attributes values to the facts he
is studying, the more he is inclined to believe that he knows them intuitively and
the less he feels a need for objective techniques.
Moreover, even though biology provides a series of transitional states between
the behaviour of elementary organisms and that of man, the latter exhibits
various specific characteristics distinguished by the formation of collective
cultures and the use of highly differentiated symptomatic or symbolic instru-
ments (the ‘language’ of bees being nothing more than a system of sensorimotor
indices). Consequently, the object of the human sciences, which thus become a
subject, differs fundamentally from the bodies and blind forces which constitute
the object of the physical sciences, and even from the object-subjects of biologi-
cal and ethological study. The difference, of course, is in the object’s degree of
consciousness, which is accentuated by the use of semiotic instruments. These,
however, pose a further epistemological difficulty peculiar to the sciences of
man : as means of communication, they often differ considerably fromone human
society to another; as a result, the psychologist or sociologist subject-observer
is constantly obliged to verify whether his understanding is in fact ‘deep’ enough
for him to grasp the details of the symbolic structure of cultures remote from
his own in space and time. He will even find himself asking whether man’s psy-
cho-physiological characteristics may not be modified by a process of feedback
from his semiotic instruments, and if so, to what extent. New disciplines such as
A. Luria’s neuro-linguistics raise problems of this kind. In short, the central
epistemological problem in the human sciences, namely the individual being
both subject and object, is aggravated by the fact that the object in turn is a con-
scious subject endowed with speech and multiple symbolisms ; this makes ob-
jectivity and its prerequisites of decentration all the harder to achieve and
often all the more limited.
11. To begin with psychology, the various aspects of the circular relationship
between the subject and the object and the difficulties of decentration find
their maxirnuni expression in the process of introspection - hence the variety of
methods which have been adopted to overcome the basic obstacles either by
going round them, at the risk of overlooking the essentials, or by treating
them as problems in which the distortions caused by centration are studied as
phenomenological indicators of the mechanisms of mental life itself.
In the pure form of introspection, a given individual is both an inquiringsub-
ject and the object of his inquiry. This being so, the subject is first of all modified