The Quest For Mind

The Quest for Mind
Piaget, Levi-Strauss, and the Structuralist Movement
Howard Gardner
Copyright © 1979 Howard Gardner
Orig. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
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For Judy
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Part I A New Approach to Social Sciences

1. A New Development in the Social Sciences
2. The French Intellectual Tradition and the Roots of Structuralism: A

Structural-Developmental Analysis
Part II The Architects of Structuralism

3. Piaget
4. Levi-Strauss
Part III An Assessment of Structuralism: Problems and Prospects

5. The Relationship Between Two Varieties of Structuralism
6. Structuralism as a World-View
Appendix & References

Genesis
References
About the Author
The Quest for Mind 5

Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use
the material indicated:
Philosophical Library, Inc., for material from H. Bergson, An Introduction

to Metaphysics, Littlefield Adams, New Jersey, 1965.
William Morrow and Co., for material from M. Mead, Sex and
Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, William Morrow, New York, 1955.
Harper and Row, Publishers, for material from C. Levi-Strauss, The Raw
and the Cooked, Harper and Row, New York, 1969.
Simon and Schuster, Inc., for material from Knowledge Among Men,
Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966.
W. W. Norton and Co., for material from J. B. Watson, Behaviorism, New
York, 1930; J. Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence, New York,1963.
Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, for material from J. Piaget, Structuralism,
translated and edited by Chaninah Maschler, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers,

New York, 1970; from B.Inhelder and J. Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking
from Childhood to Adolescence: An Essay on the Construction of Formal
Operational Structures, translated by Anne Parsons and Stanley Milgram,
www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 6
Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1958; from J. Piaget, The Construction
of Reality in the Child, translated by Margaret Cook, Basic Books, Inc.,
Publishers, New York, 1954.
The New York Times, for material from "There Are No Superior
Societies,” S. de Gramont, The New York Times Magazine, 1968, Copyright by
The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.
Dover Publications, for reproduction of a figure (p 225) from Primitive
Art by F. Boas, Dover Publications, New York, 1955.
E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., for material from Bronislaw Malinowski,
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, New York, 1964. Published by E. P. Dutton
and Co., and used with their permission.
Humanities Press, Inc., and Routledge and Kegan Paul for material from
J. Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, Littlefield Adams, New Jersey,
1964; J. Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, Littlefield Adams, New
Jersey, 1965; J. Piaget, Language and Thought of the Child, World Publishing
Co., Cleveland, 1963.
University of Chicago Press and George Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd.,
for material from C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago

Press, Chicago, 1966.

Georges Borchardt, Inc., for material from C. Levi-Strauss, Tristes
Tropiques, Atheneum, New York, 1964.
The Free Press, Macmillan Co., and Routledge and Kegan Paul, for
material from M. Mauss, The Gift, W.W. Norton, New York, 1967.
Professor Roman Jakobson for material from his book Child Language
Aphasia and Phonological Universals, Mouton, The Hague, 1968.
The New York Academy of Sciences and Professor Edmund Leach, for
material and a diagram adapted from E. Leach, "Levi-Strauss in the Garden of
Eden,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II, Vol. XXIII,
No. 4.
Social Research (New York), for material adapted from "Piaget and Levi-
Strauss: The Quest for Mind,” Vol. 37 (1970), 348-65.
Semiotica and Mouton and Co., Publishers (The Hague), for material
adapted from “The Structural Analysis of Protocols and Myths,’’ Vol. 5 (1972),
31-57.
The Human Context(London), for material adapted from “Structure and
Development,’’ 1972, in press.
Preface
Six years ago, I attended Professor Claude Levi-Strauss’s memorable
Huxley Lecture on kinship study, and shortly thereafter, I witnessed Professor
Jean Piaget leading a provocative seminar on the biology of knowledge.
Curiosity brought me to these events, for, though aware of their eminence in

the social sciences, I had not read a word by either man. Whether it was the
ideas or the remarkable personalities of these two savants which most
affected me I no longer recall, but I was sufficiently motivated to pick up

several of their books. Much of the argument remained obscure upon initial
reading; but I was left with a strong impression that something important
was being said. As a result, in the ensuing months, I dipped repeatedly into
their volumes. And in recent years, while pursuing graduate studies in social
relations, I have read through and re-read the major writings of both men, as
well as many of their less-known works. I have audited courses which treated
each thinker and have assigned their writings in my own classes. Through
these efforts to enhance my own understanding of structuralism and to

convey that understanding to others, I became convinced that their
approaches are not readily assimilated and that there are few useful guides to
their works. I came as well to two further conclusions: Piaget and Levi-
Strauss are embarked on parallel scientific enterprises; and their work
represents the most significant contemporary innovation in the sciences of
man. A growing desire to present the ideas of the two men, to specify

previously unnoticed areas of common ground, and to describe the
importance and promise of the structuralist movement which they have
launched, has prompted me to write this book.
As an audience I have in mind students and laymen interested in issues
investigated by social scientists and in current developments in intellectual

history. I have placed references, technical material, and detailed notes on
certain problems in a separate section at the end of the book. Scholars
steeped in the writings of structuralism may find my historical introduction
somewhat oversimplified and my descriptions of the work of Piaget and Levi-

Strauss insufficiently critical. Though I do have my own misgivings about
structuralism, I have consigned these to the concluding chapters and have
otherwise accentuated the positive in my exposition. Yet I am bold enough to

hope that the critique and the synthesis attempted in the final chapters will
be of equal interest to those who have never heard of structuralism and to
those who regard structuralism as an old (and maybe even dirty) word.
I have been helped by a number of people in my efforts to penetrate the
mysteries of structuralism. Special thanks are due Professors Hans Furthand
Peter Riviere, each of whose lectures I attended and each of whom

commented on an earlier draft of the present work. Other patient and
insightful readers were Barbara Leondar, Tom Considine, my editor Dan

Okrent, my copy editor Melvin Rosenthal, and my wife Judy. William Lohman
gave painstaking assistance in the preparation of the final manuscript. I owe
an especially memorable debt to Professors Levi-Strauss and Piaget
themselves, who encouraged this project from its inception, took time to
discuss a number of perplexing issues with me, and have inspired me in my

work.
Howard Gardner
Cambridge, Massachusetts
May 1972

I
A New Approach to Social Sciences
1
A New Development in the Social Sciences

Ideas are a system complete within us, like any of the kingdoms of Nature
—a sort of flora whose iconography will one day be traced out by a man of
genius, whom the world will call a lunatic.
BALZAC1
Computer simulation, psychotherapy, industrial relations hoards,
economic planning, teaching machines, public polling, and advertising have

become such accepted parts of modern life that the recency of these
phenomena is sometimes forgotten. One is tempted to conclude that the
social sciences sprang up full-grown during the Enlightenment and have

always been accepted by the larger society. In fact, however, it was only
during the last century that specific disciplines dealing with human activity
and institutions arose and that investigators came to think of themselves as

psychologists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, or, more broadly, as
social scientists. Furthermore, since it customarily takes a generation or so

for theory to be translated into practice, current public thinking and present-
day social institutions reflect the theory of some decades ago. Thus,
behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory dominate most people’s views on
human psychology; writers like B. F. Skinner, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman
O. Brown are hailed as utopian prophets, even though the theories on which

their projections are based are now outdated in the eyes of many
contemporary social scientists. Given the widespread application of social-
scientific theory, and this “cultural gap” between theory and practice, a new
development in the social sciences looms important for those interested in

the shape of the future.
A new school of social science might be expected to rely heavily upon

modern mathematics, neurophysiological and biochemical breakthroughs,
and high-speed computers and precise measuring instruments. Surprisingly,
however,the most innovative group of social scientists—the structuralists—
for the most part spurn such sources and tools.2 Instead, they seek insights
about behavior and thoughts from such seemingly unlikely sources as kinship
relations among primitive groups, hundreds of myths about food and fire, the
casual remarks of children engaged in solving a puzzle, the minute differences

between two imitations of the same model. Initially the structuralist proceeds
in a common-sense manner, simply observing and describing what he sees;

but he subsequently proceeds to employ powerful formal models and to draw
remarkable and unexpected conclusions about the significance of the

phenomena investigated. The flavor of structuralism can perhaps be most
readily conveyed by listing a few of the questions which have preoccupied its
adherents:
(1) A five-year-old child is given two mounds and asked to make sure
they have equal amounts of clay. When the child has patted the balls to his
satisfaction, an experimenter takes one and rolls it until it assumes the shape
of a sausage. He asks the child, “Is there more clay in the ball over there, in the
sausage over here, or do they both have the same amount of clay?” Only an
extraordinary five-year-old will declare that the ball and sausage have the
same amount of clay. Most commonly, children of this age will note that the
sausage is longer and conclude that it contains more to eat or to play with. An
eight-year-old child, however, will typically think the question silly, because
anyone knows the ball and the sausage have, and will always have, the same
amount of clay. The psychologist Jean Piaget has sought to determine how
this enhanced understanding in the older child has come about.3
(2) Eight-month-old infants the world over will babble the gamut of
possible sounds, many of which never appear in the language of the
surrounding culture. Within a few months, however, this variegated babbling
will have ceased, and children will begin to utter a small set of sounds
purposefully and regularly. In many parts of the world, the first discernible
words will be “mama” and "papa.” The linguist Roman Jakobson has offered
an explanation of “Why Mama and Papa?”4
(3) It is a common practice in Western society to give names to
domestic animals. One might think that naming practices in these domains
are purely random; but a closer study has revealed striking regularities. For

example, pet birds receive names which could also begiven to humans
(Pierre, Donald, Jacqueline), while dogs are given names (Fido, Spot, Pluto)
which would never be found on a birth certificate. The French anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss has introduced a fascinating hypothesis to explain these
practices.5
(4) Unless the Bible is viewed as the Word of God, or the random
concatenation of disparate myths, some explanation is required for a number

of parallel themes in the stories of the Creation, the Garden of Eden, and the
clash between Cain and Abel. The English anthropologist Edmund Leach has
applied structuralist methods in a provocative exegesis of the opening
chapters of the Bible.6
In trying to unravel puzzles like these, the structurally-oriented social
scientist typically models himself after a natural scientist. For example, the
biologist intent on elucidating the makeup of the human organism artificially
divides the body into various systems—the nervous system, vascular system,
muscular system, and so on. All appreciate that this is merely a convention
but, for pedagogical and conceptual reasons, a useful and perhaps necessary
one. Similarly, in investigating the makeup of the external world, the chemist
and physicist search for basic units— atoms, electrons, subatomic particles,
as well as larger components, like cells or molecules—in the hope that they
can build up from these units to more and more complex phenomena. All
these scientists may be said to be searching for the structural components,
and the underlying structure, of the physical or biological world; they do so
by seeking units which they can see (like cells) or which, though invisible, can
in some sense be said to have a physical existence (like atoms) . The social
scientist, by contrast, deals with behavior, with institutions, with thoughts,
beliefs, fears, dreams. At various times, it has been claimed that these do not
exist and therefore should not be studied, or, alternatively, that they do exist
and are as physical as cells or crystals. The structuralists subscribe to neither

view. They believe that behavior and institutions do have a structure, and not
merely in a trivial or metaphorical sense, but that this structure will never be
visible or tangible; nonetheless, that it is incumbent upon the investigator to

ferret it out and to map its dimensions, in clear, preferably formal or
mathematical language. Whatever the complex phenomenon under
investigation—a child interpreting a proverb, the exchange of women
between social groups, the rhyme scheme of a fourteenth-century sonnet—

the structuralist treats it like a foreign language which must be deciphered;
through careful observation, and the performance of appropriate

experiments, he determines the basic “words” or units, the syntax, and the
meaning of the foreign behavior, and describes it in terms which other

scientists can comprehend. In addition, he adopts procedures which can be
followed independently by other scientists, thereby avoiding a classic pitfall
of earlier times—a set of brilliant ideas flowing from the pen of one or

another scientist, which can be admired but not carried further by the next
generation of thinkers.
The burgeoning of the social sciences, and the founding of the new
school of structuralism, can be traced to a variety of causes, ranging from a
desire to apply methods of the natural sciences to questions traditionally

posed by philosophers, to a need for more effective means of aiding the
mentally sick and the culturally disadvantaged. An especially potent stimulus
came from the pioneering works of specific researchers—innovative thinkers
like Freud and Marx—who imposed a convincing organizational framework
upon great areas of data that had been confusing and somewhat
overwhelming, and thus showed that a comprehensive theory of behavior or
society was possible. Freud’s demonstration that mental illness and mental
health are of a piece, that much of thought is unconscious, that events of early
childhood exercise a determining influence on subsequent behavior, may

have initially shocked his contemporaries; but with the passage of time and
the accumulation of evidence, it became clear that here was a theory which
could account for many aspects of individual conduct. Similarly, Marx’s
analysis of the development of capitalism, the role of economic factors in
social and political history, the nature of the class structure and the class
struggle itself, initially aroused strong opposition; still, these ideas eventually
altered the thinking and the direction of research of social scientists, because
this orientation promised a viable approach to the nature and evolution of
human institutions. The dramatic and revolutionary sweep of these men’s
ideas, coupled with the devoted labors and elaborations of their followers, did
much to spur both interest and progress in the social sciences. And, before
much more time had elapsed, the conceptions of Marx and Freud had been
assimilated by educated persons generally, even as they left lasting imprints
upon social, cultural, and political institutions throughout the world.
Another impetus to progress in the social sciences came from the
adoption of more sophisticated methods of research and more appropriate
models of behavior. The original generation of social scientists, whose work

will be described in the next chapter, were often keen observers and careful
describers; but their work usually lacked systematic coherence and
experimental rigor, thereby precluding the possibility of follow through by

other scientists. In addition, the first social scientists, when seeking models or
analogies for the phenomena they were investigating, naturally gravitated to
quite simple devices: they regarded the reflex arc as a model for behavior, a
patch of light as a model for external stimulation, a tool as a model for a social
institution, or biological cell as the model for a society. The primitive nature
of these analogies seriously limited the scope of their investigations, either by
directing their attention to trivial problems or by constraining them to forced

and oversimplified explanations of complex phenomena. Only as social
scientists were able to make more appropriate uses of examples and methods
from the “harder” sciences, only when they chose models more closely suited

to the phenomena they sought to elucidate, did further breakthroughs in this
difficult area of study become possible.
In the last few decades, owing in large part to the efforts of a small
group, working in relative isolation from their contemporaries and,indeed,
from one another, structuralism has developed as a new approach in the

social sciences, one which holds promise for the non-distorted and
nonsimplified study of human behavior and institutions, and which any
trained investigator should be able to apply. To be sure, the terms “structure,”
“structuralism,”and “structuralist” are of long-standing use among scholars

and have already well permeated the popular consciousness. Yet it must at
once be added that my estimate here of the value and importance of the
contemporary structuralist movement is open to dispute; the present work,

should be viewed as a brief in support of its claims, rather than as an account
of what is already believed by all reasonable social scientists.
Accompanying the recent interest in the structuralist approach and in

the writings of Piaget and Levi-Strauss has come a spate of books, articles,and
mass-media presentations on “the mind of man,” “cognitive
development,”“the world of the child,” “the life of primitive man.” Anyone

who has examined these sources will have at least some general notion of
what structuralism is about—although he is quite unlikely to have acquired a

firm grasp of the movement’s methods and implications. Ignorance about
structuralism abounds because writers have characterized the methods used
instead of demonstrating them; named three dozen structuralists, but
described none in any detail;assumed ignorance on the audience’s part about
current findings, but omniscience concerning the past history of psychology

and anthropology. As a result, book-collecting in the human sciences and the
dropping of hyphenated French names are on the ascendancy, while
comprehension and critical understanding lag behind. By focusing in depth on
the most seminal figures in the structuralist camp, this book seeks to repair
the existing imbalance.
At this juncture, it is tempting (if not obligatory) to offer a capsule
definition of the subject. Yet, having just castigated others for espousing the
glib formula or the misleading catch phrase, I do not wish to contribute

further to misapprehensions about structuralism. The fact is, I think, that it is
not possible to define the movement with any precision, anymore than it is to
delineate clearly a field called social psychology or behavioral genetics.

