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

20 Jean Piaget
elapsed - by restoring the perception of time to a context of kinematic adjust-
ments of action, and so forth. In short, in many fields, the facts of consciousness,
the capacity for distortion and the efficiency of which are both so puzzling,
yield an interpretation immediately the distortion becomes a problem in itself
and the facts requiring explanation can be seen in a decentered context. As we
shall see in section v, it is this approach which enables the psychological subject
to dissociate himself from the human subject which he is investigating as an
object (it remains to be seen how he is able to do so).
HI. Sociology poses an even more acute epistemological problem than psychol-
ogy, because its object is not merely an individual subject which is external,
although analogous, to the psychological subject, but also a collective ‘we’
which is all the more difficult to identify objectively because the sociological
subject forms part of it, either directly or indirectly (in this case through other
similar or rival communities). In such a situation, the sociologist himself is
constantly modified by the object of his research; this is so from birth onwards,
since he is the product of a continuous educative and social process. Far from
being an intellectual conjecture, we can point to precise examples. For instance,
we know that the many political comments with which Pareto embellished his
famous Tratto di sociologia genevale, and which he somewhat ingenuously
regarded as evidence of his scientific objectivity, were due to an attitude acquired
from reacting against a father of progressive convictions. We have here an
example both of the difficulty of avoiding ideological influences when dealing
with sociology, and of a conflict between generations which is not only Freudian
but also related to certain social environments concerned with ideas as much as
with affective problems.
Conversely, the sociologist modifies the facts he observes. It is not that he
behaves like the psychologist, who experiments in ways which put the subject
in positions unfamiliar to him and thereby partly transform his behaviour -
one cannot experiment on society as a whole. But precisely in so far as sociology
aims at grasping that whole and goes beyond microsociological analyses of
particular relationships, such a problem - and this is true of microsociological
research itself - can only be solved by reference to theoretical or operational
concepts, either metasociological or concerned with the facts as such, which
involve a certain carving up of reality and in particular an active structuration
on the part of the investigator. This structuration naturally forces the facts
into moulds - moulds either made for the purpose or borrowed from other dis-
ciplines, but with a very variable capacity for objectivization, i.e. for faithfully
reflecting the structures of reality or, on the other hand, for distortion or
involuntary selection. Let us remember, however, and this will recall that the
epistemological problem of sociology is far from insoluble, that this active
structuration of reality is inherent in all experimental research, physical, biolog-
ical or sociological, since however accurately experience may be interpreted,
the process cannot take place outside a logico-mathematical framework; the
richer the’ framework, the more objective the interpretation. Thus a simple
act like reading a temperature on a thermometer involves not only the move-