Abstract

This book is not what one might expect from either the title or the author. It is not about the sociological or philosophical doctrines which are associated with the title, and although Piaget's long work in human development is the basis for the views of this book, it is not the subject matter. The book is a reflective essay on structuralism as a method, and a call for a comprehensive science of man using that method. Traditionally, "Structuralism" had both positive and negative meanings: positively it stood for the ideal of intelligibility; as a critical position it is allied with specific oppositions to a wide variety of atomisms and compartmentalizations. Piaget's characterization of "Structuralism" is deliberately broad, in order to capture the notion common to linguistic structuralism, Gestalt psychology, and the concepts of structures employed by logic, mathematics, physics, biology, and the social sciences. Minimally, a structure is a totality involving a system of laws for transformations; it is self-regulating, preserving and enriching itself through the exercise of its transformations without losing its unity or appealing to external elements. A living organism, the prototype of a structure, is simultaneously one physico-chemical system among others, and the source of its own activities. A structure can be formalized, and is adaptable to models of various sorts, logico-mathematical, cybernetic, etc., but it is independent of the theoretician's choice of the formal system in which it is expressed. When we can reduce a field of knowledge to a formalization of a self-regulating structure we will feel we are nearing the inner motive force of the system; this is what is important about structuralism, and what raises our hopes. But we are not nearly at that point. An authentic biologically-based structuralism is only beginning to take shape after centuries of either a simplifying reductionism or a vitalism more verbal than really explanatory. Piaget tells us that the comprehensive science of man which we need, based on structuralist ideals, and not recognizing separated disciplines, can only be achieved via thoroughgoing structuralist method.--M. B. M.