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

The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 29
that of a journey.” What is more - much more - the measurement of a resultant
tells us nothing yet about the inner mechanisms of the observed reaction, and
it is precisely those mechanisms which should be measured. It is, of course,
possible to arrive - through a system of correlation raised to the second power -
at a so-called factorial analysis, but we know neither the nature of the ‘factors’
thus disclosed nor their mode of action, so that they remain in fact entirely related
to the tests utilized, and thus to theresultants or performances, and bear no
direct relationship to the formative mechanisms. Briefly, then, the metrical
procedures of psychology do provide data which are useful in the step-by-step
comparison of details concerning the results of various mental operations, but
because of the absence of any system of units permitting the passage from
effects back to the causal mechanism, those operations remain inaccessible.
But the situation is by no means hopeless, or even disquieting, for there are
other logico-mathematical structures besides those which are numerical or
metric, and whilst number may be a particularly practical tool in processes of
comparison, there are many other forms of isomorphism besides numerical
correspondence. The difficulty in creating systems of units may thus spring
from the nature of the biological, mental or biological-mental structures themselves,
in which case such structures might lend themselves to topological or
qualitative algebraic treatment, rather than to processes involving numerical
‘groups’, ‘rings’, or ‘bodies’. Philosophers have often speculated on this resistance
to measurement in psychology. Psychologists, more prudently, in the
first place refuse to consider the matter as settled, and in the meantime make use
of broader and more flexible logico-mathematical instruments and structures,
ranging from one extreme (the many probabilistic models) to the other (the models
of algebraic logic) without, of course, neglecting cybernetic models. Thus,
in the sphere of intelligence, qualitative algebraic structures permit the description
of operations themselves and not merely of their products and resultants -
which are all that can be measured at the present time. Moreover, these operations
may be analysed as perfectly-balanced products of numerous genetically
anterior determinations which then derive from cybernetic models (including
those related to the theory of decisions or the theory of games). In all questions
of development, where measurement, properly speaking, is of no assistance, at
least at the present time, it is still possible to turn for assistance to scales of
hierarchic ordination (such as those of Guttman); and Suppes has described a
whole range of scales between nominal and metrical classification : mention
may be made in particular of ‘hyperordinal’ scales, where intervals between one
value and the next cannot be reduced to unitary factors (equivalent between
themselves), but may already be evaluated as greater or lesser than one another.
Thanks to these different models, psychology, even though it has not yet
overcome the problem of measurement in the sense of an absolute reduction to
number and to unit systems, is in possession of statistical data and of qualitative
logico-mathematical structures which are sufficient to permit, in many cases, a
certain degree of prediction of phenomena (for example in the fields of perception
and intelligence) and in particular the beginning of some form of explanation
(see below, under 7).