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

The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 51
materialcausality is therefore so close that causal or explanatory models establish
an increasingly close relationship between implicative and material sequences.
Very broadly speaking, the sciences of man are moving in a similar direction;
in other words, they are all trying to understand and to explain, but not to
understand without explaining or to explain without understanding.
There are many other questions that could well be dealt with in this section
on the main trends in the theory of the sciences of man, but we can come back
to them in the chapter on their common mechanisms (Chapter VII).
8. Specialization and integration; basic research and applications
Progress in any field of study is obviously a matter of differentiating between
problems and theories and of establishing integrating relationships within the
field of study or between it and other closely related disciplines. But this spon-
taneous development, which seems almost biological and is the direct result of
the laws of structuration applicable to intelligence in its intra- and inter-indi-
vidual operations, becomes complicated owing to numerous sociological and
sometimes even ideological factors, not to speak of epistemological considera-
tions, which are usually bound up with the spontaneous trends of evolving
science but which may act as special factors, either accelerating or hindering
progress.
I. The general sociological factor which complicates the natural specialization
process in the sciences of man and often produces marked hindrances instead of
advantages, is the creation of ‘schools’ in the true meaning of the term, within
the disciplines themselves, with the inevitable isolation and danger of dogma-
tism.
This phenomenon is probably peculiar to the sciences of man, for what we
have also referred to as ‘schools’ in the natural sciences are rather trends of
thought connected with positions that are opposed so long as experimentation
or deduction has not ended the debate. For example, the conflict between
energeticists and atomists in physics at the end of the nineteenth century was an
epistemological dispute rather than a war of schools, and the new facts dis-
covered since then have united every shade of opinion. It is true that we speak of
the Copenhagen school and the Paris school in contemporary microphysics,
because of the great names of Niels Bohr and L. de Broglie, but the discussion
as to whether the accidental is primary or derivatory in nature, and whether
an underlying determinism is impossible or in fact exists, is one of those dis-
cussions that are the result of a variety of legitimate interpretations awaiting
ultimate agreement.
In the case of the sciences of man, the ideologies themselves imply the exist-
ence of opposing schools, which is perfectly natural, and often leads to fruitful
discussion. We need not go back over this, but it should be noted that the
phenomenon is sometimes much more widespread, and that specialization by
schools still occurs at a much lower level than that of the great ideological con-
flicts. It may be useful, therefore, to give one or two examples, which we shall