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

38 Jean Piaget
tiers, so as to erect beyond them another form of knowledge dependent only on
‘intentions’, meanings and intuitions. Between the two, however, psychology
has evolved and has become greatly enriched, to the extent that today the problem
appears in quite another light. In consequence, such problems as that of
the liberation of the logical intelligence with respect to the ‘world’ of time and
space (phenomonological ‘reduction’) are today examined in the field of the
psychology of development by verifiable methods ; while phenomenological
intuition seems to logicians even more tainted with this ‘psychologism’~4 which
had to be opposed than does the work of the psychologists themselves. In
short, if philosophical psychology of a phenomenological type could momentarily
influence some individual writers (as in the case of the founders of Gestaltpsychologie,
which incidentally took a clearly naturalistic course), it in no way
modified the major trends of contemporary scientific psychology, which has
pursued its own course of development.
6. The sciences of man, the natural sciences and the system of sciences
The relationship between the sciences of man and the natural sciences is one of
the questions most affected by ideological and even national influences. In
areas where metaphysical speculation is least indulged in, such as the Anglo-
Saxon countries and the popular republics (with due regard to the differences
which oppose empirical and dialectical trends), this problem, if raised at all, is
very much less acute: it goes without saying that psychology, for example, is
seen in these countries as belonging both to the natural sciences and to the
social disciplines. But among peoples more responsive to the lure of metaphys-
ics, such as the Germanic (apart from the Viennese with their traditional posi-
tivism) or Latin peoples, many doctrines have stressed the difference between
‘Naturwissenschaften’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, and psychology has usually
been linked with philosophy. It is interesting to note that during the social
sickness which overtook Germany until the end of the Nazi period, the con-
flict in question was worked up to a climax and that during the entire Fascist
period the teaching of psychology and scientific sociology was suspended in
German and Italian Universities (in the latter case, in spite of the very closely-
related political views held by V. Pareto) and only resumed afterwards.
I. Some support for making a distinction between the sciences of man and the
natural sciences can, of course, be found in the epistemological and methodolog-
ical difficulties stressed in 3 and 4 above. But as we have already seen, not all of
these difficulties are peculiar to the sciences of man, and the problem of ex-
perimental objectivity does not offer only two extreme solutions - depending on
whether scientific research deals with physical objects at our level or with man
in society - but opens up a whole range of successive approximations, according
as the physical phenomena are studied at different levels and in particular
according as we move from physio-chemistry to biophysics and biochemistry,
from there to the true biological disciplines, thence to psychology and finally,