Writers have tended to apply the term “structuralism”either to a hopelessly
vague field of literary analysis, to all contemporary French intellectual

thought which is not avowedly existentialist, or to the writings of any and all
scholars and critics who call themselves structuralists.Certainly none of these

approaches is wholly satisfactory. Add to the confusion that no two
structuralists, not even Levi-Strauss and Piaget, define“structure” in the same
way, and one wonders why the term has not been publicly banned or

appropriated by Newspeak.
My own solution has been as follows: With very occasional lapses, I am

restricting the term “structuralism” to certain common themes and
approaches found in the writings of a small group of men, chief among them
Levi-Strauss,Piaget, Edmund Leach, and Roman Jakobson. I am at the same

time claiming that these common elements have given rise to a new
movement or paradigm in the social sciences which may (and perhaps
should) be called structuralism. I have postponed until Chapter 5 any attempt
at an overall definition, preferring initially—in line with my view of

structuralism as a method or approach, rather than a given doctrine or body
of beliefs—to illustrate what structuralism is byshowing how it is done. For
the present, it is hoped that the few examples given above will provide
enough of a foretaste of the structuralist approach to guide and sustain the
reader as he is led toward the ultimate goal through what may seem to be
somewhat remote pathways.
The structuralists are distinguished first and foremost by their ardent,
powerfully held conviction that there is structure underlying all human
behavior and mental functioning, and by their belief that this structure can be
discovered through orderly analysis, that it has cohesiveness and meaning,
and that structures have generality (otherwise there would be as many

structures as behaviors, and little point in spelling them out) . I hope that
readers who follow the argument to its conclusion will be able, not merely to
evaluate the legitimacy of these assumptions in the abstract, but to use them
to make their own structural analyses concerning questions of interest to
them. This would be the best possible proof of the utility of structuralism.
Recent findings in chemistry, physics, and other “hard” disciplines can
be cogently described without mentioning names; but such a state of affairs

has not yet been realized in the social sciences. In attempting to describe
structuralist research, one is faced with a choice: either overlook the vast
differences among theorists and pretend that a consensus exists, or
concentrate upon a few central figures and disregard the more peripheral
contributors.Because I believe their achievements to be of signal importance
for the social sciences, ranking with those of Freud, Marx, and Weber, I have
chosen to deal at length with the writings of Jean Piaget and Claude Levi-
Strauss. In their lives and works, these men throw into sharp relief the central
themes of structuralism, so that a thoughtful analysis of their contributions

should help illuminate the works of their colleagues as well.7 And, more
generally, a detailed consideration of the work of one or two leading
practitioners seems tome the best way to convey understanding of any new
method. The reader’s immersion in the researches of Piaget and Levi-Strauss

will, it is hoped,enable him to develop an intuitive sense of the nature of
structuralism, and he should then be better able to cope with my more formal
analysis, and my efforts to reconcile conflicts in the views of these two

thinkers.
Structuralism is controversial, in part because it involves a rejection of

earlier approaches in the social sciences, and in part because it has certain
peculiarly French characteristics which make it seem strange, even exotic, to
many people of Anglo-Saxon culture. Any assessment of the

movement,therefore, is necessarily incomplete without an understanding of
its origins,the background out of which it has emerged, and of the competing
paradigms against which it puts forward its own claims. For this reason, the
discussion here will begin with a description of the intellectual tradition into
which both Piaget and Levi-Strauss were born, and a thumbnail history of the
disciplines to which they were later to make such substantial contributions.
It is in both the importance of the questions it tackles and the
sophistication of its analytical tools that structuralism represents a major
advance in the social sciences. Unfortunately, in an introductory work it is not
possible to discuss in detail the formal procedures and models, the

mathematical and logical formulations, which Levi-Strauss, Piaget, and others
sometimes use; and in any case I am not equipped to do so. Regrettably, part
of structuralism’s power must be taken on faith in this book. But I hope at

least to provide some indication of what structural analysis based on logical
principles can yield. Furthermore, there is no need for the reader to feel in
awe of the mathematical foundations of structuralism; indeed, the movement
has been subjected to strong criticism for its overreliance on or even misuse
of formalisms, and I myself feel that many insights are more effectively
presented without the mathematics and that some of the formal analysis is
metaphorical and suggestive rather than precise and necessary. At any rate,
even if the reader lacks the technical knowledge to evaluate structuralist
techniques critically,he can and should judge whether the problems studied
by structuralists are significant and whether the solutions offered are
meaningful and revealing.
Various differences in method and orientation exist between the two
men under consideration. For example, Piaget uses a structural-
developmental approach in which he seeks to account for phenomena, such
as the conservation of liquids, through an examination of the processes

whereby they unfold overtime; Levi-Strauss prefers an “agenetic” structural
approach, treating phenomena like naming practices in different cultures,
which date from different periods and have separate histories, as if they all
existed at the present time under similar circumstances. Nonetheless, there
are certain broad themes which have come to dominate the thinking of both
men. Among these are the effect of the language a person uses on the nature
and quality of his thought processes; the origins and development of the
moral code and religious beliefs of a given social group;the affinities and
differences among thought processes of children, animals,primitives, the
mentally ill, and normal Western adults; the appropriateness of certain “root

metaphors” of action or perception as a description of the fundamental
essence of thought; the relative validity of the developmental and the
agenetic, or non historical, approach. In the chapters that follow, I shall
review the solutions which each man has proposed for these problems and
then offer my own thoughts on how a rapprochement between outstanding
differences of opinion might be brought about. Perhaps the proposed
synthesis can also serve as a point of departure for an integration of the

structural and developmental approaches to human nature.
Two assumptions mark the structuralist enterprise overall. One is the

belief that through careful examination of groups which, like children or
primitives, differ from the contemporary Western adult, new light can be cast
on the whole of human experience; the second is the faith that what is
distinctive about human beliefs, development, and institutions is a reflection
of the fundamental nature of human thought, and hence, the biological
structure of the “human mind.”8 Such a view of the mind as central to

behavior and institutions is controversial, but it is deeply ingrained in the
background of both Piaget and Levi-Strauss, and forms a point of departure
for their theorizing. Whether right or wrong, the quest for mind is an exciting
and,potentially, an enormously fruitful enterprise. Like the Cartesian
intellectual tradition out of which it emerges, this quest has already yielded
powerful insights into the questions which currently intrigue social scientists
and have always fascinated thoughtful individuals.
Notes
All abbreviations for references will be found in the Reference Section in the back of the book.
1 The epigraph comes from Balzac's Louis Lambert (Boston: Little, Brown, 1888), p. 63.
2 Some of the better introductions to structuralism are IS, S, and R. Bastide (ed.), Sens et usage du terme
'structure’ dans lessciences humaines (The Hague: Morton, 1962). Thorough descriptive
works on Piaget and Levi-Strauss are: J. Flavell, The Developmental Psychology of Jean
Piaget (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1963); and Y. Simonis, Claude Levi-Strauss, oula
"passion de l'inceste" (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968). The best critical introductions are
H. Furth, Piaget and Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), and L-S.
3 Piaget’s research on conservation of substance was reported in J. Piaget and B. Inhelder, Le

Developpement des quantites chez l’enfant (Neuchatel: Delachauxet Niestle, 1941). A
considerable amount of research on conservation has tendedto confirm Piaget’s findings.
For some of the better studies, see I. Sigel and F. Hooper (eds.), Logical Thinking inYoung
Children (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1968).
4 Jakobson’s work is described in his monograph Child Language Aphasia and Phonological Universals
(The Hague: Mouton, 1968) and in his essay"Why Mama and Papa,” reprinted in Selected
Writings, Vol. 1 (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), pp. 538-45. There has been little empirical
research relevant to Jakobson’s claim.
5 Levi-Strauss’s hypothesis about the sources of animal names is reported in SM, pp. 204 ff.
6 Leach's structuralist account of Genesis appears in "Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden: An

Examination of Some Recent Developments in the Analysis of Myth," in C L-S, pp. 47-60.
7 In their lives and works, these men . . .: I have written a number of papers which seek to compare the
two men: “Piaget and Levi-Strauss: The Quest for Mind,” Social Research Vol. 37 (1970),
348-65; “The Structural Analysis of Myths and Protocols,” Semiotica, Vol. 5 (1972), 31-
57; "Structure and Development,” The Human Context, 1972, in press.
8 The quotation marks are my way of indicating my strong reservations about such a concept as the
“human mind.” implying as it does a mind-body dichotomy, a dualistic view of human
nature that I reject. For present purposes, however, it has seemed expedient to use the

term, and I have done so throughout.
2
The French Intellectual Tradition and the Roots of

Structuralism: A Structural-Developmental
Analysis
As to the opinions which are truly and wholly mine, I offer no apology for
them as new—persuaded as I am that if their reasons be well considered,
they will be found to be so simple and so conformed to common sense as
to appear less extraordinary and less paradoxical than any others which
can be held on the same subjects.
DESCARTES
I do not see that I should ever conclude anything from these various sense
perceptions concerning things outside of ourselves, unless the mind has
carefully and maturely examined them. For it seems to me that it is the
business of the mind alone, and not of the being composed of mind and
body, to decide the truth of such matters.1
DESCARTES
Few schoolboys today have ever read a line of the Federalist papers or
of Jefferson’s writings, let alone the philosophical writings of Locke or

Montesquieu which formed the basis for American political
thought.Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the Founding Fathers have
been “read” by Americans of all ages; such articles of faith2 as the essential
equality of all men, the right to possess property and pursue happiness, the
need for checks and balances within a constitutional system, have for so long

been “in the air”that they form a natural and effortlessly acquired set of
beliefs for most inhabitants of our country. Somewhat more subtle, but
equally pervasive, is the conviction that every man should have the right to
make a new life for himself, unburdened by old religious or political tradition;
as self-fulfillment is most likely to be found in an environment bereft of

constraints, the opportunity to develop in a new, relatively fluid milieu (like a
frontier territory) becomes particularly attractive. For, just as immutable
laws, an entrenched hierarchical social order, and rigid religious and social
mores can restrict a person’s range of choice and preordain his eventual fate,
so life in a non traditional society can foster development and productivity.
This set of beliefs, part and parcel of one’s birthright as an American, extends
into the scientific realm, where Americans have challenged the view that
man’s mind and his development are determined by a fixed genetic
endowment or by parental social status. Instead,they hold that men can
evolve in as many different ways as there are diverse settings—indeed, man

is best viewed as a reflection of those pressures and models present in his
own environment.3 These forces, and not the biological heritage, are the
prime determinants of man’s development and his eventual status in life.
Even as young Americans (and often young Britons) have effortlessly

imbibed such ideas, French youths have similarly picked up another set of
unconscious attitudes which inevitably color their views on man and society.
(I am using the term “French” broadly, to include such outposts of French
culture as Western Switzerland and Belgium.) As members of a culture which
has existed for many centuries, has few means for nonviolent change, and is
dominated by the lingering effects of past events, they place greater emphasis
on the traditions of their society4 and are far less sanguine about the
possibilities for environmental change or novel human development. Such
ideas, presumably assimilated years ago by the youthful Piaget and Levi-
Strauss, constitute an important part of the heritage of structuralism. Because
they are less well known to those outside Continental circles, these elements
of the Gallic tradition will require some elaboration here.
1. THE FRENCH INTELLECTUAL TRADITION
Since the time of Rene Descartes, the most influential philosopher5 in

French intellectual history, French thinkers have been fascinated with
the“human mind.” Descartes saw the mind as an entity apart from the rest of
the person; mechanical and biological functions were carried on by the body,
while language, reasoning, and originality were reflections of unique mental
powers possessed by the mind or soul. This dualistic approach to human
nature has been severely criticized since his time, but Descartes’ belief that
the mind should be studied on its own, that it can be examined separately
from the more animal-like aspects of human beings, has persisted in the
academies and salons of his country.

Many other Cartesian views and biases have exhibited comparable
longevity: the conviction that inspection of one’s own mind is the primary
route to truth; the denigration of humanistic philosophy and the
arts,accompanied by an exaltation of logical-mathematical and geometrical
reasoning;the belief that animals lack mind and hence are incapable of
generative,creative thought; affirmation of the central role of human language
in understanding and thought; the aspiration to unify all knowledge; an

abiding preoccupation with the essence of human nature. Less acceptable
have been Descartes’ ignorance of social and cultural factors; his peculiar
proof of the existence of God; his rejection of sense data; his lack of interest in
the way skills and abilities are acquired; his failure to consider historical
trends. In any event, it is hardly overstating Descartes’ importance to assert
that the primary concern of French thinkers in the succeeding centuries has
been, on the one hand, to refine and elaborate those of his ideas they found
most compelling and, on the other, to modify or sift out those tenets which
seemed less palatable.
There is perhaps only one other figure in French intellectual history
whose influence is at all comparable to that of Descartes: the Genevan
philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.6 Often writing in opposition to the

Cartesians, and to Enlightenment counterparts like Voltaire, Rousseau took
pains to stress the very aspects of human nature which Descartes had
overlooked or disdained. Where Descartes had concentrated on the rational
and logical aspects of human cognition, Rousseau emphasized the affective,
sentimental, and emotional portions of the human psyche. Where Descartes
was content to focus on the individual, and, indeed, on one particular
Frenchman, Rousseau took into account the range of human societies,

exhibiting special empathy with peoples from the remote past and on distant
shores. And where Descartes’ interest was restricted to the mature thought
and action of the developed adult, a principal treatise of Rousseau’s

concerned the education of the naive child.
Rousseau also introduced a number of concerns which had not occupied

Descartes. He was fascinated by the question of society’s influence
upon“natural” or “savage man” and attempted to devise idealized models of
the State of Nature and the Social Contract. Rousseau knew these models
were inevitably conjectural, but felt it vital “to know closely a state which no
longer exists,which may never have existed, and which probably will never
exist,” in order to make plausible extrapolations about the current plight of

mankind. First he reduced man and society to first principles (man is free in
the State of Nature): then he performed hypothetical experiments upon these
models and principles (let us see what happens when one man becomes
dominant in this State).Rousseau intuitively anticipated certain themes which

were to concern future generations: the relationship between Nature and
Culture; the possible differences between primitive and civilized man, the
respective psychologies of child and adult; the pivotal nature of private

property, power relationships among men, the general will of a community;
the perception of sensible qualities. Because of his perspicacity and his
passionate insights he has been hailed by some, including Claude Levi-
Strauss, as the first scientific student of human nature.
Yet, despite his many divergencies, Rousseau demonstrated appreciable

loyalty to Cartesian canons. He joined in the condemnation of earlier
philosophy and the learned academies; he concurred in the centrality of man
and the essential differences between man and beast; he underscored the
importance of language; he continued to rely on his own introspection and to

ponder the place of mind in human nature. Rousseau, then, stands in the
French tradition as a crucial antipode to the seminal Descartes: antagonist
and revisionist on some issues, supporter and amplifier on a number of

others.Between their respective positions those of the remaining contributors
to the tradition can be plotted, with certain themes and issues recurring
inexorably,others oscillating in emphasis from the Cartesian to the

Rousseauian pole.
One enduring facet of the French tradition concerns the status of
empirical evidence—that is, the relative weight attached to systematic

observation and measurement of phenomena by oneself and others.
Descartes, of course, had little interest in such observation, preferring to rely

on introspection, his own pure, unaided ratiocination; and Rousseau, though
paying lip service to explorers, scientists, and historians, also deemed his own
sentiments and inner promptings the surest guide to truth. This “conceit” is
very difficult for those outside the tradition to accept; the necessity of
achieving consensus within a community of scientists, for example, has long

been an article of faith in the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet the tendency to turn
inward,even in the face of contradictory observations by others, has persisted
among the French, and is found even today in many writings. All the same,
among those interested in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, there has

been a slow but steady movement toward empiricism. In the course of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, systematic data collection has been
embraced, scientific institutions have been set up, the value attached to one’s
own perceptions has been minimized in favor of consensual agreement
among scholars investigating related phenomena. To be sure, this progress
has been less rapid or decisive than in other intellectual circles and one
encounters regressions toward a more solipsistic interpretation of

phenomena; the sacrosanctity of one’s own observations remains a latent
leitmotif of French thought. Yet the overall trend toward empiricism seems
inexorable.
A number of leading participants in the development of the luminous

French intellectual tradition have made major contributions to the emergence
of the social sciences as an autonomous field of study—in particular, Claude
Henri Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and Emile Durkheim. Comte and Saint-

Simon made encyclopedic efforts to cull and collate all knowledge about the
range of human societies and activities. Like Spencer in England and Hegel in
Germany,however, they tended to view their own society as the culmination
of social evolution, hardly considering that other groups might have reached
comparable levels of development or possess equal integrity. Moreover,
although they strongly espoused a positivistic approach—i.e., dealing only
with immediate,observable, material entities—they tended to fall back on

unsupported philosophical speculation in their own work. As Comte boasted:
The progress I have achieved has procured for me a certain authority; and
my conceptions are now sufficiently matured. I am entitled,therefore, to
proceed with the same freedom and rapidity as my principal ancestors,
Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz, who confined themselves to a definite
expression of their views, leaving the verification and development of
them to the public.7
Durkheim’s work8 represented a definite advance over that of the
founding sociologists, for he practiced careful methods of data

accumulation,employed statistical controls, and embraced a less parochial
view of the relation of his society to others around the world. Durkheim
appreciated the important role played by feelings of solidarity, religion, and
morality within a social group; in splendidly paradoxical fashion, he used

hard-nosed empirical methods to document conclusions which ran counter to
positivist orthodoxy. For example,he was able to show that suicide rates,
which had generally been interpreted as the sum of individual decisions by
isolated actors, could more adequately be accounted for as a reflection of the
mores of the culture in which a person lived; given the dominant religion of a
society, one could predict its suicide rate. Rather than stemming from
individual neuroses, suicide reflected the degree of social integration in a

group. Similarly, Durkheim was able to draw upon the legal system, the
economic forces and the division of labor in a society in order to demonstrate
the nature and degree of social solidarity found therein. Norms and social
solidarity, hitherto thought to be abstract or even metaphysical entities, were

demonstrable social facts, as specifiable and accessible to study as individual
actions or physical objects. Almost singlehandedly, Durkheim conferred upon
French social science a coherence which it had theretofore lacked; yet his
reluctance to consider psychological factors and his failure to devise formal,
testable models of social processes imposed a certain one-sidedness and
circularity upon his formulations which it was left to succeeding generations
to correct.
Another French thinker of Durkheim’s time represents, from one point
of view, a regressive influence; and yet Henri Bergson exercised such a

powerful hold over youth in the early part of the present century that he
cannot be ignored. A mathematician and Cartesian philosopher by training, an

artist and metaphysician by inclination, Bergson immersed himself in the
sciences of his era, only to emerge with a devastating critique of the
limitations of scientific knowledge. He contrasted the intellect to the intuition,

regarding the intuition as a natural way of reacting and understanding, the
intellect as a labored form of cognition suited only to narrowly focused
scientific investigation. Philosophers and scientists had paid too exclusive
attention to the intellect; Bergson proposed to demonstrate the limitations of

science and the creative power of intuition. He called special attention to the
flux and flow of reality9—the aspect of experience which he felt was central—
and deplored the “isolated, cinematographic” approach of science, which
worked instead with discrete moments of time and substituted symbols for
the ongoing, unceasing continuity of life:
If one looks a little more closely at each of these states, noticing that it
varies, asking how it could endure if it did not change, the understanding
hastens to replace it by a series of short states, which in their turn break
up if necessary and so forth, ad infinitum. But how can we help seeing that
the essence of duration is to flow, and that the fixed placed side by side
with the fixed will never constitute anything which has duration. It is not
the “states,” simple snapshots we have taken . . . along the course of
change, that are real; on the contrary, it is flux, the continuity of transition,
it is change itself that is real.
Bergson, in sum, hurled a challenge at the masters of the French
tradition:recognize the limits of rational and scientific inquiry, its incapacity

to illuminate central aspects of human experience; and attempt to grasp in an
intuitive way the innermost qualities of life itself.
Bergson’s position may be viewed as reactionary, in that it ran counter

to the increasing reliance upon empiricism and the increasing faith in science;
and yet, he was touching upon many of the same antirationalist themes which
had recurred periodically in French thought, most memorably in
Rousseau.Furthermore, a remarkable number of themes which were articles
of faith for Descartes are preserved with little change in Bergson’s writings:
the nonmechanical nature of mind; the centrality of language in human

society; the disdain for earlier philosophical efforts; the desire to unify all
knowledge;the reliance on logical exposition; the perpetual fascination with
the nature of human intelligence and mental functioning. Thus, despite his
opposition to the general thrust of Cartesian thought, Bergson carried
forward many of its cardinal precepts, and couched even his critique of it in
terms acceptable to its practitioners.
We see, then, that while there is certainly movement and change within
the French intellectual tradition, many of its central tenets have remained
more or less fixed and unchallenged since the early seventeenth century.
Whenever such regularities can be discerned in a given system, a structural
analysis becomes possible. To give the reader, therefore, a kind of foretaste of
structuralist methodology, I propose to make here just such an analysis of the

