Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man: (75 Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science)

system reflected in Saussure's linguistic theory, and so influential in the great progress linguistic theory has made in this century. Indeed, Granger sees linguistic theory as expressing a paradigm for scientific theorizing, which research in other social sciences should adopt. But 'structuralism' as a method in science does not, in Granger's view, begin with Saussure and the linguists. It is nothing less than the strategy of all the sciences, both natural and social, since their beginnings. Now, 'structuralism' is a 'trendy' term no less in Anglophone methodology than in Francophone philosophy. But Granger's employment of the term is not to be assimilated to this trend, nor to the fashionable excesses for which this expression has been a watch- word (he explicitly separates himself from this movement in the preface to the second edition). The exact nature of what Granger calls 'structuralist' methods is the subject of a large part of this work, and I will not dwell on it much further in this introduction. Suffice it to say that Granger's demand for structuralist description is nothing less than the recognition that the successful pursuit of science requires that its terms and predicates pick out what we may call 'natural kinds'; that is, describe classes of items that bear uniform nomolog- ical relations to one another. A science whose descriptive terms do not meet this condition will never produce any laws that reflect such nomological connections.

Table of Contents:
I. The Problem of Forms and the Philosophy of the Sciences.- The Possibility of Science and the Fact of Science.- Perception and Science.- Linguistic Expression and Scientific Forms.- Coordination and Subordination of Forms.- A ‘Ptolemaic’ Revolution.- II. Language as a Vehicle of Information.- Rhetoric and Contents.- Epistemology, Genetic Psychology and Axiomatization.- Critique of the Notion of ‘Grouping’ as a Form of Logical Thought.- Ordinary Language and Formalized Language.- Pure Informational Language.- Semantics and Syntax.- III. Scientific Languages and Formalisms.- The ‘Mixed’ Language of Science.- The Formation of the Language of Chemistry.- Reversal of the Relations between Oral Language and Writing.- Multi-Dimensionality and Spatiality of Signs.- Semantic Polyvalence.- IV. The Découpage of Phenomena.- The Myth and the Concept.- Experienced Meanings and Scientific Objects.- Organized Practice, the Cultural Environment of the Concept.- An Example of Structural Objectivation: the ‘Wager’.- Two Apparently Opposed Movements: ‘Formalist’ Découpage and ‘Operational’ Découpage.- The Saussurian Reduction.- The Phonological Découpage.- Hierarchy of Phonological Structures.- Dynamics of Linguistic Structures.- ‘Language Engineering’.- The Theory of Queues.- Theories of Learning [apprentissage] as Dynamic Games.- V. Quality and Quantity.- Quality of the Object and Quality of the lived Experience [vécu].- Difference and Similarity.- Qualitative Responses and Information.- Probability of Response, and Division into Latent Classes.- Scaling Structure.- Search for a Metric.- The Interpretation of ‘Principal Components.’ Return to Structural Organization.- The General Theme of Linear Structures.- Disorder and Order.- Qassifications.-Linear Structures, Vectorial Spaces.- The Random Schemata.- Conclusion: Dialectic of Quality and Axiomatization.- VI. Structuring and Axiomatizing.- ‘Energetic’ Models and ‘Cybernetic’ Models.- Causality in the Models.- Meanings and Functions of Axiomatization in Mathematics.- Axiomatization in the Natural Sciences.- Axiomatization in the Sciences of Man.- The Evaluative Structure of Random Situations.- The Definition of a Norm of Decision.- Conclusions: Consciousness and Concept.- VII. The Understanding of the Individual.- The Clinical Situation and Structures in Psychoanalysis.- Diachronic and Synchronic: Personalities as Informational Systems.- Practice as Art and the Individual.- Individual and Alienation.- History as a Clinical Undertaking without Practice.- History and the Present.- Individual and Field.- Conclusions.- Postface to the English Edition (1982).- Notes.- Bibliography of Works Cited.- Index of Names.