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

n e place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 27
place these disciplines in a position somewhat similar to that occupied by the
social sciences, so that in the last analysis, the sciences of man cannot be
systematically and from the outset relegated to a position:of inferiority.
II. It remains nevertheless that the methodological problems encountered in
experimentation, measurement and the confrontation of data provided by
experiment with theoretical patterns are a source of particular difficulty as far
as the sciences of man are concerned. These problems are not, as we have just
seen, to any great extent due to the limited possibilities of experimentation, a
difficulty also encountered in certain of the natural sciences on grounds of scale
or of historical development; in principle, experimentation in the strict sense
of the term may, as we have seen, be replaced by adequate analysis of the data
provided by observation and measurement. The most serious problem - and
here the obstacles encountered by the sciences of man are comparable with
those met with in a number of biological disciplines - is that of measurement
itself, i.e. the degree of precision with which the facts determined by observa-
tion can be noted.
Measurement consists, in principle, in applying number to the discontinuous
or continuous data which are to be evaluated. And if recourse is had to number,
this is not because of the prestige of mathematics or because of some prejudice
in favour of quantity, for quantity is merely a relationship between qualities
and it is impossible to dissociate the qualitative and quantitative aspects of any
structure, even one which is purely logical.9. The instrumental value of number
derives from the fact that it constitutes a structure which is far richer than that
of its logical components: class - which is predominant in systems of classifica-
tion, and order - which is the chief characteristic of seriations. As a synthesis of
class and order, number thus offers an abundance and a mobility which make
its structures particularly useful in all matters related to comparison, i.e. cor-
respondences and isomorphisms : hence the necessity of measurement.
But the use of measurement and the application of number presuppose the
creation of ‘unities’, i.e. the casting aside of qualitative differences between a
number of elements in favour of what they have in common. Until a system of
unities has been organized, structural analysis may only be attempted along the
two complementary lines of interlocking or ordinal systems, which furnish
more or less complete substitutes, or more or less approximative measure-
ments, but fall short of exact measurement. Exact measurement only becomes
possible, in fact, in physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc., when systems of unities
have been constituted, whose intrinsic properties and whose relationships are
such that it is possible to pass from one unity to another.
The chief difficulty with the sciences of man, and indeed with all the life
sciences, as soon as group structures and not merely isolated and particular
processes are involved, lies in the absence of unities of measurement, either
because it has not yet proved possible to constitute such unities, or because the
structures in question, although quite possibly of a logico-mathematical nature
(algebraic, ordinal, topological, probabilistic, etc.), do not present specifically
numerical characteristics.