French intellectual tradition, as it has been presented (very sketchily, to be
sure) above. Naturally, the method will seem somewhat strange at first, and
the analysis in need of further explication. Nonetheless, the experiment seems

worth pursuing, if only because structuralism should be applicable to most
any domain, including its own history. For similar reasons,I shall undertake,

later in this chapter, a developmental analysis of social-scientific thought in
general, in the hope of giving the reader at least partial familiarity with
developmental methods even as these are brought to bear upon their own
genesis.
The structural analyst confronted with a given subject area, or“domain,”

first attempts to isolate those factors within it which have remained constant.
These he views as “outside time,” “given,” “perpetually present,”hence
synchronic—in the present case,those elements that constitute the essence of
the French intellectual tradition.Next, the analyst incorporates temporal

considerations, searching for factors which change with time, which are
subject to historical pressures and thereforediachronic. These diachronic
aspects,in turn, may be of two sorts: those which move solely in one direction
over the course of time and so are referred to as irreversible;and those which
seem to shift from one pole to another and back again and so are considered
to be reversible.10
After this brief introduction to terminology, let me now present in
tabular form a structural model of the French intellectual tradition:
A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE FRENCH INTELLECTUAL TRADITION11
Synchronic Elements interest in mind; detached objectivity; desire to synthesize all

(always present from knowledge; special status of human beings; unique properties of
1650 to 1900) language;interest in, but disdain for, previous philosophy;
respect for mathematical(logical) thinking
Diachronic Elements, primary interest: in the individual/in society
Reversible (alternate primary interest: in French culture/in the variety of world
in importance from cultures
1650to 1900) primary interest: in logical-mathematical thought /in the
affective life and aesthetic aspects of thought
Diachronic Elements, interest in findings of modern science

Irreversible (of rejection of introspection
increasing search for empirical data and confirmation
importance
from1650 to 1900)
What insight, if any, can such a structural analysis yield? First of all, it
represents a radical, and yet revealing, simplification of a vast amount of

information—here, of the leading themes in the history of modern French
thought. The themes are organized in such a way that their changes or
continuities can readily be seen: some remain unchanged, others oscillate in
importance, still others steadily increase or decrease in significance during

the given period. Once such a set of coordinates has been laid out, it also
becomes possible to compare thinkers and to note their predominant
biases.Thus, Bergson and Rousseau can both be seen to have emphasized the
affective and aesthetic: aspects of mental functioning; yet they differ, in that
Rousseau was relatively more interested in the diverse cultures of the world,
and in society in general, while Bergson directed his attention to the

individual within French civilization. A more detailed version of this c hart
might also indicate whether those diachronic features which are reversible

tend to change at the same time, or at different moments in history. For
example, one could determine from such an analysis whether a shift from
interest in the individual to interest in society has tended to accompany a
shift from interest in logical/mathematical reasoning to an interest in
affective and aesthetic thought; or whether, instead, these shifts have always
occurred at different times, independent of one another. Finally, one could
make similar structural analyses of other intellectual traditions and thereby
determine whether themes which were synchronic in one culture were
necessarily synchronic in others as well. And so on.
The most dramatic property of a structural analysis is the possibility it

offers for deducing the existence of hitherto-undiscovered phenomena; if
structuralist principles are legitimate and if the analysis is properly carried
out, the analyst should be able to anticipate the shape of future events. From
this perspective, the above analysis is of some interest.Had a structural
analysis of French thought been made in the year 1900, one could have
predicted with some confidence that a brilliant young social scientist would
be interested in questions of the mind; that he would adopt empirical

methods and spurn introspective techniques; and that he was equally likely to
focus on individual or societal factors, primitive culture or his own culture,
logical-mathematical or affective-aesthetic thought. Finally, he would

probably continue to display, in one form or another, certain staples of the
tradition: a critique of earlier philosophy, an interest in human/animal
differences, an aspiration to synthesize all scientific knowledge, an emphasis
on the power of language, and a desire to account for the nature of thought. Of
course, the present analysis is being made with the benefit of hindsight; yet it
is at least conceivable that a prescient analyst at the turn of the century,

equipped with structural tools,could have predicted the advent of thinkers
like Piaget and Levi-Strauss.
While a purely structural analysis ordinarily assumes that all relevant
factors are present in some form throughout the period and across the
domain being investigated, a developmental analysis is predicated on the

assumption that higher levels of organization may evolve which could not
have been predicted simply from knowledge of earlier events. The history of
scientific disciplines has not been subjected to extensive developmental

analysis (although the writings of Piaget, Foucault, Kuhn, and certain other
historians of science do contain hints of such an approach)12. Nonetheless, in

the belief that it will at least provide some insight into its methodology, and
with the hope that it will complement our structural analysis of the French
tradition, I will attempt below a developmental analysis of the history of
modern social-scientific thought.
Although interest in the nature of man antedates recorded history,and

speculation about a science of man was rife during the Enlightenment, it was
only in the latter part of the nineteenth century that empirical investigations

concerning human nature and experience were definitively launched.
Perhaps Darwin’s conclusive determination of man’s place within a
naturalistically explicable evolutionary process helped to legitimize a science
of man. After The Origin of Species was published in 1859,theological

objections to a study of human nature gradually lost their potency.
Data collection and theoretical formulations about man took numerous

forms, of course, ranging from neurophysiological investigations of spinal
reflexes to psychophysical investigations of the threshold of pain
perception.The strand of investigation to be explored here may be broadly
termed “social science” and may be defined as the effort to increase
understanding of man’s behavior, his mental processes, his relations with
other men, his position in various cultures, his social institutions. Two
countries, especially, became noted as centers for the social sciences:
Germany, for the investigation of human psychological processes; England,
for the exploration of the behaviors,customs, and ideas of diverse groups of

people.
2. EARLY INVESTIGATIONS IN PSYCHOLOGY
In Leipzig in the late 1870’s, Wilhelm Wundt, a philosopher of enormous
breadth, located an old, unused auditorium which he could use for
demonstrations and experiments. Soon afterwards, he opened what is
generally deemed the first laboratory for psychological experimentation, and
through a combination of zeal, diligence, and entrepreneurship, he
successfully preached the gospel of psychology to the rest of the learned
world. In this laboratory Wundt and his students conducted scores of studies
of human sensory capacities—perception of space, time, memory, attention,
reaction time, and other topics which were shortly to become the mainstay of
the science of psychology. They relied heavily on introspection—systematic
self-observation—in their search for the basic elements of psychology; and

they came to believe that atomistic sensations (of light, sound, smell, etc.)
were associated together to compose human perceptions. Many students
from Western Europe and overseas came to study in this laboratory, in order
to use its instruments, learn its methods, and rub elbows with the “great
man.” Those who returned to America tended to retain more of Wundt’s
methodology than of his overarching philosophy, and America became, within
thirty years, the principal center for experimental psychological research,

while a more philosophical approach tended to prevail in Western Europe,
particularly France.
As Wundt’s ideas and methods invaded the United States, heated
debates about the respective merits of introspection or controlled

investigations,the examination of consciousness or the study of conduct,
“philosophical” or“biological” psychology, dominated the field. After some
years of fierce debate about the “true” mission of psychology, the upper hand

was gained by those suspicious of philosophizing, consciousness, and
introspection, and committed to controlled methods of experimentation, fine-
grained explanations of behavior, and a flexible view of human nature. Thus
Wundt’s experimental methodology triumphed. even as his faith in

introspection and his interest in consciousness were forgotten. The
emergence of “behaviorism” reflected a widespread belief among Americans
in the controlling power of the environment,reflecting, perhaps, the unique

history of the country. The behaviorist cause was considerably buoyed by the
powerful and effective propagandizing of John Watson, famed for his boast:
Give me a dozen healthy infants well-formed and my own specified world

to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one of them at random
and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor,
lawyer,artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggar man and thief,
regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and
race of his ancestors.13
With the victory of Watson and his like-minded contemporaries, talk of

mind and consciousness largely ceased in America, and was replaced by
descriptions of overt behavior which was always presumed to be determined

by environmental conditions. Interest centered on the function or adaptive
value of given behaviors, the prediction of future activity, the nature of
individual skills and differences, the testing of intelligence, the collection of
data and development of statistical methods, and the comparative study of
animals—all matters being simultaneously pursued in the British Isles.
In Continental Europe, however, behaviorism was less than favorably
received. More convinced of the determining power of heredity, still
committed to the centrality of consciousness and subjective experience and to
the value of introspection, given to suspicion or disdain of technology, and at
best ambivalent about experimentation, European psychologists rejected
most of the American behaviorist program. Instead, in keeping with their
more philosophical and speculative bent, they searched for the general
properties of the humanmind, its affective and its cognitive components. It
may be said, without undue simplification, that the field of psychology around
the turn of the century was essentially divided between these two opposing
orientations. Certainly there were psychologists both on the Continent and in

the Anglo-Saxon countries who took intermediate positions; but, for the most
part, they assented to the view that the future of psychology lay somewhere
between these competing images of man.
Two schools which emerged in the opening decades of the twentieth
century, however, served notice that neither of these approaches had offered
the last word in psychological insight. The Gestalt psychologists14—notably
Wolfgang Kohler and Max Wertheimer—employed the controlled
experimental procedures championed in America in the name of a radically
divergent set of psychological principles. They sought to demonstrate that the

mind actively constructs the world it perceives, that it naturally and
inevitably confers meaning upon stimuli, shapes them and gives them

coherent form (“Gestalt”meaning “form” or “configuration”); far from simply
reflecting what is “there”in the “real world,” the mind seeks out examples of
good form, imposing it upon aspects of the environment which are wanting.
Where Wundt stressed the atomistic nature of elementary sense data and
their combination into mosaic-like wholes,the Gestaltists emphasized the
phenomenological perception of intact objects,dynamic forces, meaning and
value. If for Wundt the primary elements perceived in a fire were geometrical
forms of varying shapes, brightnesses, and hues, the primary elements for the
Gestaltists were excited tongues dancing and darting about. Kohler,
Wertheimer, and their associates insisted on the priority of the whole (the
“Gestalt”) over its parts, and stressed the relations among elements rather
than the elements themselves: a melody or geometric figure inheres in a
relation among tones or lines, not in the individual notes or marks. Where the
behaviorists searched for Laws of Learning in order to document changes due
to additional experience or training, the Gestaltists sought Laws of the Mind’s

Organization in order to elucidate the mental faculties and structures
governing perception and intellectual processes. As a result of these

emphases(motivated in part by the desire to annihilate iniquitous
behaviorism), the Gestaltists paid little attention to changes in behavior and

perception overtime, the influence of parts upon the whole, or, in general,
intellectual processes which do not involve the mind’s organization of sense
data.
At about the same time the Gestaltists were creating a stir in academic
circles, Sigmund Freud and his fellow psychoanalysts were launching a
revolution in man’s conception of his motivation, behavior, and mental
health.Freud demonstrated that an individual’s behavior was not simply what
it appeared to be to his conscious mind or to the naive observer; relentless
unconscious processes were at work in man’s dream and waking life,
reflecting deep-seated strivings, motives, fears, and anxieties. The founder of

psychoanalysis attempted to lay bare the structure of the unconscious, to
tease out its principles of functioning, to spell out processes whereby ideas
were formed, transformed, repressed, sublimated, and made accessible for
conscious consideration. Freud’s work initially engendered strident

opposition among his colleagues, with some criticizing the absence of
empirical studies and statistical support, others deploring his dark and
pessimistic view of human nature,still others questioning his models of

thought, neurosis, defense mechanisms,and child development. Even those
sympathetic to the psychoanalytic perspective often felt that Freud
concentrated excessively on the affective aspects of mental processes, paid

too little attention to psychologically normal or fully psychotic individuals,
and was insensitive to the characteristics of children,members of primitive
cultures, and others who differed from the turn-of-the-century Viennese
burgher. Nonetheless, the fundamental reorientation of psychological studies

that Freud engineered has come to be acknowledged by all but the most

carping critics.15
The Gestaltists and the psychoanalysts charted vast domains which had
been by-passed by the preceding generation of psychologists. The Gestaltists

stressed the constructive properties of the mind, the validity of the data of
consciousness, and the centrality of perceived relations; the psychoanalysts
highlighted the role of the unconscious in thought processes,the crucial part
played by motivational factors, and the existence of similar basic personality
constellations in “normal” and “sick” individuals. Both schools, despite their
many differences and deficiencies, represented visible progress over the
earlier stage of psychological thought. There was recognition of the need for
empirical observations and theory-building, and a closer tie between data and
theory; there were methods which could be applied by any competent

investigator and which led to interesting questions. Yet neither the Gestaltists
nor the psychoanalysts developed a coherent and comprehensive position on
the relationship between child and adult, perception and cognition,thought
and affect, part and whole; nor did they devise formal, testable models of the
processes which they described.16 From a structural-developmental point of

view, Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis may be viewed as transitional
stages in the evolution of psychological thought. They stand midway between
the behaviorism, sporadic empiricism, and introspectionism of the preceding

generation and the structural approach adopted by the most productive
psychological school of the present time.
3. EARLY INVESTIGATIONS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
As measurements of pain perception and auditory threshold were being
recorded in Leipzig, small coteries of dedicated scholars were ensconced in

the libraries of London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, poring over the
records made by missionaries, travelers, and adventurers of their encounters
with primitive people all over the “uncivilized” world and the British empire.
These men. more often than not convinced of the essential oneness of
mankind, were attempting to account for the apparently striking differences
in customs,behavior, and outlook between the natives of the African wilds, on
the one hand, and the cultivated gentleman of the Victorian drawing room, on
the other.One way of proceeding was that endorsed by such thinkers as
Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte: to postulate a series of stages through
which all men would ultimately pass—from savagery to barbarism to

civilization—to note the diffusion of knowledge across cultures, and to plot
the place occupied by each new tribe or group on this march toward
Progress; evolution was synonymous with the perfectibility of man. The more
farsighted of these “armchair anthropologists,” however, came to understand
the essential futility of such an approach. One could never conclusively prove
the validity or falsity of such evolutionary, historical, or diffusionist schemes;
devoting one’s energies to them simply postponed the vital task of describing
in their own terms the lifestyles of these groups and locating affinities
between the life of the primitive and the world of civilized man. Later

generations of anthropologists have paid greater tribute to men like Edward
Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan, who concentrated upon the customs of particular
groups and the common elements among diverse groups, than to
investigators like Sir James Frazer, who combed the literature in support of a
priori notions about what was progressive, scientific, or civilized and what
was not. Heightened understanding lay in comparison of kinship systems in
order to discern the underlying principles of organization rather than in

thinly veiled disparagements of “outrageous” rain dances.
By the early years of the present century, anthropology had emerged as

a separate discipline in both Europe and the United States; it became possible,
and eventually essential, for those trained in the discipline to conduct their
own field work. The anthropologists’ invasion of exotic societies had an

expected effect: firsthand acquaintance with various tribes and peoples
heightened interest in the particular characteristics of individual groups and
called into question the facile generalized schemes of the previous

generation.An empirically-minded anthropologist, Franz Boas17, widely
revered for his rigorous intellectual standards, encyclopedic knowledge, and
unfailing integrity, virtually decreed that anthropologists should not waste
their time on evolutionary, historical, or diffusionist speculation but should

occupy themselves collecting data about existing groups and attempting to
make inductive sense of it. Following the example of the physical sciences,
Boas inspired a whole generation of American anthropologists to make
careful ethnographical investigations “in the field” and to eschew a priori
generalizations about matters which could not be verified empirically.
A figure of comparable importance in England was Bronislaw
Malinowski18, who spent four years in the Trobriand Islands during the First
World War, setting such enviable standards for painstaking field work and
empathic immersion in the life and consciousness of a society, that he is still
hailed as a paragon for the inspiration of young anthropologists. Malinowski
favored a functionalist approach, in which the anthropologist directed his
attention to the ongoing life of the culture and attempted to understand how
its various aspects fulfilled the biological and psychological needs of its
members. “The ethnographer’s goal,” he said, is “to grasp the native’s point of
view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of the world. . . . there may
emerge [in the investigator] a feeling of solidarity with the endeavors and
ambitions of these natives.” Rejecting the possibility of “collective ideas” in a
society, Malinowski strongly favored psychological explanations of cultural

phenomena; as an example, he spent some years in the field initially
attempting to verify, and finally modifying, Freud’s concept of the Oedipus

complex within the context of a matriarchal society.
While Boas’s inductive approach and Malinowski’s functionalism held
sway in the Anglo-American cultural sphere, the sociological approach
pioneered by Durkheim remained influential in Gallic anthropological circles.

Although Durkheim himself stressed the importance of data collection and
empirical analysis, the overall thrust of his approach (particularly in the
hands of less-disciplined followers) was toward a rejection of psychological
causes,toward armchair theorizing and speculation, and acceptance of such

supra-individual entities as a “group mind.” As in the psychology of the
time,then, the young discipline of anthropology was divided into two camps:
west of the Channel were, by and large, the empiricists and functionalists,
who favored intensive immersion and energetic data collection in a single

culture, who viewed societies as a sum of individuals fulfilling their biological
and social needs; to the east were more sedentary anthropologists who rarely
visited the field, who searched for patterns underlying diverse cultures, and
who viewed society as a “super-organic,” or supra-human, entity. On the one
hand, dogmatic empiricism and a search for psychological causes; on the
other, overarching generalizations and a belief in sociological explanation.
Two transitional figures facilitated the shift from the first generation of
anthropological analysis to the more sophisticated approach characteristic of
structuralist investigators. In France there was Durkheim’s prize student,

Marcel Mauss, who collaborated with the master on a study of the methods of
classification used in primitive societies, and became leader of the

