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

The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 53
differences rather than the similarities between research workers in order to get
the most out of a new methodology. Since then, however, positions have become
more flexible, and the very fact that the ‘behaviour theory’, as it is called today,
has the allegiance of the vast majority of research workers shows that it covers
a wide range of possible shades of opinion, so that it is no longer correct to
speak of it as a ‘school’ in the proper sense of the term. As we have seen above,
when Tolman, for instance, says that ‘expectation’ is one of the basic factors
of the learning process, it is difficult to see how this notion differs from mentalist
concepts. On the other hand, when Skinner declines to have recourse to intermediate
variables, and regards the human organism as an ‘empty box’ of which
nothing is known except its inputs and outputs, he is applying the behaviourist
rules strictly, but he is doing so from methodological prudence, and not necessarily
any longer from an esprit d’tfcole; for he knows well that the research work
of the future wil move in the direction of filling this ‘box’ with both physiological
and psychological elements.
An even simpler way in which a ‘school’ may be formed is by isolation (which
is sociologically comparable to the biological factor which produces new species
on islands lying at a distance from any continent). A mechanism of this kind can
be seen at work in contemporary research in social psychology. This branch of
psychology arose from the discovery of new and entirely legitimate problems -
the problem of the possible effect of group interaction on mental functions
which at first glance appear to be independent of it (perception, etc.); or the
problem of the dynamics of interactions in small social groups, for instance.
But while the best writers on social psychology are closely in touch with research
work in experimental psychology in general, and so produce some very valuable
syntheses (cf. a recent work by R. Brown entitled Social Psychology), many
‘social psychologists’ immure themselves totally within their own chosen ground.
In such cases, scientific specialization is likely to be accompanied by the formation
of a ‘school’, which is the product of an ordinary psycho-sociological artefact.
n. Whereas the emergence of schools in this way usually has the effect of in-
creasing specialization, although as a result of the impact of more or less extra-
scientific factors, the opposite may also happen - some schools may aspire to
greater integration than that achieved by spontaneous intra- or inter-discipli-
nary co-ordination. They may succeed to some extent, but once again, out of pure
esprit &&ole, they oppose other possible integrations, which might have been
more natural in some cases and more comprehensive in every case.
Once more we may take as an example the logical positivism that issued from
the ‘Vienna circle’ (in which the psycho-sociological factor is fairly clear, for the
Viennese have always had a special talent for organizing this sort of intellec-
tual society). In this case the goal of the school is explicitly ‘the unity of science’,
an ideal that recurs in the title of the Encyclopaedia for Unified Science and in
that of the Institute that Ph. Frank established at Harvard; and this unity is
sought by reducing scientific data either to observable facts ascertained per-
ceptively, or to the formulation of an accurate vocabulary, that of logic and