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The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 23
This is because it deals with more easily quantifiable data and thus involves
feweriof those circular or dialectical situations which, although a source of
difficulty, contribute to the particular richness of the sciences of man.7
The difficulties outlined above may seem insurmountable, but a comparison
between the beginnings of scientific psychology - a discipline in which those
difficulties are especially prominent - and the flourishing science it has now
become is nothing if not reassuring. One is left wondering at the hidden means
whereby these problems, even if not fully solved, have at least been divested of
their mystery.
v. These means, although fairly simple in principle, become increasingly
complex in practice as experimentation augments in difficulty. A situation in
which the subject of a mode of acquiring knowledge is modified by the object of
his study and in turn modifies it, constitutes the prototype of a dialectical in-
teraction. There are two principal methods of approaching such interactions,
and it is precisely these two kinds of method which are normally described in
dialectical terms as well. On the one hand, the task is to clarify such interac-
tions in terms of their development, in other words to set them in a historical or
genetic context; on the other, it is to analyse them in terms of disequilibria and
restored equilibria, in other words, of auto-adjustments and causal interac-
tional circuits.
In the field of psychology, for example, the most effective method of disso-
ciation in an interpretation, or even in a descriptive analysis of facts concerning
adult behaviour or consciousness, is to trace it to its source in infancy. There are
two reasons for this. The first is that the only way to obtain a causal explana-
tion of a system of reactions is to study the way in which it was formed, since a
structure is only comprehensible through an understanding of its composition.
Even in the case of adjustments whose driving power is synchronistic, we still
need to know how they have come about; here again, the study of the process
becomes explanatory. The second reason is that in so far as a structure attrib-
uted to an adult individual can be suspected of belonging more to the observer
than to the subject of his observation, a study of the various stages of its devel-
opment furnishes a body of objective references which it is difficult to mould
deliberately in order to fit subjective theories. In other words, if the suspect
structure exists only in the mind of the theorist, it is impossible to detect traces
of its formation in the subjects at previous stages, whereas if the formative pro-
cess can be followed step by step, there is no longer any reason for doubting
the objective existence of its final outcome.8
The other method of ascertaining that this function is, in fact, being perform-
ed by a structure in the mind of the subject, and that the structure itself if not
merely a product of the observer’s own process of conceptualization, consists in
studying its effect on the subject’s pattern of behaviour or of thought. For
example, children aged seven-eight are believed to be capable of building
mental structures of the type A < B < C . . ., which are put together by a process
of trial and error. Given that logic characterizes such sequences as inter-con-
nected and transitive series of asymmetrical relations, it suffices to examine