Durkheimian school upon his mentor’s death in 1917. Mauss was interested
primarily in anthropological investigations and, though never himself
involved in field work, saw to it that his students were placed in appropriate
cultures.In 1925 he founded and became director of the Institute of
Anthropology in Paris; from this position he directed field work, encouraged
critical and imaginative investigations of perplexing phenomena, and
attempted to preserve what was most worthwhile in the Durkheimian

tradition, while de-emphasizing its less viable aspects, such as the belief in
crowd psychology and the doctrine of group mystique.
Not one to wield his pen lightly, Mauss exerted his influence primarily
through his teaching and his personal example. His genius lay in an ability to
perceive profound significance in what at first glance seemed trivial. In his

most famous study, The Gift, Mauss adduced evidence from such diverse
societies as Polynesia,Melanesia, and Northwest America, as well as from
Roman, Greek, and Hindu literature, in support of the notion that gift-giving
practices among social classes, groups, and individuals lay bare the essence of
a social system. Modes of giving, receiving, and repaying are seen as basic
means of expressing or reaffirming social bonds and the relative social

standing of givers and recipients; an individual is embodied in his gift, or
“prestation,” which expresses in a fundamental way his concept of himself
and his relationship to others. By thus focusing on this seemingly mundane
aspect of life as it appears in different groups, “we have been able,” said
Mauss, “to see their essence,their operation, and their living aspects, and to
catch the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional
stock of themselves and their situation as regards others.”19 Here, Mauss took

a fundamental idea of Durkheim’s and, by searching judiciously for relevant
data and examining phenomena at the appropriate level of generality, carried
through the kind of analysis palatable to the broad spectrum of
anthropological investigators. His failure to complete the transition to

structuralism accomplished by his successors seems a reflection of the
paucity of his output, his hesitancy in pursuing an analogy between language
and culture, and his reluctance to postulate formal and mathematical models.
Similarly seeking to fuse the strengths of the Anglo-Saxon and Gallic
traditions was Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, a distinguished British

anthropologist who sponsored and conducted field work while also
promoting Durkheimian views of society and social phenomena. Almost alone
in his generation, Radcliffe-Brown did not hesitate to view society as a

biological organism and to deal with such relatively abstract notions as social
structure and social relations. He construed society as a system of
interdependent parts,searched for analogous structures among diverse

groups, and attempted to make those general comparisons which would
illuminate the nature of social institutions. Unwilling (or unable), however, to
divorce himself entirely from the British empiricist tradition, Radcliffe-Brown
looked for revelations of social structure and relations in the overt daily
interactions among individuals. He thought of society as the mere sum of
individual social relations at a given moment, structure as “this network of
actually existing relations.” This view was sharply criticized by the
Durkheimians, who,anticipating a fundamental tenet of structuralism,
preferred to posit a model remote from surface phenomena, one which
captured the underlying reality, of which the naive observer or participant
might be unaware. Radcliffe-Brown was also vigorously opposed by the

followers of Malinowski, who disparaged his efforts to generalize across the
boundaries of cultures and societies, his positing of invisible “structures,” his
manipulation of algebraic equations which purported to deal with kinship

and social organization, and his supposed lack of empathy. Radcliffe-Brown
was sufficiently occupied defending his formulations from these strong
attacks to keep him from ever demonstrating satisfactorily the possibilities of
his blend of structural-functional ism. He remains at worst a footnote in
anthropological history, at best a transitional figure like Mauss, who
anticipated the future evolution of the discipline but was unable to preside
over it himself.
The simple developmental analysis we have undertaken above points

up significant parallels in the respective histories of psychology and
anthropology. Both disciplines were launched in the latter half of the
nineteenth century and spread rapidly across Europe and into the United
States.In each, before long, two broad camps of workers could be discerned:
those of an empirical or behaviorist bent, who favored data collection over
theorizing and sought explanations in terms of individual psychological and
environmental factors; and those with an introspective and philosophical

approach, who spun elaborate theories about human nature, trusted their
own intuitions, and attributed greater influence to hereditary and traditional
factors. A higher-level synthesis of these opposing views seemed indicated,
but this did not come immediately. Instead, a series of transitional figures
pointed up the deficiencies of the earlier orientations, and made some
progress toward a more satisfactory mode of analysis. It remained for the
structuralists to complete the shift to a fully sophisticated approach in the

social sciences; and it is the achievements of structuralism’s two most
eminent practitioners that will concern us for the remainder of the book.
Before focusing upon these men, however, I would like to summarize
the results of our inquiry thus far, sketch out briefly some characteristics of
the second developmental stage of the social sciences, and describe two
schools of thought which could have influenced a young social scientist
during the early decades of this century.
4. THE FOUNDATION OF STRUCTURALISM
Even as the determining role of the environment has been a leitmotif of
American thought, so—our structural analysis confirmed—has the quest for

mind been a perennial concern of the French intellectual tradition.
Accompanying this concern has been a belief in the uniqueness of man’s
cognitive processes,the importance of language, and the appropriateness of a
holistic approach to the understanding of behavior and society. Other aspects
of the French tradition have proved susceptible to variation: the alternating
emphases on the individual or the society, on a single civilized society or the
range of cultures, on the logical-mathematical aspects of thought or its

affective and intuitive facets. The increasing acceptance of empirical methods,
on the other hand, appears to he an irreversible trend in French thought. A
projection from this analysis indicated that future workers would be
empirical investigators of the mind, who might explore either rational or

intuitive thought, and examine either a range of societies and age groups or a
single group or stratum.
Our developmental analysis has revealed an initial stage in the
evolution of social-scientific thought during which investigators displayed

either total commitment to the accumulation of facts or, conversely, a
devotion to introspective or philosophical considerations.20 These polarities

were perhaps a necessary feature of pioneering work; but after a time, certain
facets of this first stage became irritants. Younger investigators began to
question the overarching speculations, introspective evidence, and circular
reasoning of the European school, even as they became impatient with the
atomism,functionalism, and ad hoc explanations of the empiricists. Soon a
cluster of new movements emerged, which sought to mediate between the
Anglo-Saxon and Continental traditions. Supporters of Wertheimer, Freud,

Mauss, and Radcliffe-Brown searched for a middle level of explanation in

which facts of significance were isolated and plausible hypotheses advanced.
Both the mindless accumulation of facts and the unsupported spinning of
hypotheses were gradually supplanted by a search for the fundamental,
determining organization which underlay disparate phenomena. The

transitional figures generally postulated the existence of unconscious
processes of which the individual, the society, and the naive observer were
ignorant; regarded certain enigmatic phenomena (like the nature of gift-

giving or the characteristics of early childhood) as especially rich in
theoretical yield: favored interplay between perplexing data and broad but
precisely formulated theoretical frameworks; and welcomed the judicious
application of biology, mathematics, and other disciplines to social-scientific
problems.
It was left to the next generation to realize more completely this shift in
focus and procedure. The structuralists reasserted the special status of
human beings, in opposition to the excessively mechanistic or animalistic

approaches to Homo sapiens which characterized their predecessors; the
priority of mathematical and logical thought; the inadequacy of explanations
rooted in affective factors; the belief that various levels of individual and
group functioning could be accounted for within a single framework; the

interest in the epistemic subject as both a phenomenon to be probed and a
valuable partner in the analysis. The structuralists seized upon the formal
properties of thought as the analytic tool which would allow them to escape
from the Scylla of thoughtless empiricism and the Charybdis of factless
philosophizing; through an independent description of structures which the
analyst could discern and which were also valid constituents of a subject’s
mind, the structuralist could provide an explanation at the appropriate

level:between the nervous system and conscious behavior, between the
technical-economic infrastructure and the ideological superstructure of the
culture. In short the structuralists sought underlying arrangements of

elements which determined overt forms of behavior and thought, could be
expressed in logical formal language, and reflected the biological attributes of
human beings. The particular solution they wrought will become clearer in
subsequent chapters; for the present, the accompanying table may help to
clarify the general progression of social science during the early years of this
century.
The most salient feature of structuralism, only dimly foreshadowed
during the transitional stages, is the belief that diverse sets of phenomena can
be related to one another, once relevant factors and their relationships have
been ferreted out. The investigator can devise a formal or informal model of
the underlying structures which will not only account for the present data in
an economical and comprehensive fashion but which will also be applicable

to data that have yet to be collected, and to data expressed in unanticipated
form. The formal model must be divorced from concrete reality to the extent
that it can be stated without reference to the particular phenomena being

investigated; and yet it must be a reflection of observations made by
empirically oriented observers, not a whole-cloth invention of the armchair
philosopher.
A DEVELOPMENTAL ANALYSIS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIAL SCIENCE
Anthropology Psychology
Stage 1 (1900-1920) Empirical approach: Empirical approach: Watson

Malinowski,Boas (behaviorist)
Philosophical approach: Philosophical approach:

Durkheim Wundt(introspectionist)
Transitional Phase Mauss and Radcliffe- Wertheimer, Kohler, and Freud

(1920-1935) Brown
Linguistics as Catalyst Phenomenology as Negative Example
Stage 2 (1935- Structural approach: Levi- Structural approach: Piaget

present) Strauss
In our structural analysis of the French intellectual tradition, we first
reviewed the major historical currents, then attempted to tease out those
features which appeared representative of the underlying “structure” of
thought. Next we composed a model which incorporated synchronic and
diachronic aspects of the domain, and which also had a certain predictive
power. This model may be said to have an independent existence—that is to
say, it can be expressed in purely formal language, equally applicable to the
structure of Russian intellectual thought or the metabolic cycle of a

vertebrate. If we term the synchronic factor k, the diachronic reversible
factors a and b, and the diachronic irreversible factor x, x+i, x + 2, etc., we end
up with the following abstract (or formal) model, upon which it is possible to
perform a set of operations and hypothetical experiments:21
Time 1 Time 2 Time 3 Time 4
Synchronic factor k k k k
Diachronic reversible factor a b a b
Diachronic irreversible factor x x+1 x+2 x+3
We may presume that Piaget and Levi-Strauss were sensitive not only to
the synchronic and diachronic aspects of the French intellectual tradition but
also to the dominant trends in the social science of their time. Possessed of
wide-ranging and synthetic intellects, they not only assimilated the work of
their predecessors (with whom they had agreements as well as
disagreements) but were also attuned to the more general intellectual and

social developments of the period. We shall conclude this introductory
discussion by describing two of the most prominent of these developments, to
which Piaget and Levi-Strauss reacted in instructive ways.
During the early part of the present century the so-called
phenomenological school of philosophy gained prominence in Europe, owing

primarily to the innovative writings of Edmund Husserl.22 The
phenomenologists rejected(or, to use Husserl’s term, “bracketed”) much of

the history of philosophy andnearly all of current psychology, arguing
vigorously that one must begin any analysis with one’s own “phenomenal”
experience, one’s own living reaction to events, persons, objects, the
immediate givens of life. Unlike the introspectionists, who had minimized the
value of raw, unanalyzed consciousness and stressed the need for trained
self-observation, the phenomenologists honored spontaneous and uncritical
human responses. The phenomenological perspective included a radical
critique of science, which was viewed as introducing unnecessary and

artificial bifurcations and divisions into human experience, creating barriers
between subjects and objects, becoming embroiled in futile terminological

disputes, deductive entanglements, and “facts,”instead of confirming the
essential nature and unity of experience. As all perception, even that of the
logician or physicist, must begin with momentary experiences, scientists were
suppressing the crucial dimension of experience—the intuition of essences—
in their preoccupation with concepts, models, and ideal states. For the
phenomenologists, one’s perception of the self and the body was central;
interest inhered in the content of objects, in essential qualities, in the
appearance of things: intention, organization, directedness, attractiveness
were accepted as valid phenomena which required no demonstration except,

perhaps,to satisfy stubborn scientists.
As they did with Bergson, Piaget and Levi-Strauss seem to have taken
phenomenology seriously and to have read its major proponents carefully,
but finally to have rejected it with some decisiveness as preventing a
serious,objective, and controlled study of any occurrence. Piaget asked how

one could determine, except through experimental scientific means, that
individuals actually had the same experiences and, if they did, how these
came about. Levi-Strauss questioned the egocentrism of those who placed

their own experiences at the center of their philosophy. More generally, both
men, after having been enamored of philosophy in their adolescence, became
deeply suspicious of the whole philosophical enterprise. As Levi-Strauss

commented, in a characteristically harsh judgment on the possibilities of
philosophical analysis:
It is necessary that the philosophers who have long enjoyed a sort of

privileged position because one recognizes their right to speak on all
topics begin to resign themselves to the fact that many matters of research
escape the realm of philosophy. ... we are witnesses to a sort of
dismemberment of the field of philosophy. Maintaining the requirements
of all or none has led to a sclerosis of social science.23

Indeed, phenomenology served to some extent as a negative example,whose
seductive beckonings must be resisted by the serious social scientist.While it
would be ill-advised (and perhaps impossible) to ignore one’s personal
impressions of a phenomenon, no scientist could afford to rest his case on this
sort of evidence.
While forming increasingly severe opinions regarding the practice of
philosophy in the absence of confirming or disconfirming facts, Piaget and
Levi-Strauss looked with much greater interest and favor upon developments
in the field of linguistics. Linguistic study had been an active enterprise at the
time of Descartes, and had made considerable progress since then; but by the
latter part of the nineteenth century the principal schools were bogged down
in the mindless and uncritical collection of details about different linguistic
stocks, as well as unproductive studies of comparative grammar, the
etymology of words, the origin of human language, the slight changes in

language across geographical boundaries. So preoccupied with minutiae and
bereft of convincing documentation were many of these inquiries that the

Cercle linguistique de Paris actually forbade papers on the origin of language
in the closing years of the century.
As a result of the pioneering work of a Genevan linguist, Ferdinand de
Saussure, a revolution occurred in the study of language.24 Just around the

time the more farsighted anthropologists were discovering the uselessness of
historical and diffusionist inquiries which could never be confirmed or
refuted, Saussure was rejecting most of the evolutionary and comparative
pursuits of his colleagues. He called, instead, for a study of language as a
separate, distinct system with its own rules and properties which could be
discovered by careful examination of language per se, without reference to
historical, geographical, economic, or other “extra-linguistic” factors. Even as
chess can be understood through a mastery of the rules, and the relative
strength of given players by a study of a particular game, so language can be

analyzed exclusively in terms of its systematic regularities.
Saussure made many enduring contributions to the study of
language.He argued that the purpose of linguistics was to discover principles
operative in all languages; these in turn could be drawn on to explain the

differences among language stocks and historical eras. He demonstrated that
language was an orderly, coherent, “collective” phenomenon. Above all,
Saussure stressed that linguistic analysis involved determination of the

relationships among basic elements; units were devoid of structure when
isolated and could only be defined by their relations with one another;
whatever distinguished a unit or sign from others in the set of units defined it.
“In languages.” asserted Saussure. “there are only differences.” Just as, in a
chess game, a piece has meaning only in relation to all the other pieces, and
any slab of wood so designated can represent that piece, so, in language, a
part of speech is defined only in relation to other parts or signs and a concept

may be represented by any available sound.
A generation of linguistic scholars took inspiration from Saussure’s

reorientation of the field. Foremost among them was Roman Jakobson, a
brilliant, prolific Russian scholar who, like Marcel Mauss of the Durkheimian
school, attempted to preserve what was most valuable in his master’s

tradition while sifting out those aspects which did not prove viable. Jakobson
and his associates searched for the basic building blocks of a language, the
qualities of the emitted sound which they termed “distinctive features.” Once
the distinctive features in a domain were isolated and defined, more complex
linguistic entities could be described simply as a combination of a certain set
of distinctive features.25 After years of painstaking inquiry, the followers of

Saussure postulated a small set of a dozen or so distinctive features required
to produce a sound; these features could, when combined in various

ways,account exhaustively for all sounds used in the languages of the world.
Such a remarkable simplification of what had appeared an unmanageable
babble was recognized as a significant achievement by workers in many
fields, and served as a model for other linguists who aspired to simplify the
realm of syntax and semantics in a comparable way.
The resurgence of interest in language and in linguistics had
reverberations throughout the social sciences. Investigators began to
examine the differences among various kinds of natural and formal language,
the operation of linguistic and nonlinguistic symbols, the relationship
between language and thought. Interest in these “semiotic” questions
attracted such diverse workers as Freud, Cassirer, Boas, Malinowski,
Durkheim, and Wundt; indeed, Mauss held that the key to cultural analysis lay
in a comprehension of the laws of language.26 Not surprisingly, incisive

practitioners of the social sciences like Piaget and Levi-Strauss became
interested in the problems of language; and while their enthusiasm for
phenomenology had been short-lived,they were sufficiently impressed by the
work of the linguists to base their early work on linguistic questions and
models.27
What was it about the study of language that so attracted French social
scientists during the early years of this century? Language was clearly a
phenomenon which was central to the human mind, and one which had
intrigued their predecessors, from Descartes to Bergson Saussure and his
followers had now shown that language could be studied in isolation from
other cultural products,that it was analyzable into systemic elements which
could be defined independently, that one could examine the way in which
these basic elements were combined in order to produce complex sounds and
utterances and meanings.The domain of language was clearly part of the
human realm; and yet, more so than the other social or human sciences,
linguistics had moved toward the model of the physical sciences: it was
possible to devise abstract formal models of underlying linguistic structures,

to relate disparate phenomena in this way,and to apply such theoretical
models to empirical data collected from diverse sources. By treating language
as a set of signs, the analyst obtained objectively determinable units and
operations upon which he could base his conclusions; and the prospect then
arose that actions, perceptions, and thought itself could be systematically
studied along the same lines. It was the promise of studying behavioral and
cultural phenomena in a rigorous manner, of developing testable models of

pivotal processes, that was most appealing to the young Piaget and Levi-
Strauss; the strides made by the linguists inspired them in their efforts to
found a structuralist social science.
Notes
1 The first quotation from Descartes is found in his Discourse on Method (New York: Dutton,1951), p.
66, the second comes from his sixth meditation in Meditations on Philosophy (New York:
Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 79.
2 The “articles of faith” held by most Americans have been specified by various commentators,
including A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York:Vintage, 1954); R.
Williams, American Society (New York: Knopf, 1956); M. Lerner, America as a Civilization
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957). More recently, interest has centered on the gap
between the ideals expressed by most Americans and the reality of contemporary life.
See, for example, C. W. Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951); H.
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); M. Harrington, The Other
America (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
3 For an extreme statement of the environmentalist position, see B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and
Dignity (New York: Knopf, 1971).
4 Many aspects of traditional French society are described in S. Hoffman et al., In Search of France
(Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard Univ. Press, 1963).
5 Descartes’ principal ideas are put forth in his Discourse on Method (New York: Dutton, 1951) and in
his Meditation on First Philosophy (New York: Liberal Arts Press,1960).
6 Rousseau’s major works includeThe Social Contract (New York:Hafner, 1947); The First and Second
Discourses (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964); and Emile (New York: Dutton, 1962). His
model of the state of nature is put forth in The Social Contract,from which the brief
quotation is taken. Levi-Strauss has already written one essay on Rousseau in Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (Neuchatel Baconniere, 1962) and is presently working on a lengthier
homage.
7 Comte’s boast is found in M. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Crowell, 1968), p.
61. This book provides a useful, if somewhat doctrinaire, introduction to the early
history of social-scientific thought.
8 Of the early social thinkers, Durkheim has, deservedly, been the most carefully studied. Excellent
essays by a variety of authors appear in K. Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim (Columbus: Ohio
State Univ. Press, 1960). Other studies include H.S. Hughes, Consciousness and
Society(New York: Vintage, 1961), and T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1937). Durkheim’s most important works are The Elementary Forms
of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965), Suicide (New York: Free Press,1951), and
The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964).
9 Bergson's examination of the experiential flux is found in An Introduction to Metaphysics (Totowa,

N.J.: Littlefield Adams, 1965), p. 16.His other philosophical works include Creative
Evolution (New York: Holt, 1911) and Matter and Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
A helpful introduction to Bergson's orientation can be found in H. S. Hughes.
Consciousness and Society (New York: Vintage, 1961), pp. 113-24.
10 The terminology used in this preliminary structural analysis comes from linguistic study, in
particular from the works of Ferdinand de Saussurc, Course in General Linguistics (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), R. Jakobson. Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (The Hague:Mouton,
1962), and N. Troubetzkoy, Grundzugeder Phonologic (Prague: 1939). It has been
appropriated by Levi-Strauss and others who seek to apply the methods of structural
linguistics to other areas of study.

