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

34 Jean Piaget
More exactly, there are several kinds of problems, depending on whether the
ideological or philosophical currents support some one or other particular trend
in research, whether they are likely to conceal some aspect or other of the field
to be investigated, or whether they may eventually atrophy some discipline or
other by implicit or even explicit opposition to its development. The method to
be followed is therefore that of selecting some particular examples and drawing
conclusions limited to each of them individually.
I. An initial somewhat striking example is that of empirical philosophy, which
has a very lasting tradition in Anglo-Saxon ideologies, one of the present-day
sequels being the movement known as ‘logical empiricism’ or ‘positivism’. This
empirical philosophy has in fact played a not insignificant part in the formation
and development of certain aspects of the sciences of man, though imposing on
them at the same time certain orientations which other schools today find rather
restrictive.
One may certainly say in favour of empirical philosophy that it has been one
of the sources of psychology and scientific sociology, in the sense that it antici-
pated the future need for them and even contributed to their development.
Locke sought to resolve problems by basing himself on facts and not on mere
speculation, while Hume put as the sub-title of his famous treatise ‘An attempt
to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’. The
whole of Anglo-Saxon psychology was initially soaked in this kind of atmos-
phere, and the ‘English anthropological school’, with Tylor, Frazer and many
others, was also inspired by it. One cannot therefore deny that an ideological
current of this kind contributed positively to the advancement of the sciences of
man; nor ought we to neglect the contemporary contributions of logical empi-
ricism to the development of logic and of the theory of sciences.
But precisely as a philosophy or the crystallization of an ideology, empiricism
(obviously a very general term which by no means excludes countless individual
variants) in some cases has also played a directional or canalizing r61e which
psychologists, sociologists and non-empiriscist logicians could regard as restric-
tive. For empiricism does not stop at insisting on the need for experiment in all
disciplines bearing on questions of fact (psychology, etc.); everyone is agreed
on this point. It adds a particular interpretation of experience, whether that of
the scientist or that of the human subject in general (the object of the given
psychological and sociological studies), by reducing this experience to a mere
record of observable facts instead of finding there, as in other epistemologies, an
active structuration of objects, all of them related to the actions of the subject
or to his attempts at interpretation. One result of this is that, in the field of the
psychology of learning and intelligence, investigators of the empirical philo-
sophical school naturally tend to under-estimate what has been stressed by others
under the name of the subject’s actions; thus it comes about that several theories
of learning envisage the acquisition of knowledge as a kind of copy of reality
and give the major emphasis to external ‘reinforcements’ which strengthen
associations; while non-empirical theories stress the factors of internal organi-
zation and reinforcement.