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22 Jean Piaget
about it. Section v will deal with the various kinds of intellectual decentering
which can be used to solve it.
rv. Economics suffer from the same difficulties. As evidence of this, we need
only consider the extent to which Marxism regarded the classical economy as
reflecting an ideology based on class. Consequently, however accurately an
economic law reflects the observed facts, there are always grounds for question-
ing just how general it is, in view of its dependence on a relatively special
structure which the economist, if trained in it and conceiving it through in-
sufficiently decentered models, is inclined to regard as general. Fernand
Braudel, in maintaining that economics are a question of ‘all structures and all
conjunctures, and not only of material infrastructures and infraconjunctures’ -
of ‘social structures and conjunctures’ up to the level of ‘civilization’ - shows
that although metrical and statistical data are far easier to come by in economics
than in sociology, the principle underlying the epistemological problem of
deciphering experience objectively, and of interpreting it, is just as complex in
the former discipline as in the latter.
Ethnology, on the other hand, has the great advantage of dealing with
societies of which the observer is not an integral part. But the question remains
of determining what the observer, when faced with data external to himself, has
injected in the form of conceptual instruments in order to be able to structuralize
them. Even if we knew nothing of the philosophical moulding or intellectual
habits of such men as Frazer, Uvy-Bruhl and L6vi-Strauss, it would not be
altogether impossible to reconstruct them by studying what these writers had to
say on myth or on the mode of reasoning of the subjects of their inquiries. The
question then is whether Frazer’s laws of the association of ideas, the logical
relativism of Uvy-Bruhl and the structuralism of Lhi-Strauss are nearer the
subjects’ minds or those of the authors. Structuralism can immediately be seen
to fit the facts better than the other two approaches (and what is more, without
conflicting with a constructivist view which embodies the essence of Uvy-
Bruhl’s ‘pre-logic’ provided we put aside his radical heterogeneities, global
‘mentalities’ and so on, concepts which ignore the techniques). But this is not
because structuralism confines itself to copying the observed data; on the con-
trary, it integrates the facts into algebraico-logical systems which reproduce
their shape without distortion and render them acceptable to general modes of
explanation.
In linguistics, the modification of the observer by the facts he observes is
less marked, since a linguist, by profession, is a comparatist who does not
reduce everything to his own language and concerns himself with the differences
no less than with the similarities between the languages he is comparing. But
once again, this does not mean that the theory is merely a structure matching
the facts to be interpreted, because the further linguistic structuralism progress-
es, the more iirmly committed it becomes to the technique of abstract models,
which enrich the linguistic material with logico-mathematical structures.
Lastly, we have demography, which poses fewer of the specifically human
science problems of subject-object relationship than any of our other disciplines.