11 Such a scheme has many weaknesses, of course.One risks leaving out important figures, forces, or
counterforces,oversimplifying the complexity of a man’s thought, ignoring factors which
have both reversible and irreversible facets. Conversely, as further subtleties are
introduced into the scheme, its economy and simplicity are threatened.
12 For pioneering investigations of the development of scientific thought, see: J. Piaget. Introduction a
l’epistemologie genetique(Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1950), T. Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), M. Foucault. The Order of
Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970). Some of the articles and general histories of social
science on which the present account draws are: G. Allport.“The Historical Background of
Modern Social Psychology.’’ in G. Lindzey (eel.),Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol.
1(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. 1954). pp. 3-56; A. Kardiner and E. Preble, They
Studied Man (New York: Mentor,1962); M. Harris. The Rise of Anthropological Theory
(New York: Crowell, 1968); E. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology(New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950); H. S. Hughes. Consciousness and Society (New York:
Vintage. 1961); D. Sills(ed.), various biographical articles in The International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan.1968); L. Bramson. The Political
Context of Sociology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1961): E. Boring. Sensation and
Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1942).
13 John Watson's environmentalist claim appeared in Behaviorism (New York: Norton, 1930), p.104. A
useful introduction to the theory and methodology of behaviorism is H. Rachlin.
Introduction to Modern Behaviorism(San Francisco: Freeman. 1970). Discussions of the
pros and cons of behaviorism appear in N. Wann (ed.). Behaviorism and Phenomenology
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964).
14 Gestalt psychology is effectively presented in W. Kohler, Gestalt Psychology (New York:Mentor,

1947), and an exhaustive account of its postulates appears in Kurt Koffka’s classic text
Principles ofGestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt, 1935). A sympathetic critique of
this school appears in J. Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence (Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield
Adams, 1963), Chapter 3.
15 Freud’s individual works are too familiar and too numerous to mention. The standard biography is
E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953).Two
excellent critical introductions are P. Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York:
Anchor Books, 1961) and P. Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York:
Knopf, 1968).
16 This judgment is perhaps unduly harsh, in view of the fact that contemporary psychology has yet to
resolve most of the issues involved. Yet it seems fair to credit the structuralist school
with a greater sensitivity to these problems and, perhaps, with genuine progress toward
their resolution.
17 Boas’s ideas and influence can be gleaned from his monumental General Anthropology(Boston:
Heath, 1938). See also A. L. Kroeber et al., Franz Boas 1858-1942, American
Anthropological Association Memoir Series, 1943, no. 61.
18 Malinowski’s approach is conveyed in a number of monographs, among them The Argonauts of the
Western Pacific (New York: Dutton, 1964); Crime and Custom in Savage Society (New
York: Harcourt Brace,1926); The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1929). Malinowski’s description of the ethnographer’s goals is
found in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, p. 25.
19 The quotation from Mauss comes from The Gift (New York: Norton, 1967), pp.78-9. His essays are
collected in Sociologie et anthropologic (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1950), which has
a lengthy and perspicacious introduction by his follower, Claude Levi-Strauss. A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown’s views on social structure are found in Structure and Function in
Primitive Society(Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1952).
20 A caveat to be entered here is that the determination of stages and transitional points in a
developmental analysis is a delicate problem. What from one point of view is a new stage
may, when examined more closely, be only an elaboration of a previous stage, or a
transitional phase. What is needed is an independent definition of stages and transitions;
yet this is difficult to achieve, since every observer brings to the task his own peculiar
perspective. No doubt, later histories of this period, even if they recognize the
importance of the structuralist movement, will see it as an imperfect and transitional
phase,rather than as a high point of social-scientific thought.
21 The example of a model expressed in purely formal language is a trivially simple one, but there is no
reason why a model of great complexity cannot be developed. Naturally the analyst
attempts to devise the simplest model consistent with all the relevant empirical and
logical considerations.

22 Husserl’s most influential work is his Logical Investigations (New York:Humanities Press, 1970).
Merleau-Ponty, a contemporary of Piaget and Levi-Strauss,wrote The Phenomenology of
Perception(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), and The Structure of Behavior
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
23Levi-Strauss’s critical remarks concerning philosophy appear in an interview with R. Bellour, in Les
Lettres franfaises, no. 1165 (1967). See also his assessment of existentialism in S. de
Gramont, "There Are No Superior Societies,” in CL-S, p. 21.
24 Saussure’s lectures were published posthumously in Course in General Linguistics (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1966). Jakobson’s writings are now appearing in a standard edition,
Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). The best introduction to his work is Essais
de linguistique generate (Paris:Editions de Minuit, 1963).
25 The theory of distinctive features had to overcome considerable resistance from the older schools of
linguists before it finally won broad acceptance. Even as linguistics was the first
structuralist science, however, its structuralist tenets are now being challenged by a
newer, more "dynamic,” school of investigation.
26 Among the most notable studies of symbols and symbol systems are: S. Langer, Philosophy in a New
Key (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1942); E. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press,1953); B. Whorf, Language, Thought and
Reality(New York: Wiley, 1956); N. Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1968); C. Peirce, Philosophical Writings (J. Buchler, ed.) (New York: Dover,
1955);C. Morris, Signs, Language and Behavior(New York: Prentice-Hall, 1946).
27 Levi-Strauss’s debt to linguistics is spelled out explicitly in several essays—for example,“Language

and the Analysis of Social Laws” and “Linguistics and Anthropology,”both reprinted in
SA, Part I. Piaget's debt to linguistics is less often articulated; but see his Play, Dreams
and Imitation (New York: Norton, 1951), and his address “Psychology,Interdisciplinary
Relations, and the System of Sciences,” delivered at the XVIIIth Meeting of the
International Congress of Psychology, Moscow, 1966, in which he remarked (p. 27) that
"Linguistics is undoubtedly the most advanced of the social sciences, both by virtue of its
theoretical structures and by the precision of its knowledge.”
II
The Architects of Structuralism

3
Piaget
Things and slates are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming.There
are no things, there are only actions.
-BERGSON1
In a word, in the beginning there teas action, as Goethe said; then came
operation.
–PIAGET2
In 1916 a brilliant and sensitive young biologist spent a year in the
Swiss Alps, recovering from a condition of nervous exhaustion (what today
might be termed an identity crisis). To pass the time and to collect his
thoughts, he composed a novel Recherche(“Search”) which was published two
years later, when he was twenty-two years-old. In it, he recorded the conflicts
felt by a young Catholic concerning the relationship between religion and
science, and, with Comtean hauteur, proposed a general synthesis of

knowledge. The major part of the novel consisted of a lengthy and wide-
ranging tract reviewing, questioning, and criticizing the principal
philosophical and scientific views of the time on the nature of life and
experience. The work dwelt in particular on the nature of the relationship
between part and whole in organic life, the concept of type-of-species, and the
meaning of organismic equilibrium:
Now there can be no awareness of these qualities, hence these qualities

cannot exist, if there are no relationships among them, if they are not,
consequently, blended into a total quality which contains them, while
keeping them distinct. For example, I would not be aware either of the
whiteness of this paper or of the blackness of this ink if the two qualities
were not combined in my consciousness into a certain unit and if. in spite
of this writing, they did not remain respectively one white and the other
black; in this originates the equilibrium between the qualities.3
Neither the style nor the message of the novel was of a sort destined to
win a wide public, and with the exception of one or two philosophers who
expressed indignation at the author’s stance, Recherche was ignored and
forgotten,even by its author. Looking back at it several decades later,
however, Jean Piaget could comment that nearly all the ideas which were to
guide his subsequent research had been raised in some form in this idle
exercise of his spiritual Wanderjahre.
What had led to the composition of this adolescent work? Jean Piaget
was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in 1896, son of a student of medieval
literature who was the historian of Neuchatel, and of an intelligent and

kind,though rather neurotic, mother. With a father of a systematic and critical
bent, and a mother who was frequently ill, the son became a serious and
industrious child who displayed scholarly promise at a remarkably early age.
He enjoyed collecting various kinds of natural objects, such as fossils and

seashells, and was avidly involved in mechanics and bird-watching. At age ten

he saw a partly albino sparrow in a park and sent a description of it to a
natural history journal in Neuchatel. The article was published—and, in
Piaget’s words,“I was launched.”
On the basis of this find, the still-preadolescent Piaget became an
assistant to the curator of Neuchatel’s natural history museum. There he
mastered the biological system of species classification and the methods for
handling exhibits. During his “spare time” he collected molluscs, and within a
few years became an expert in “malocology,” publishing widely in this area
during his early teens. (Piaget reminisces that foreign colleagues wanted to
meet him, and job offers were tendered, but that he always had to decline
these overtures, lest the other party discover his extreme youth.) The articles
written at this time were rather primitive, but Piaget was subsequently
grateful that this early scientific experience had shored him up against the
seductive lures of philosophy.
The years 1911-1916 were a time of deep inner crisis for Piaget. He
found himself unable to reconcile the dogmatic religious teachings he had

absorbed with his more recently acquired scientific credo. At the age of
fifteen, he went to visit his godfather, a Romansh man of letters, who taught
him some philosophy and, in particular, exposed him to Bergson.
Piaget alludes to his first encounter with Bergson’s work with awe: “It
was an emotional shock; I recall an evening of profound revelation.” Well
prepared for the encounter, he found that Bergson’s writings addressed his
own need to fit questions about life, religion, and the natural sciences into an
overall, integrated world-view. For the first time, he could see that God was
identified with life and that biology might be drawn on to resolve

philosophical dilemmas. Biology furnished an explanation of all things,
including the mind itself.
For a time, Piaget subscribed to the Bergsonian view of knowledge.But
he soon came to see epistemological problems in Bergson’s approach; in
particular, he discerned a need for a rigorous experimental science as a

bridge between Bergson’s casual Darwinism and his analysis of knowledge
and intelligence, between biological investigations and the study of mind.
Piaget feverishly resumed his reading, as well as writing, in philosophy

and science, while simultaneously pursuing a varied course of study at the
university. He ardently perused the works of, among others, Spencer,Comte,
Darwin, and William James. Eventually, this regimen proved too much for
him, and he was compelled to take off a year in 1916 to go live in the
mountains. He had already acquired his lifelong habit of thinking issues out
by writing, and so kept numerous notebooks of his intellectual

development.Several such notebooks, as well as the novel Recherche and
some still-unpublished tracts were products of this period.

From his year of reflection, Piaget seems to have emerged with his
physical and spiritual equilibrium restored. Returning to school, he
completed his degree in biology and philosophy under the direction of a
mathematical philosopher, Arnold Reymond, the teacher he most frequently
mentions as a formative influence in his thought. Through his work with
Reymond, Piaget reached a crucial insight: the activity of an organism can be
described or treated logically, and logic itself stems from a sort of

spontaneous organization of activity. At this time he also formulated the
notion that all organisms consist of structures—i.e., of parts related within a
whole— and that all knowledge is an assimilation of a given external into the
structures of the subject. He concluded that the sense of balance or resolution

evident at various intellectual levels corresponds to the biological necessity
for equilibration or autoregulation of structures in every domain of life. All of
these ideas were to recur in Piaget’s writings over the next half-century.
Thus, by the age of twenty or so, Piaget had already set up the program
he would pursue in the future. He was interested in the relation between

biology and logic and regarded human psychology as the essential
link,humans being indubitably part of the biological world and yet also the
practitioners and source of logical thought. Piaget thought that he would

spend a few years studying psychology and then return to his first loves,
biology and logic. Although he was to fulfill much of this program eventually,
his scheduling estimates were somewhat off.
As Piaget felt deeply that his nascent system of knowledge was
worthless unless it could be put to an experimental test, he elected to go to
Paris, where he could acquire the necessary experimental and clinical
methodology. He took courses in clinical psychology at the Sorbonne, learned
to interview mental patients, and also audited courses on aspects of sensory
psychology, perception, and the epistemological foundations of psychology.
He was then recommended to Theodore Simon, who had worked with Alfred
Binet, creator of the first intelligence tests. Simon hired Piaget to standardize
some psychological tests and, perhaps sensing the latter’s potential, placed an
entire school at his disposal.4
Binet had posed many kinds of questions to young children and had set
up preliminary performance norms. For example, he determined that an
average three-year-old could repeat three digits, identify a picture of a

cow,and string beads. An average six-year-old could recognize objects
represented in an incomplete picture, trace a simple maze, and define an
orange; a nine-year-old could resolve verbal absurdities, field simple
arithmetical questions, and give rhyming words; a thirteen-year-old could
repeat five words correctly, assemble sentences with the words out of order,
and correctly answer questions of this sort: Edith is taller than Susan; Susan
is taller than Lilly;who is taller, Edith or Lilly? Piaget’s task was to ask
children such questions and to determine more precisely at what age most
children were able to handle the question. Piaget modified the standard

methods used in intelligence testing by applying the clinical method of
interviewing he had learned in working with mental patients. Instead of
merely recording a response, he encouraged the child to reason about the
problem.
While engaged in this project, Piaget happened upon the insight for
which he is most renowned. He found that children at certain ages not only
gave wrong answers to questions but also exhibited qualitatively different
ways of reasoning. The young child was neither “dumber” nor just a few steps
behind the older one; rather, lie thought about things in a wholly different
way,possessing a distinctive conception of the world that was manifested in
every application of his reasoning power, whatever its object, and that could
be elicited through judicious questioning. This deceptively unimposing

conclusion(so simple, said Einstein upon learning of it, that only a genius
could think of it) was to be explored by Piaget in literally thousands of
investigations over the course of the next half-century.
Piaget studied children’s conceptions of number and of cause and effect
at Simon’s laboratory and wrote up his results in three lengthy articles. The
third of these he sent to Eduard Claparede, a leading Swiss psychologist, who

was so impressed by it that he offered the twenty-five-year-old scholar a
position as director of studies at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in

Geneva, the principal Swiss center of research in the field of genetic
psychology. Piaget accepted the offer and initiated many further studies of
young children during his first years at the Institute. Within a short time after
his arrival there, he had published five major works.5 He was destined to have
a worldwide reputation by the age of thirty and an honorary doctorate from
Harvard just before his fortieth birthday.
Surprisingly, Piaget’s reputation did not continue its rapid ascent after
this first spate of publications. Instead, the early monographs remained the
chief basis of his reputation for the next quarter-century, long after he had
ventured into other areas of knowledge and indeed had repudiated certain
aspects of his early work. Only in the 1960’s, after Piaget had been by-passed
for many years by the principal psychological schools, was there a resurgence
of interest in his pioneering research.
Because Piaget’s published works are so numerous and so widely

dispersed—he has written or coauthored some fifty volumes, and many
hundreds of articles—any effort to give a comprehensive summary of his

lifework would be futile. It is likely that, except for his closest associates,
there is no one who has read all of this vast output, and, unless someone
should deliberately set himself the task of compiling it, it is unlikely that
anyone else ever will. However understandable, this is quite unfortunate, for
to understand him fully, it is necessary to follow him in all his twists and
turns, his repetitions,his slight and not-so-slight revisions of his earlier work.6

Piaget is a superbly disciplined individual who spends several hours
each day taking long walks, during which he organizes his thoughts, which
are then written down on the same or the following day, in his neat,
somewhat cramped script. He is especially given to writing in airports, where
one is unlikely to be disturbed, and will often arrive at an airport several
hours before departure so that he can have an uninterrupted bloc of time in
which to work. During the summer months he retreats to a hideaway

somewhere in the Alps where he takes long walks, collects shells, and writes
page after page, usually producing at least one book or monograph during
this estivation.
For Piaget, writing is a form—or better, an extension— of thinking.As a
psychologist he believes that thought builds upon itself, that attempts to work
and rework a problem hold promise of yielding greater insight, that each
fresh formulation of a position may integrate more of the relevant data into
an increasingly comprehensive framework. Piaget is faithful to this view in
his writings, which are filled with fresh returns to points raised earlier, each
revision expanding the given formulation to accommodate a new finding or
setting the formulation in relation to a competing or complementary point of
view. Attempts to skim what appears to be a rehash of an old Piagetian

argument are frequently brought up short as Piaget introduces a new
observation which directs the argument along unanticipated and rewarding

lines. Piaget views action as the source of knowledge, and for him thinking,
reading, and writing are all and equally forms of action. During the act of
writing, Piaget’s own thoughts become clear to him; by additional thinking
and writing, these thoughts and ideas become ever further clarified and
integrated.
This distinctive approach to intellectual creativity imposes itself upon

all who would hope to grasp Piaget’s work. There is, alas, no royal road to
mastery of Piaget. His viewpoint is a radically novel one, and, consistent with
his theory of how knowledge builds and changes, it is not possible to learn
this new way of looking through a three-point program or a simple negation

of previous views. When a child first learns that the earth revolves around the
sun, he is confronted with an idea counter to his common sense but an idea
which, once accepted, can readily be incorporated into his world-

view.Piaget’s revolution, however, does not allow itself to be expressed or
understood simply; and citing his views with approval while simultaneously
embracing a contradictory position is a common phenomenon. Certainly the

best,and possibly the only, way to appreciate the full subtlety of Piaget’s ideas
is to read and reread, again and again, his principal writings. In doing this, one
is essentially recapitulating the procedure used by Piaget in thinking and in
writing; putting forth the major ideas, at first vaguely, then exploring their
ramifications, pondering them in the perspective of other views, attempting
to square them with one’s own views about cognition.

