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50 Jean Piaget
The second solution is that of psycho-physiological parallelism or iso-
morphism. According to this view, the consciousness and its organic concomi-
tants are the two aspects - inner and outer - of a single reality, but there is no
possible causal interaction between these aspects, which are the two possible
expressions of a single reality. We may express them in terms of idealism,
materialism or duality of nature, as we wish. This solution is logical, but the
objection to it is that we can no longer perceive the function of consciousness,
which merely accompanies certain material processes and produces nothing
itself.
We have therefore suggested a third solution. It is only an epistemological
generalization of the second, but it endows the consciousness with a cognitive
activity sui generis. If we analyse the relations between states of consciousness,
we perceive the essential fact that they are invariably due not to causality proper,
in the sense given above, but to another kind of relation, which might be called
implication in the broad sense of the term. Essentially, a state of consciousness
expresses a meaning, and one meaning is not the cause of another meaning,
but implies it (more or less logically). The concepts two and four, for instance,
are not the cause of the proposition 2+2 = 4, but they imply it of necessity,
which is not the same thing; and although we can obtain 4 from 2 and 2 on a
calculating machine, this causal product is not a state of consciousness unless
the user attributes meanings to it and expresses it in the form of conscious im-
plications. To put it briefly, consciousness, in our view, is a system of implica-
tions (between concepts, affective values and so on), and the nervous system is a
causal system, while psycho-physiologcal parallelism is a special case of iso-
morphism between the implicatory and causal systems. This restores a specific
function to consciousness16.
The duality between the facts of consciousness and those of material causality
is constantly evident in the social sciences proper, and while some sociological
systems, such as Weber’s, stress the phenomenological aspect of the former,
others, such as Marxism, do not accept explanations unless they also cover
material facts.
We have therefore reached a point, especially with Jaspers’s psycho-patho-
logical studies, at which we have two quite different broad types of interpreta-
tion - those based on the ‘understanding’ of conscious intentions and meanings,
and those based on ‘explanation’ by material causality. But although this dis-
tinction is valuable and even highly relevant, there is no fundamental opposi-
tion between the two types; we have already seen why, when discussing the
artificial conflicts that some authors have tried to create between the ‘Geistes-
wissenschaften’ and the natural sciences. In fact, if we are prepared to adopt
the hypothesis that there is a parallelism between implication and causality, in
the general sense just mentioned, we have here a case of complementarity
rather than a fundamental opposition, and this complementarity, in different
but comparable forms, recurs even in the natural sciences : whereas mathemat-
ics deal rather with implications, which must simply be ‘understood’, without
looking for any causal explanation, physics has to do with material facts, which
must be ‘explained’, and the parallelism between conceptual implication and