Having issued such caveats, one can perhaps now be overly bold and
attempt to list Piaget’s cardinal ideas in a few pages. As we later proceed to
examine some of his specific contributions in greater detail, the latent
implications of these rapidly outlined views may gradually emerge.
Piaget began his life’s work as a biologist, and he remains deeply

committed to the study of organic life. Like others of his time, he was deeply
influenced by Darwinian evolutionary theory, and in fact came to believe that
processes and states should be understood in terms of their developmental
course. An early experiment convinced Piaget, however, that Darwin’s
account of natural selection was too simple.7 Piaget placed some aquatic
molluscs which had the normal elongated shape into the great lakes of
Switzerland—bodies of water far more turbulent than their customary homes
in the marshes of Europe and Asia. Through motoric adjustments during the
period of growth to the rough movement of the water, a new breed of mollusc
developed which was globular in shape and more resistant to the currents of
the water. When this mollusc was placed into a calmer body of water,
however, it retained the new, globular shape. Piaget interpreted this result as
indicating that, rather than merely being subject to chance mutations, the
structure of an organism has the potential to develop in diverse ways,

depending on the eliciting circumstances of the environment. Adaptation to
new conditions involves an active restructuring and accommodation to the
environment on the part of the organism which may result in a lasting
alteration of form. Organisms have the capacity to respond to stress, and the
results of the exercise of this capacity will be manifest in succeeding
generations.
By analogy, Piaget reasoned that an organism’s intelligence was
embodied in a series of structures with latent tendencies for development,

which could be brought out by appropriate interaction with the
environment.8 But, again, the organism was not a passive reflector but rather
possessed active potentialities which could unfold to a greater or lesser
extent,depending upon the nature of the interaction with the environment.
Piaget, seeking the essential property or capacity of

organisms,concluded that it was action. A paramecium swims, respires,
excretes, assimilates food; an infant sucks, cries,exhibits reflexes,
incorporates food. Although casual talk treats feeling,thinking, seeing, or
understanding as discrete processes, the scientist must appreciate that they
are all and equally forms of action. Whatever development occurs in an
organism must involve the mastery of the current repertoire of actions, and
the combining of actions into new, more complex actions. The order and pace
with which this process unfolds are functions both of the extent of the
organism’s interaction with the environment and of the organism’s own
“equilibrating processes.’’ That is, the emergence of a new form of action —

for example, walking—results from the organism’s being placed repeatedly in

situations where walking would be adaptive, the maturing of certain muscles
and nerve fibers, and the self-regulating nature of the organism, which at
certain determinable points produces spurts of growth and emergence of new
activity while giving rise at other times to periods of consolidation or stasis.
Piaget’s view of action differed markedly from the customary view of
motion or random activity. He saw action as potentially intelligent; thus, an

organism that used a stick to reach an object it could not grasp by hand would
be exhibiting intelligent action. In addition, Piaget saw action as susceptible to
logical treatment. That is, he maintained that one could observe a series of
actions undertaken by an organism and then extrapolate the reasoning
process involved in its actions, ferret out the intellectual structure implicitly
reflected in the action, even set up a logical model of what had happened. If a
child consistently followed a certain route to and from a park, but returned
home one day by a different route, which could be inferred from previous
activities,Piaget would attempt to map the logical structure necessary for this
novel and intelligent action to have taken place.
The contention that action may be intelligent should be plausible to any
parent or pet-owner; but the claim that all thought or intellectual functioning
is itself action seems counter to common sense. After all, in reading a book,
watching a movie, or solving a problem, one is clearly engaging in thinking,

and yet it is difficult to discern actions, other than the trivial moving of eyes
or lifting of pencil. Piaget intends no such self-evident point.He argues, rather,
that all mental states involve a form of implicit activity upon the world, and
that the capacity to “think” questions through in one’s head would not exist in
the absence of a developmental history in which one has performed physical

actions upon the environment.
Although support for this position will have to await further elucidation,
now is an appropriate time to introduce a crucial term in the Piagetian
armamentum: mental operation.All thinking involves, for Piaget, a series of
mental operations, and these operations are simply internalized actions and
sequences of actions. The child who appreciates that one ball has the same
amount of clay as another that has been altered in shape is demonstrating the
capacity to perform an operation of reversibility. Piaget maintains that such a

problem could not be correctly solved unless the child is able, in his own
mind, to roll the distorted clay back into its original shape, and to confirm that
the two balls thus procured are the same size. Since the clay cannot
simultaneously assume two different shapes, the child must reason in his
mind. Thus, reasoning involves implicit action—hence the term “mental

operation.” Of course, for the mature adult such an operation may not reveal
itself to casual introspection, since the idea of equivalence over

transformation is so firmly established that a rote formula suffices for an
answer. Not so for the young child, whose evolution from as tage where he
does not recognize the equivalence of the two balls to one where he insists

upon it is directly dependent upon his capacity to carry out an operation of
reversibility, i.e., implicitly or mentally returning the transformed ball to its
original shape.
From his observations and experiments with children, Piaget has
deduced three principal stages through which normal individuals in Western

culture pass in their march to intellectual maturity. The sensorimotor stage,
which runs its course in infancy, involves the child’s increasing mastery of his
actions in a world of objects. By the end of the period he exhibits a “practical
intelligence’’: he is able to demonstrate,through the manner of his

interactions with things and persons, that he has a sense of space, time,
causality, and objects which will enable him to negotiate his way successfully
around his environment.
During the years following infancy, called variously the preoperational,
intuitive, semiotic, or representational stage, the child evolves toward the
possession of concrete operations. The capacities evolved during the

sensorimotor stage in direct contact with objects are now achieved on an
implicit plane—that is, he no longer needs to “go through the motions” in
order to test a possible action. By the conclusion of this period, during the
elementary-school years, he will no longer have to assume another person’s
seat in order to see how the world looks to that person. Rather, he will be able
to switch perspectives mentally, to form a representation of the view from the
other chair. The term “concrete”here indicates that the child is continuing to
work in his mind with concrete materials, with objects, physical states,
persons and so on; the “operational”aspect involves his implicit actions upon
those objects which he is manipulating mentally.
The final broad phase of mental evolution is termed by Piaget the stage
of formal operations. This is generally attained sometime between the ages of

twelve and fifteen, and involves the capacity to carry out experiments in a
laboratory and, more broadly, to reason like a practicing scientist, employing
deductive thought.Thus the fifteen year-old, in contrast to the nine-year-old,
can conduct experiments in which he varies factors one at a time, and then
can issue a reasoned judgment about the relevant causal relations. Clearly,
this kind of reasoning is operational, for it involves implicit (and sometimes

explicit)actions upon the environment, in particular such activities as
joining,reversing, and coordinating. The operations are called formal
because,increasingly, the child is operating not upon the world of objects but
rather upon verbal or symbolic characterizations of this world—upon
linguistic,logical, or “formal” propositions. The child’s starting point is not the

object itself, or even an implicit action upon an object, but rather a statement
or possible statements about the object which the child weighs against one
another, and performs operations upon. Thus, the child trying to judge which
of three girls is tallest evaluates the propositions with respect to one another
and draws the appropriate conclusion. Piaget believes that he can specify the

logical operations which the child at the level of formal operations is capable
of performing; validation of this claim, which is still awaited, would serve as a
powerful confirmation of his theory.
Three broad trends characterize the child’s mental development in
childhood. The first is the decline of egocentrism. The young child is, in
Piaget’s terms, totally egocentric—meaning not that he thinks selfishly only
about himself, but to the contrary, that he is incapable of thinking about
himself.9 The egocentric child is unable to differentiate himself from the rest
of the world; he has not separated himself out from others or from
objects.Thus he feels that others share his pain or his pleasure, that his
mumblings will inevitably be understood, that his perspective is shared by all
persons,that even animals and plants partake of his consciousness. In playing
hide-and-seek he will “hide” in broad view of other persons, because his

egocentrism prevents him from recognizing that others are aware of his
location. The whole course of human development can be viewed as a
continuing decline in egocentrism, until death or senility occurs.
A second trend in the child’s mental growth is the tendency toward
internalization or interiorization of thought. The infant either solves

problems by his activity upon the world or he does not solve them at all. The
older child, on the other hand, can achieve many intellectual breakthroughs
without overt physical actions. He is able to realize these actions
implicitly,through concrete and formal operations.
Finally, a growing child increasingly relies upon various kinds of

symbols—words, pictures, mathematical or artistic concepts. The child of two
is able to use words and other symbols as accompaniments to his physical
actions,and before long he becomes able to replace overt actions with
symbolic representations of them. Such use of symbols is an extremely

powerful aid to thought, and its emergence has been designated the dynamic
characteristic of the preoperational, or intuitive, stage. Thus, the young child
trying to understand the principle governing a pendulum’s trajectory is
restricted to a series of uncoordinated actions on the object which he is
unable to order or assess, while the teenager confronted with the same
problem is able to evaluate the possibilities in some sort of linguistic or

symbolic code, without making hand or pendulum move. Furthermore, when
he finally does begin to manipulate the pendulum, his actions will be guided
by the logical analysis he has performed and will be perpetually adjusted in

accordance with that program.
Although Piaget’s views on intellectual development were, as we have
suggested, at least latent in his earliest papers and treatises, his mature
formulations rest upon an enormous amount of experimental data
accumulated over many years with the help of many colleagues, foremost
among them Barbel Inhelder. We shall now take a look at each of the three

major periods of Piaget’s work. Throughout we shall, for illustrative purposes,
indicate the ages of the children being examined. It must be emphasized,
however, that any ages given for a developmental phase are very
approximate, at best. What is important for Piaget is not whether a child

reaches the stage of concrete operations at age five or age eight, but only that
the concrete-operational stage must always succeed the preoperational stage,
even as it must always precede the formal-operational stage. It is entirely
possible for a five-year-old to beat a more advanced stage than a six-year-old;

what is not possible is for the child to skip a stage, or to vary the normal order
of progression through the successive stages.
1. CLINICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF THE CHILD’S WORLD-VIEW
Piaget’s earliest series of studies, for which he was catapulted to fame,

dealt with the world-view of children aged four to twelve. This age range was
a fertile one to study, because the four-year-old, a fluent speaker, could
convey to the experimenter his notions about many realms of activity, yet
these notions were markedly divergent from those of somewhat older

children, and so the egocentrism of the young could be readily seen.
In the research that formed the basis of his very first book, Piaget
sought to uncover the young child’s intellectual level by focusing on his use
and understanding of language. He told a simple fairy tale to children and
asked them to repeat the tale to others. From these repetitions, Piaget was
able to measure the child’s own understanding of the story—could here
capitulate the major points? did he comprehend the underlying message?—
and the child’s capacity to appreciate the amount of information another child
would need to “get” the story. Here is a sample story:
Once upon a time there was a lady who was called Niobe and who had 12
sons and 12 daughters. She met a fairy who had only one son and no
daughter.Then the lady laughed at the fairy because the fairy had only one
boy. Then the fairy was very angry and fastened the lady to a rock. The
lady cried for ten years. In the end she turned into a rock, and her tears
made a stream which still runs today.
Consider now how Gio, aged eight, related the story of Niobe:
Once upon a time there was a lady who had twelve boys and girls and
then a fairy, a boy, and a girl. And then Niobe wanted to have some more sons.
Then she was angry. She fastened her to a stone. He turned into a rock and
then his tears made a stream which is still running today.10
Gio’s protocol would seem to suggest that he understood little, if
anything, of the story: individuals are never distinguished from one
another;sex is mixed up; Niobe is never properly introduced. Yet a series of
questions asked following his telling indicated that in fact he had understood
the story almost perfectly. For example, he knew that the fairy was angry
“because she[Niobe] wanted to have more children than the fairy.” Piaget

indicates thatG io’s problem lay in his “style of talking,” which made it
impossible for someone ignorant of the story to discern which details were
crucial. Gio evidently lacked the ability to assume the listener’s perspective,
i.e., his “egocentric coefficient” was high. It was through such finely honed
investigative techniques that the limitations of children’s speech were
revealed—the fact that a child’s language is often too imprecise to permit
adequate communication and that his level of understanding is not always
reflected in his spontaneous speech.
In addition to revealing that a child’s understanding often exceeds his
skills in communication, Piaget’s study suggested that children aged four to

eight have only an incomplete grasp of logical causality and frequently gave
implausible verbal accounts of causal relations. Piaget examined this question
directly in a companion book, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. He first

reviewed the spontaneous use of the word “because” in children’s discourse,
and found that the word was quite frequently used in what appeared to be an
appropriate sense. For this reason many parents of a six-or seven-year-old
might declare that of course their child knows the meaning of “because.”
When, however, Piaget gave children of this age incomplete sentences and
asked them to supply the endings, he found an inexpert and often erroneous
handling of causal terms. Indeed, the use of “because” varied from its correct
meaning to one akin to “in such a manner that” to another suggesting the
connective “and.” Thus, Sci (aged 7:2) : “A man fell down in the road because
he broke his leg.” Berne (aged 6:6) : “I teased that dog because he bit me.” Don
(6:0) : “I’ve lost my pen because I’m not writing”; “I went for a message
yesterday, because I went on my bike”; and “They are playing music [in the
next room] because you can hear it.”11
Piaget interprets these logical solecisms as a demonstration that the

child does not have a developed sense of causality: the child dimly perceives
that some sort of causal relation obtains, but is likely to blurt out the first idea
that comes into his head, and that is more likely than not to be the
consequence of the act, rather than its cause. He does not ask whether the
connection is causal, consecutive, or logical, but simply expresses the relation
by an available conjunction. He tends to juxtapose rather than examine logical
implications and to impose a syncretislicvision, in which the domain as a

whole is vaguely perceived, but its unique details and their interrelations are
largely overlooked.
Thus far the Piagetian enterprise seemed to emphasize the child’s
linguistic errors, logical immaturities, and egocentric tendencies, rather than

the more positive features of his mental functioning. In the next phase of his
enterprise, however, Piaget focused on the specific: contours of the young

child’s world-view. He did so by applying in his interviews with children the
clinical methods he had used in working with mental patients. For example,
he would ask a child where the sun had come from. Rather than merely

recording the youngster’s answer and moving on to the next question, he
would use the initial response as a point of departure for further discussion
and probing. Taking care not to influence or predetermine responses, lie
would encourage further discussion through nondirective questions or

remarks, such as: What did you mean by that? . . . A little boy told me the other
day that he thought. . . Suppose the sun were to disappear one day . . . Do you
suppose the sun has always been there? There was no set procedure for
questioning, for this would limit the child’s freedom of expression;but there
was a plan of attack for experimenters to follow, and a set of hypotheses
which Piaget hoped his subjects would confirm or disprove. This clinical
method has continued to be used prominently throughout Piaget’s later

studies, and an apprenticeship in its use (which may take a number of years)
is now required of Piaget’s research associates and students.
Characteristically for a scholar reared in the Cartesian tradition,Piaget
began his investigations of the child’s mental universe by probing his notion
of thought. Piaget hypothesized that a being with no clear notion of the
distinction between mind and body, with a less developed sense of self, would
have a different conception of thought from that held by most adults. He then
asked children to tell him their thoughts about thinking.12
During the first stage, many children claim that they think with the
mouth. For example, Mont (7:0) was asked if he knew what it means to
think.When he said he did, he was asked, “What do you think with?” The
mouth. “Can you think with the mouth shut?” No. “With the eyes shut?” Yes.
“With the ears stopped up?” Yes.
Though the child spontaneously introduces the idea that thought comes
from the mouth, he does not hesitate to suggest an external source to thought
as well. Thus, Ratt (8:10) was asked, “Have words got strength?” Yes. “Tell me
a word which has strength.” The wind. “Why has the word ‘wind’ got
strength?” Because it goes quickly. “Is it the word or the wind which goes
quickly?” The wind. Only later does the child adopt a more internal notion of
thought; and even then it tends to be rather animistic. Asked if one can touch
the mind, Peret (11:7) replies, No. You can’t because you can’t see it. “Why
not?” It’s air. “Why do you think it is air?” Because you can’t touch it.
Having probed juvenile conceptions of the thought process and the
mind, Piaget investigated several other kinds of conceptions, including the
child’s view of dreams. For the youngest child, the dream is an image or voice
coming from outside and manifesting itself in front of your eyes. Banf (4:6)
sees dreams as made of “lights” in the room. The lights are “little lamps, like
bicycles . . . [which come] from the moon. The lights come in the night.” The
search for the causes of dreams comes sometime later. Bag’s (7:0) dreams
come from God “to pay me back because I wasn’t good.” Other children see
dreams as being sent by various external objects like birds, pigeons, or the air.

Gradually a movement inward commences as the child, though he still sees
the dream as the product of external sources, comes to regard it as existing
closer to him, in his room or directly in front of his eyes. It is first in the years
immediately prior to adolescence that the dream is understood to be internal

and of internal origin. Bouch (11:10) explains, “I’m dressed like other people,
then it [the picture] is in my head, but you’d think it was in front of you.”
Piaget concludes that the young child’s ideas about thoughts, words,and
dreams are characterized by three forms of a fallacy he calls “realism”—the
attribution of an independent, quasi-physical reality to mental states and
constructs. In the first type, the child confuses the mental object and the thing
it represents (the sign with the thing signified); to touch the name of the sun
would be to touch the sun itself, to curse the sun is to threaten its existence.
This realism gives rise to feelings of “participation” in which the name passes
to and fro between the object (the sun) and ourselves. The second kind of
realism involves confusion between internal and external. The dreams are
first found to be in things, then in the room, then in the head, and finally in
thought itself; the child often embraces the paradoxical notion that the dream
is a voice or air which is both external and internal. The third variety of
realism leads to a confusion between thought and matter. Thought or dream

is a whisper, or a voice, or smoke; only gradually does the child come to
believe that experiences like dreams can have a nonsubstantive basis.
Explorations of children’s conceptions in other areas, ranging from the
nature of weather to the origin of the sun and the moon, confirmed Piaget’s
notions about the distinctive quality of the young child’s thought. He found a
pervasive flavor in the answers given by children of a certain age, irrespective
of the topic of the questioning or the particular experience of the individual
child. A consideration of the questions and answers demonstrate show
unlikely it was that the children were extrapolating their answers from
religious training or from what the parents, siblings, and teachers had told
them. Rather, it appears that the child had never considered these
questions,and that Piaget was uncovering “an original tendency,
characteristic of child mentality.” Piaget has called this flavor “artificialism”

and explored its characteristics at some length.
The artificialist child conceives of all objects, including natural bodies,
as artifacts, as each being “made for” a given purpose. The readiest

hypotheses are that natural objects are made “for keeping warm,” “for
boating,”etc. —that is, for whatever use they are actually put to—and,
furthermore, that these natural objects are made by men. The child behaves
as if nature were charged with purpose, as if chance or mechanical necessity
did not exist, as if each being tended towards a fixed goal. There is no
distinction in the child’s mind between physical and moral causes, and
therefore the sun appears because it has to give us light or to keep us warm,
because men or God so decree it. There is a development to this artificialism;

for example, the four- or five-year-old may trace the origin of man to earlier
man, whereas a child aged seven to nine is likely to attribute man’s existence
to animals, plants, or nature itself. But such attributions are merely more
sophisticated manifestations of the artificialist mode of thought.
Piaget, with acute discernment, has perceived a relationship among the

accounts of the universe woven by children in their early years, the kinds of
dream symbolism studied by Freud, and the accounts of cosmology and
nature given by primitive peoples.13 Indeed, he claims that an elementary

conception of the world—replete with animism, realism, and artificialism,
with objects seen as permeated by spirits and thought as material in

substance —will naturally and inevitably color less developed forms of
thought, whether in the mind of a child, a dreamer, a madman, or a primitive.
Only as the child becomes interested in the mechanisms which govern the
functioning of objects—in the construction of a bicycle or the processes of a
simple craft—does a trend away from artificialist explanations and toward an
understanding of a phenomenon in its own terms emerge.
When the child starts to ask how something works, he can no longer
subscribe completely to the notion of human or natural omnipotence, and he

has started to test reality with various hypotheses about its processes and
structures. At the same time, the child becomes aware of the fallibility of his
parents and teachers and stops looking to them as a source or creator of all
knowledge. Instead, he tries to explain phenomena in their own terms, and
typically seeks to establish dynamic forms of participation between things:
the clouds and the rain are attracted to one another: the wind and the clouds
act upon one another. Unlike artificialist and animistic hypotheses, these lend
themselves to testing and even to refutation—through systematic
observation one can see whether the wind actually does depend on the
clouds. Once the child has freed himself of spontaneously occurring but
deceptive theories about the nature of the world, he has the opportunity to
arrive at a more reasonable and less biased version. It is a fascinating
phenomenon, one which reminds Piaget of his globular molluscs, that the
normal ten- or twelve-year-old in our society is able to reject, with relatively

little prompting from his environment, many primitive notions about the
world of objects which the greatest philosophers in classical times held to be
correct. Although certain characteristics permeate both childhood and
primitive thought, the dissemination of modern scientific findings has

interacted with factors of development to produce juvenile theories of nature
which are increasingly consonant with the findings of science.
2. STUDIES OF INFANCY
While Piaget was discovering the characteristic world-views of young

school children, he was also launching a family of his own. Three children
were born in the Piaget household during the late 1920’s and early 1930’s,

and Piaget began what in all likelihood are the most careful observations of
infants ever undertaken. These studies were an effort to define and trace the
evolution of the most basic aspects of intelligence; they were eventually
published in a set of three monographs which constitute the second major

phase of Piaget’s developmental investigations.
In a little-known article published in 1927 in a British journal14, Piaget

mentions the great difficulties he had in studying the first year of life of his
first child. Any parent who has tried to make sense of the goings-on of infancy
can readily sympathize with Piaget. At first, the child seems a totally alien
creature, much closer to a primitive animal or automaton,a sum of its waking
and sleeping states, sucking rates, plus a reliable but limited repertoire of
reflexes. Before one knows it, however, the child becomes able to react to
individuals, and many a mother suspects that even her two-month-old
recognizes her. Babbling proceeds with seemingly little purpose in the early
months, but suddenly a first and then a second word appears. And once
words combine into phrases and phrases into sentences, the child has
become, to all intents and purposes, a participant in the adult world. In the
meantime, he has achieved the ability to walk, run, imitate, use tools, eat,
recognize himself,undress himself, and engage in numerous other complex

activities with little direct tutelage from his parents.
Children change dramatically within weeks, days, sometimes even
hours: a child will pore over a picture puzzle in the morning with no idea of
how to solve it, look at it a few minutes in the afternoon and assemble it
correctly; he will passively watch a television show for a week, then recite
three commercials flawlessly. It is no wonder that parents have expressed

marvel, and psychologists bewilderment, about the mechanism of change in
the first years of life; it seems easiest to follow the child’s example, adopting
some sort of artificialist or animistic explanation for this phenomenal
progress. And it is not surprising that most parents, when the second or third
child comes along, are more struck by the temperamental differences among
their children than by the undeniable similarities in behavior, physical
growth, or intellectual development. All told, the naturalistic study of children

presents strong evidence for the contention that mere observing of a
phenomenon will lead to charming anecdotes and a “feeling for the subject”
without yielding propositions which can be empirically tested.
Unlike other parents and most child psychologists, however, Piaget

drew lessons from the problems he encountered in studying the first year of
life of his first child. When there were additions to the Piaget family, he was
Pasteur’s genius, “the prepared man”: he had a theory of how infant
development occurred and he was prepared to test it. The theory of infancy
was critical for his grand scheme, because if one wanted to understand the
development of intelligence, it was necessary to start at the beginning. And if
one wanted to pinpoint the role of language in intellectual functioning, it was

imperative to begin at the prelinguistic stage.
Piaget’s method and materials were deceptively simple. He sat near his
child, who was lying in the crib or playing on the floor, watched the infant’s
spontaneous behavior, and from time to time introduced various kinds of
interruptions or “problems,” carefully noting the child’s reaction to these

impositions. The experimental materials were restricted to the most banal
objects: pens, berets, pocket watches, boxes. From the years spent in silent
observation came what are by common consensus the most brilliant set of
observations ever made on children during the prelinguistic stage.
In his first book summarizing his results, Piaget explored the origins of
intelligence. He outlined six stages of sensorimotor development,during the

course of which the child moves from simple reflexes to a practical mastery of
the world of persons and objects around him. We shall now describe each of
these stages, with their approximate age ranges. It will, however, be noted
that (as indicated earlier) the children vary significantly in the age at which
they reach a given stage; moreover, a child who is predominantly at one stage
will occasionally evince behaviors associated with an earlier or a subsequent
stage.
(1) Use of Reflexes
The newborn infant is seen as a collection of reflexes: sucking,
swallowing, crying, making gross bodily motions, and the like. What occurs
during the first few weeks of life is that the child becomes quite proficient
with regard to these fundamental actions and is able, up to a point, to modify
them to make them more appropriate to the given environment. Thus,
sucking may proceed in a slightly modified way, depending on the angle at

which the child is held, the shape of the nipple, the amount of fluid desired,
the degree of pressure needed to get the fluid at a desirable rate. Such
modifications are examples of accommodation—a basic process of adaptation

in which the child alters a behavioral pattern or scheme in accordance with
the conditions he finds in the outer world. As a corollary, a wider variety of
objects come to be treated as “suckable,” and the child not only sucks when
hungry at the breast, but also when other objects are put into his vicinity at
other times. This complementary aspect of adaptation—in which an
increased number of objects or events are subsumed under, and trigger, the
exercise of a given behavioral scheme—is called assimilation.
The scheme itself may be thought of as the capacity to suck, or the act of
sucking; but as the child develops particular components of this ability, more
differentiated sucking schemes, involving variations in speed,frequency, or
shape of the mouth, will also evolve. More generally, the scheme can be
thought of as those aspects of an action or operation which are repeatable or

generalizable in a similar action or operation. The scheme of sucking consists
not in the particular characteristics of any given suck, but rather in those

more general properties which persist through a variety of sucking situations.
An infant’s (or any person’s) behavioral repertoire may bethought of as the

sum of his schemes.15
(2) Acquired Adaptations and Primary Circular Reactions
When the child no longer sucks reflexively at objects, but undertakes
systematic coordinations between behavioral patterns, such as bringing his
hand up to his mouth during sucking, he has entered Piaget’s second stage: he
is now able to adapt his schemes to the particular dimensions of situations.
Characteristic of this phase is the primary circular reaction, the constant
repetition of a behavioral component so that the pattern is smoothed out and

mastered. Consider the following examples of the behavior of Laurent during
his third month of life:
From 0:2 (3) [i.e., third day of the second month] Laurent evidences a
circular reaction which will become more definite and will constitute the
beginning of systematic grasping: he scratches and tries to grasp, lets
go,scratches and grasps again etc. On 0:2 (3) and 0:2 (6) this can only be
observed during the feeding.. . .
But beginning 0:2 (7) the behavior becomes marked in the cradle itself.
Laurent scratches the sheet which is folded over the blankets, then grasps
it and holds it a moment, then lets it go, scratches it again and
recommences without interruption. At 0:2 (11) this play lasts a quarter of
an hour at a time, several times during the day. At 0:2 (12) he scratches
and grasps my fist, which I placed against the back of his right hand. . . . At
0:2 (14) ...I note how definitely the spontaneous grasping of the sheet
reveals the characteristics of a circular reaction— groping at first, then
regular rhythmical activity (scratching, grasping, holding, and letting go)
and finally progressive loss of interest.16
One can see in these jottings that the two-month-old child at first achieves
some mastery of the behavior in a particular situation and then exhibits the
behavior in newer contexts, in which he both assimilates objects into his
scheme of grasping and accommodates the scheme to the different shapes
and positions of objects.
(3) Procedures to Make Interesting Sights Last
These trends are accelerated in the third stage of development,during
the middle of the first year of life, when the child becomes capable of
performing secondary circular reactions.Such a reaction still encompasses the
repetition and mastery of simple behaviors(hence circular) , but these
behaviors are now put to various uses— in particular, to the preservation of
interesting sights and experiences.Accompanying this stage is a kind of motor

recognition of familiar objects,involving the performance of reduced and
simplified (abbreviated) versions of the behavioral scheme appropriate to an

object when that object appears. Thus,when a person enters the room, the
infant will turn his head slightly, then resume his previous activity. The
temptation here is to use mentalistic language, for the child appears to

display incipient signs of intention,recognition, and direction.
The child at this third stage is interested in the environmental

consequences of his actions. Unlike the younger child, he doesn’t merely act
or try out; he heeds consequences and attempts to have the more desirable of
them repeated. It is at this stage, then, that we find the child fulfilling for the
first time a role celebrated in all of Piaget’s work: that of an experimenter or
investigator who modifies his conceptions of the world as a result of his
actions upon it and his observation of their consequences. Particularly
instructive are the procedures for making interesting sights last. By his
behavior the child reveals that he is interested in phenomena that are
sufficiently akin to those engendering his previous actions to be assimilable,

but that he has no clues concerning the actual cause of the desired event:
At 0:7 (7) Laurent looks at a tin box placed on a cushion in front of him, too
remote to be grasped. I drum on it for a moment in a rhythm which makes
him laugh and then present my hand (at a distance of 2 cm. from his in
front of him). He looks at it, but only for a moment, then turns toward the
box: then he shakes his arm while staring at the box; then he draws
himself up.strikes his coverlets, shakes his head, etc. (that is to say. he uses
all the“procedures” at his disposition).17
(4) Coordination of Secondary Schemes
As he approaches the end of his first year of life, the child exhibits a new
level of behavior—stage 4 of Piaget’s sequence. He begins to combine his
various secondary schemes (“coordination of secondary schemes”) and to
apply them in new situations. For the first time, the child is able to adapt to
new situations through a systematic use and combination of schemes familiar
to him.Prominent at this time is the sequence of setting aside an object in
order to reach a more desired goal. To do this, the child requires not only a
clearly established intention but also the ability to execute a plan so that the
appropriate behavioral scheme will occur at the apposite time. To be sure,

such a plan will not be made with drawing board precision; but at the very
minimum,the child must have sufficient control of his schemes that it is
possible for him to order them appropriately. Such sequences offer, in
Piaget’s view, an illustration of the spontaneous structuring activity inherent

in all intelligent thought; it is difficult to comprehend how such a combination
could be derived simply from “past experience” or environmental influences.
An example is Laurent’s behavior at 0:7 (8) when Piaget presents him with a
little bell behind the corner of the cushion. Laurent strikes the cushion, as he
had done previously, but then depresses it with one hand while he grasps the
new object with the other. Exploration of new objects is characteristic of this
stage:
At 0:8 (16) Jacqueline grasps an unfamiliar cigarette case. .. . at first she

examines it very attentively, turns it over, then holds it in both hands while
making the sound apff.After that she rubs it against the wicker of her
bassinet, then draws herself up while looking at it, then swings it above
her, and finally puts it into her mouth.
The divergence between the child near the end of his first year and the
newborn infant is already incredible: the newborn simply exhibits his limited
repertoire of reflexes in an unmotivated sequence, whereas the child of one

year has control of a large number of differentiated and appropriate
behavioral schemes which he draws upon skillfully in exploring objects and
attaining goals.
(5) Tertiary Circular Reactions—New Means Through Experimentation
More striking signs of intelligent behavior wait upon the events of the
last two sensorimotor stages. In the fifth stage the child evolves tertiary
circular reactions and discovers new means for solving problems through
active experimentation. In contrast to his earlier, primary and secondary
circular reactions, in which he was working with familiar schemes, the child
at stage 5is oriented toward the novel features of an object which are not
readily assimilable to the usual schemes. The child makes a new discovery
and, rather than falling back upon old schemes, actively pursues the
consequences of his discovery by devising novel schemes:
Thus Jacqueline, when fourteen months of age, finds that a certain

movement of her fingers leads to a tilting of a box. She then varies the
conditions of the movement, keeping track of her discovery, until she
arrives at an effective way of tilting the box up.
In addition to this capacity to adapt schemes to new situations, the child

is also able to devise new means for solving problems. Hitherto he has relied
on familiar schemes or on their combination: at stage 5, however, he lets the
problem or difficulty serve as a guide and attempts to devise a solution
adequate to the demands of the situation. In a revealing example,Piaget places
his watch on a big red cushion. Laurent, at age 0:10(16),attempts to reach the
watch but cannot get it:
But then, instead of letting go of the support at once, as he has hitherto

done, in order to grasp the objective, he recommences with obvious
interest to move the cushion while looking at the watch. Everything takes
place as though he notices for the first time the relationship for its own
sake and studies it as such. He thus easily succeeds in grasping the
watch.18
Not satisfied with this demonstration of use of new means,
however,Piaget devises an even more difficult problem. He sets up two

colored cushions in front of Laurent. The first one, as before, is placed directly
in front of the child, while the second is placed behind the first so that a
corner of the second is facing the child. This corner is placed on the first
cushion; but the second does not protrude and is not very visible. Finally,
Piaget places his watch at the far end of the second cushion. Laurent
immediately grasps the first cushion and pulls it toward him. When he
observes that the watch does not move, he examines the place where the
cushions are superimposed and goes right to the second cushion, thereby
retrieving the watch. At stage 5, then, the child has already achieved an
effective, supple commerce with the world of objects. Yet, he remains
restricted to the world of objects present; when things disappear from view
(or when he looks away) , he has difficulty incorporating them into his

domain of thought.
(6) Invention of New Means Through Mental Combination
The sixth stage, which emerges toward the latter part of the second
year, marks a decisive point in the child’s development: for the first time, he is
able to devise means of solving problems through internal or mental
coordinations.If the stage 5 child is placed in a situation in which he cannot
readily devise a solution, he will grope around with the means at his disposal,
always actively experimenting with overt sensorimotor acts. The child at
stage 6, however,will pause and appear to consider the alternatives, to carry
out a kind of internal experimentation, an inner exploration of ways and
means. An entirely novel sequence of actions can come to pass without trial
and error in the world, simply through a mental inventory of possible actions.
Two examples will serve to illustrate the unique character of this sixth stage
—the invention of new means through mental combinations:
Jacqueline at 1:8 (0) arrives at a closed door, with a blade of grass in

each hand. She stretches out her right hand toward the knob but sees that she
cannot turn it without letting go of the grass. She puts the grass on the floor,
opens the door, picks up the grass again and enters. But when she wants to
leave the room things become complicated. She puts the grass on the floor
and grasps the doorknob. But then she perceives that in pulling the door
toward her she will simultaneously chase away the grass which she placed
between the door and the threshold. She therefore picks it up in order to put
it outside the door’s zone of movement.
In the second example, Piaget hides a chain inside a matchbox and
leaves only a tiny slit open. Lucienne, at 1:4 (9). begins by turning the whole
thing over, then tries to grasp the chain through the opening. Not succeeding,
she simply puts her index finger into the slit and so succeeds in getting out a
small fragment of the chain; she then pulls on it until she has completely
solved the problem. Next, Piaget replaces the chain in the box and leaves an
even tinier opening. Again Lucienne tries her two schemes—turning the box
over and sliding her finger into the slot—but this time neither of them works.
A pause follows, during which Lucienne manifests a curious reaction:
She looks at the slit with great attention: then several times in succession,
she opens and shuts her mouth, at first slightly, then wider and wider.
Soon after this phase of thinking, Lucienne unhesitatingly puts her finger
in the slit and, instead of trying as before to reach the chain, she pulls so as
to enlarge the opening. She succeeds and grasps the chain.19
These examples, multiplied by dozens in Piaget’s book, suggest that the

child’s intellectual processes have undergone a revolution by the end of the
sensorimotor period. Rather than starting from overt actions in the world,and
letting these actions guide him to the solution of a problem, the child at the
age of eighteen months can now apprehend the constraints of a problem on a

conceptual level and consider the various possibilities without actually
having to run through them. A kind of short-circuiting appears to have taken
place whereby an action or behavioral scheme can be contemplated without
being unraveled and enacted. We have seen foreshadowings of this trend
earlier in the child’s development, as, for example, when the stage 3 child
faced with a familiar object goes through only a partial enactment of the
appropriate scheme. But by stage 6 a much more radical development has
occurred: the actions need not be physically carried out at all, for assimilation
and accommodation can occur on the “mental” or “representational” plane.
Does Piaget mean to say, then, that the child of age two walks around
with pictures in his head? Piaget is appropriately cautious at this point, on
which it is virtually impossible to gain evidence. He prefers to suggest that the
child, instead of performing an act, is imitating it internally: he is “running

through” the act itself “within his body and mind”rather than externally upon
the world. This imitation of action can be replete with pictorial images,
muscular sensations, or relatively free of physical-sensory accouterments.
What is crucial is not its physiological concomitants but the fact that in some
way the two-year-old is potentially able to draw upon an action, evaluating its
appropriateness without testing it in the world. Here lies the basis of
operational thinking.
Until the sixth sensorimotor stage the child’s knowledge of the world is
based on the actions he can perform on the world of objects. If a child can
bite, suck, throw, drop, and bounce a ball, his knowledge of the ball is as an
object which can be bitten, sucked, etc. His knowledge is restricted to the sum
of schemes which can be performed on that object. (If there were an action
called “zilching” that he could perform, the child’s knowledge would include
the zilchability of the ball.) But after the sixth stage, two radical reorientations
have occurred in the child’s epistemology. The first is that he can now view
the ball in relation to potential actions as well as to actions actually

performed with it: the ball is not only something that he throws, but
something that he “could throw” if he wanted to knock down a pan from the
wall,or something that he “could suck” if he wanted to alleviate a pain in his

mouth. In appropriate situations, the child may run through his possible
schemes via mental representation and, without any perceptible prior
actions,alight immediately on the correct sequence of movement. The second
major consequence is that the world is no longer simply a sum of physical

actions related to objects and persons; rather, the two-year-old child has
developed an entire theory about the crucial components of experience—

about space, time,causality, and objects, and the way they interrelate to
constitute experience.
Because the child’s changing awareness of objects is a crucial
component of his psychological development— and because it is to this
subject that Piaget has devoted perhaps the most central chapter in all his

work—it merits special mention. First, however, a word on Piaget’s
methodology may be appropriate. Psychology may be viewed as the science
of tasks and tests; it is difficult to assess behavior unless some sort of a
standard is defined, and a subject’s performance evaluated in relation to this

standard. Devising tests for infants is especially demanding, and Piaget was
among the first psychologists to have specific tasks in mind when working
with children, instead of merely describing what the child does in an

unstructured situation.
One risks finding in Piaget’s reports merely a series of perceptive

descriptions if one fails to appreciate that his interventions into his children’s
life-space were carefully planned in order to yield information about a range
of capacities. Piaget always worked with a hypothesis in mind which could be

tested by setting the same task for the child on a number of separate
occasions. His highly organized account of his findings may hide the subtlety
and brilliance of each of his little tests; these sometimes fade into the
background against Piaget’s more dominant concern with theoretical
concepts and stages of development. Perhaps the magnitude of his
achievement can be most clearly realized if one makes the attempt oneself to
devise a series of tasks to be used in assessing a child’s sense of the world of

objects, and then goes on to consider Piaget’s efforts in this direction. Only
then can his unique capacity to guide the child’s behavior without hiding its
spontaneous properties be fully appreciated.
For the adult, the world is composed of objects: persons,
furniture,astronomical bodies, chemical compounds, cells molecules. Not only
are these objects relatively stable, but also the adult has various theoretical
notions about objects which are virtually impregnable to challenge. An object
endures across time, contains a certain amount of matter which may be
transformed but not destroyed, is susceptible to certain transformations but
not to others, and exists in a spatio-temporal context with other objects.

These sophisticated notions take a long time to solidify, but the most crucial
central component—what Piaget calls the sense of object permanence—
develops during the first years of life. Let us now take a look at the
developmental trajectory Piaget has uncovered.20
The core of the object concept is the understanding that objects

continue to exist when one can no longer see them. Accordingly, Piaget’s tests
have focused upon infantile behavior when objects are removed from
sight.During the initial two stages (analogous to stages one and two of
sensorimotor development) the child shows no special behavior when objects
vanish. Though he may smile or behave appropriately when the nipple or
parent comes into view, he gives no evidence of perceiving the universe as
divided into objects having substance and being external to himself. When an
object is removed from sight,it simply ceases to exist for the child, who looks
for it no further and becomes preoccupied instead with whatever remains in

his perceptual field.

In the third stage, around the middle of the first year of life, the child
possesses sufficient expectations that he is moved to action when a desired
object disappears from sight. At six months, for instance, Laurent searches in
front of him for a paper ball which Piaget has dropped above his blanket. He
immediately looks at the blanket but only in front of him—that is,where he
has just grasped the ball. When Piaget drops the object outside the bassinet,
Laurent does not look for it, except around Piaget’s empty hand, which
remains in the air. Similarly, Lucienne, at the end of eight months, grabs a
small doll and examines it with great interest. When it drops out of her hand,
she immediately looks for it in front of her, but doesn’t see it right away.
When she has found it, Piaget takes it from her, and places a blanket over it,
before her eyes. Lucienne evinces no reaction.
During the third stage, then, there is concern about absent objects,but
the child apparently lacks a strategy or scheme for finding them. Piaget
believes that the child’s general recourse when an object vanishes is simply to
continue whatever action he has been undertaking and to hope, by invoking

magical kinds of procedures, to make the object somehow reappear. In the
fourth stage, however, which occurs toward the end of the first year of life,
the child for the first time makes an “active search” for the object. At this
time,he begins to search for objects outside of the perceptual field: he studies
the displacements of objects (where they have been moved) and begins to
coordinate his visual sense of where objects are and his actual knowledge of
where they are. Indeed, it may seem that the stage f child has a sense of object
permanence when one learns that Laurent, at nine months, would lift up a
pillow to reach a tin box which had been hidden beneath it. Rut a more
decisive test of the child’s object concept occurs when Piaget initiates a series
of visible displacements:
At 0:10 (18) Jacqueline is seated on a mattress with nothing to disturb or

distract her (no blankets, etc.). I take her parrot from her hands and hide it
twice in succession under the mattress on her left in A. Both times
Jacqueline looks for the object immediately and grabs it. Then I take it
from her hands and move it very slowly before her eyes to the
corresponding place on her right, in B. Jacqueline watches this movement
very attentively, but at the moment when the parrot disappears in B. she
turns to her left and looks where it was before, in A.21
This attraction to A, the original locus, when the object has been moved
in the child’s presence to B, is a strikingly dramatic illustration of the
undeveloped intelligence of the child near the end of his first year.22
Numerous other observations of this sort by Piaget confirm that, for the
stage4 child, the object seems to inhere in a particular locus. In his search, the
child is not able to take note of the displacements he witnessed, but instead
searches for the object in its original place. This indicates that the child does
not yet have a sense of an object apart from location, nor an awareness that
an object can move to a variety of loci and remain the same object. It is
instructive in this regard that cats have also been shown to reach stage 4 and
to do so in a much shorter period of time—about three months. Might it be

that the longer and more gradual evolution of the child’s concept helps to
explain why the child advances further than the cat, which never gets beyond
stage 4?
Stage 5 is marked by the child’s ability to take visible displacements into
account. The child no longer searches for the object at A when he sees it
moved to B or C, but immediately looks at the correct location.While it might

appear that the child’s object concept is now fully developed,clever
improvisation by Piaget has documented its still fragmentary quality.Trying a
series of invisible displacements in front of Lucienne, now one year old,
Piaget finds that she succeeds in locating the target only when she has seen it
placed. When Piaget hides a watch in his fist, places the fist under a blanket,
and then shows Lucienne his empty fist, she will look at his hand, and all
about,but will not look under the blanket, where the watch has been placed
outside of her visual field.
The full-blown object concept only emerges in the sixth stage, at about
eighteen months, when the child is able to take into account both visible and
invisible displacements of the object. The qualitatively different behavior of
this stage is well illustrated in the following series with Jacqueline:
At 1:7(20) Jaqueline watches me when I put a coin in my hand, then put

my hand under a blanket. I withdraw my hand closed: Jacqueline opens
it,then searches under the coverlet until she finds the object. I take the coin
back,put it in my hand and then slip my closed hand under a cushion
situated at the other side. . . . Jacqueline immediately searches for the
object under the cushion. ... I complicate the test as follows: I place the coin
in my hand,then my hand under the cushion. I bring it forth closed and
immediately hide it under the coverlet. Finally I withdraw it and hold it
out, closed, to Jacqueline. Jacqueline then pushes my hand aside without
opening it (she guesses that there is nothing in it, which is new); she looks
under the cushion, then directly under the coverlet, where she finds the
object.23
In the sixth stage the child is aided by the newly developed ability to
represent actions and events mentally—the same capacity that characterizes

the sixth stage of general sensorimotor intelligence. This ability to find the
object irrespective of what has been witnessed presupposes knowledge of
invisible displacements of the object. Piaget explains that this result comes
about neither through a priorideduction (reasoning from first principles) nor

through mere learning by empirical examples (a conclusion based on
probability) . Were the understanding of the object concept based on a
priorideduction, there would be no reason for a child to go through a long
stage of trial-and-error gropings, where he looked unsystematically for the
object or simply waited till it reappeared. On the other hand, if the child were
simply learning by association, there would be no way to explain how he was
able to locate objects whose displacement he had not seen; nor could a mere
accrual of past experiences account for the certainty with which the stage 6
child pursues the object until he finds it. Rather, says Piaget, the evidence
suggests that the child actively constructs his knowledge of the object by
making certain assumptions about how objects behave, by trying out these

“hunches,” by rejecting those which are not supported by the facts, and
ultimately by devising his own theory, “On the Existence of Objects in a
Spatial and Temporal Framework.” Needless to say, this construction is not a
self-conscious process:it takes place exclusively on the plane of actions. But

that fact makes it neither unintelligent nor unconstructive, for actions may
have their own compelling logic. Furthermore, the development of the object
concept, which itself rests upon the development of sensorimotor

intelligence, lays the groundwork for a new plane of reasoning in which
problems and situations need not be worked out purely through physical
activity but may also be thought out via mental operations. For the reasoning
which characterizes the child during the later operational stages of
intelligence rests precisely upon the knowledge that the world is composed of
substantial, permanently existing objects which can be manipulated and

transformed in diverse ways while still maintaining their identity.
At the time he was observing his infants, Piaget was deeply influenced
by Jules Henri Poincare24, a leading French philosopher and mathematician
around the turn of the century. Poincare had proposed that the sense of space
was innate in human beings, and possessed the properties of the
mathematical construct called a group;this would mean, roughly speaking,

that even a young child was capable of performing specified operations upon
a given set of elements—for example,proceeding from one locus to another
via one operation, then returning to the original locus by an inversion (or
reversal) of that operation. For Piaget,this suggestion that understanding of
space could be described in terms of group theory was of great importance,
for it confirmed his own conclusion that behavior (or action) could be treated
in logical terms. He added, however, that Poincare, not being a psychologist,

mistakenly regarded the group of spatial displacements as a priori knowledge
instead of recognizing it as the product of thought processes developing
within the individual.
Piaget’s research on the development of space, time, and the object
concept revolutionized the perspectives of Kant and Poincare, by

demonstrating that the infant lacked an innate “adult” sense of these
dimensions of experience and therefore had to “construct” them (build them
up through his own actions) over the course of years. Nonetheless, Piaget was
very much in sympathy with Poincare’s practice of introducing logical models
for intellectual conceptions. Not only did such models confer neatness,
elegance,and power upon one’s formulations, but they also reflected Piaget’s
own major preoccupation in child development: the child’s increasing
approximation to logical consistency in his actions, behavior, and knowledge.
Accordingly, even in this early work on infant intelligence, Piaget proposed
that the child’s sense of space, which evolves in the first eighteen months of
life, possesses the characteristics of a “practical group.” This meant that the
child could reveal through his movements within and about a given area, or
realm, his understanding of its spatial layout. (See Diagram 1.) If a child

washable to come back from point C to starting point A, either by tracing his
way through B or by proceeding directly from C to A, and was able without
difficulty to employ diverse routes in order to make interconnections with
indifferent parts of the realm, Piaget concluded that the child’s behavior was
analogous to, if not isomorphic with, a mathematical group. This claim is
neither obvious nor beyond dispute; yet whether or not it is substantiated,
the line of thinking it reflects is crucial for an understanding of Piaget. From

this time onward in his work, Piaget would be increasingly eager to provide
mathematical models for the behaviors he discerned; these formal analogies
constituted for him the underlying structures of behavior.
DIAGRAM 1. THE SPATIAL GROUP
3. STUDIES OF CONCRETE AND FORMAL OPERATIONS
Having described the child’s characteristic world-view during the
1920’s, and the origins of intelligence in infancy during the thirties, Piaget
subsequently devoted his prodigious energies to investigations of the
development of the capacity to think scientifically. His studies have traced the
genesis of operational thinking at the concrete and formal levels, and he has
simultaneously sought to describe the underlying structure of operations
through the positing of formal-logical models of thought. Piaget has thus

brought closer together his two major interests, developmental psychology
and genetic epistemology; he has alternated between ingenious experiments
with schoolchildren and intensive explorations in the field of logic,
culminating in the invention of new logics. Typifying this emphasis upon the
nature of scientific thinking has been the long series of studies of the child’s
capacity to “conserve” physical properties, to which we now turn.25
Just as an appreciation of objects is necessary for reasoning about,and

negotiating one’s way within, the environment, so the awareness of various
forms of conservation is the precondition for working consistently with
specific material. Conservation is a global term which covers a range of
phenomena; that a substance may be bent or twisted, that liquid can be
poured into diverse containers, that melodies may be sung at different pitch
levels,that land masses may have dissimilar shapes and yet remain in crucial
ways the same, are all examples of conservation taken for granted in adult
society. One of Piaget’s most striking findings was that, until the age of seven

or eight—the advent of the capacity for concrete operations—the child is
aware neither of the conservations nor of numerous other forms of
consistency assumed by older children and adults.
DIAGRAM 2.CONSERVATION OF LIQUIDS
To study conservation of liquids, an experimenter pours water into two
identically shaped containers (A₁ and A2) and gains the child’s assent that
both containers have the same amount of liquid in them. (Alternatively, the
child may pour the water himself.) Then either child or experimenter pours
the water from one of the containers (A2) into another container of a
completely different shape— for instance, one that is much longer and
thinner (B). The child is then asked whether the first container (A,) and this
new container (B)each have the same amount of water or if one has more
than the other. (See Diagram 2.) Almost invariably, the young child of four or
live will declare that one container has more than the other “because it is
taller,” or because“water goes higher” in it. Efforts to dissuade the child from
this contention are to no avail, for even if one convinces him of the correct
answer, he will lapse into a misconception of the same sort on the next task.
Various “check”tasks verify that the child really believes that the quantity of
liquid changes when it enters into a different-sized container with different
dimensions. For example, if the child is asked to pour the same amount of
liquid into two containers of different sizes, he will pour the water to the
same level irrespective of the disproportion in amount which results.
Counterarguments that the child does not understand the meaning of the
term “same” miss the point: it is true that the child does not understand the
term in the adult way, but this is precisely what Piaget is documenting. For a
young child, amount and sameness are matters of appearance.26
Other Piagetian demonstrations flesh out the characteristic

Weltanschauung of children at this age.In conservation-of-substance tasks,
the child regards a ball of day rolled into a sausage shape as having more clay
(because it’s longer) or less clay (because it’s thinner) than one which retains
its round shape and was originally declared to be of the same size. Or, shown
a collection of diverse objects and asked to place together those which belong
together, the child will come up with a range of possible groupings but will be
unable to make classifications which are internally consistent. For example,

he will put a blue ball and a yellow ball together “because they are both balls,”

then a yellow triangle and a yellow circle because they are “both yellow,” and
a large ball and a large square because they are "both large.” If the
inconsistency of this procedure is called to his attention, he will be
unconcerned, because as he is unable to bear in mind at the same time all the
various dimensions involved, his classifications do not appear to him as
inconsistencies. The child associates from part to part, but never succeeds in
integrating the parts within a hierarchically arranged whole. Finally, a child

shown seven beads, five white and two black, and asked whether there are
more white beads or more beads ,will insist there are more white beads,
because there are only two black ones.He will resist the necessary
comparison of the whole set of beads, including black and white, with one
subset of beads, all white, because, according to Piaget, the preoperational

child is unable to maintain a simultaneous awareness of a whole and a part.27
Understanding what is involved in comparing white beads with all

beads is crucial for a grasp of Piaget’s theory. The preoperational child can
compare white beads with black beads if both are visible, because this task
merely involves a perceptual discrimination between lighter and darker
spheres and an assessment of which pile is bigger. However, he cannot
compare the class of all beads with the class of white beads, because it is
impossible to compare a set physically with its subset—i.e., it is physically
impossible to form two groups, one consisting of all the beads, the other of all
the white beads, as the white beads would have to belong to both groups, and
hence be in both places at the same time. For such a comparison a mental
operation is required, of which the preoperational child is incapable. Almost
invariably, therefore, he will reinterpret the problem as, Are there more white
or more black beads?, a question which can be answered simply by visual

inspection. The operational child, on the other hand, mentally compares the
class of all beads (seven in number) with the class of white beads (five in
number) and answers Piaget’s puzzle correctly. It is this capacity to perform

actions mentally—to form the two groups in the mind and to compare them
in size—which is crucial for all of the higher cognitive functions studied by
Piaget.
Piaget’s largest body of research, embodied in about two dozen
monographs, has been concerned with the period of concrete operations. He

has sketched out the characteristic cognitive map of the preoperational child,
the child en route to concrete operations, and the child who has finally
reached that higher stage. Remarkable though it may seem, a child of six or so
who misses all the questions described above and seems quite unaware of his
inconsistency will, six months or a year later, step again into the experimental
laboratory and not only answer the questions to perfection but also ridicule
the idea that anyone, least of all himself, could ever entertain another
interpretation of these phenomena. Piaget claims that what has happened in
the interim is that the child has become able to think operationally. Let us try
to understand the meaning of this claim.

In Piaget’s view, the child’s intellectual development reflects the nature
of his actions upon the world, and the degree of coordination among these
actions. The infant possesses the capacity for a diverse set of actions at birth,
but only gradually becomes able to coordinate them; for example, he
combines his vision and his grasping at five months or thereabouts, and
within the next year becomes able to integrate a set of actions in order to
achieve a goal. He synthesizes all of his potential actions toward an object at

about a year and a half, and constructs a theory of the object at that time.
While the events of the first year of life are restricted to the sensorimotor
plane, the advent of representational thought—i.e., the ability to imagine
actions—enables him to contemplate a series of schemes without actually

carrying them out “in the world.” At the same time, of course, more advanced
and complex actions are also becoming possible, as the child matures
physically and acquires various skills. What has happened in the

preoperational period, according to Piaget, is that the child now has at his
disposal a variety of actions, both actual and potential, which he can direct
toward objects, but which he has not yet been able to coordinate into an
integrated and holistic structure.
The child on the verge of grasping the principle of conservation of

liquids will consider two alternative schemes of actions: (1) pouring liquid
into thin containers makes the liquid go higher; (2) pouring liquid into thin
containers makes the liquid have narrower width. An incorrect answer will
focus on either the height or the narrowness of the container (whichever
happens to be more salient), thereby revealing that the child has not
succeeded in coordinating the actions with one another; he has focused on a
perceived state rather than on the transforming act. When, however, the child
realizes that these two actions complement and can be coordinated with each
other, that the action which increases height is the same as the action which
decreases width,and that the two cancel each other out, he has developed an
operation called compensation. In more technical language, he may be said to
understand that in transferring liquid from the standard beaker A to the new
beaker B, one changes aspect x of A to x', which is greater than x, but one has
simultaneously changed aspect y of A to y', which is less than y, so that the
two changes compensate for one another (though, needless to say, the child
does not put the matter this way himself) . At about the same time he comes
to realize that the act of pouring water from beaker A into beaker B is
equivalent to the act of pouring water from B back into A, and thus has
developed the operation Piaget calls reversibility.
Piaget argues that the child has fully achieved a grasp of the principle of
conservation of liquids when he succeeds in combining into a “structured
whole” these two operations and a third—that of identity, the quantitative

notion that nothing has been added and nothing taken away from the object
despite its change in appearance. Indeed, this total system of operations, this
structured whole, underlies all conservations, and is fundamental to the

attainment of concrete operations.
The cognitive capacities of the concrete-operational child may be

described mathematically, according to Piaget, in terms of nine interrelated
“groupings” (a variety of group devised by Piaget himself)28. These

mathematical structures and their behavioral counterparts account for the
whole range of behaviors which the eight-to-eleven-year-old (but not his
younger brother) is able to perform. For example, the grouping of
“composition” expressed as A +A'=B, B + B' = C, etc., where A x A' = 0 and B x
B' = 0, is said to underlie a variety of operational tasks having to do with

addition of sets, position of groups in a hierarchy, composition and
decomposition of classes, and class inclusion. That is, this one formal
expression designates the structure underlying a variety of cognitive
capacities of the eight-year-old. A child who can solve this range of tasks is
presumed to have a behavioral structure isomorphic with that grouping.
It is not as yet possible to verify Piaget’s claim about these groupings,
although Piaget believes that analogues of these mathematical structures will
eventually be found in actual behavior and, ultimately, in the nervous system
as well.29 It is possible, however, to verify or disprove the particular

hypotheses and findings reported by Piaget; and hundreds of researchers all
over the world have consistently been able to replicate his findings. More
controversial is his discussion of operations, inasmuch as these hypothetical
mathematical formulations cannot be readily translated into workable
experiments. Piaget’s disputes with American psychologists—for example,
Jerome Bruner—have often centered on the usefulness of these elusive
constructs.
What strikes one in reading Piaget, however, is that operations are
intensely real and vital for him. In watching a subject explore, examine, weigh
factors, and reach conclusions, Piaget vividly discerns actions and
operations,just as a behaviorally oriented psychologist spontaneously spots
stimuli and responses in the workaday activities of college sophomores or
Norwegian rats, a psychoanalyst finds repression or Oedipal fixation in his
patients. For Piaget,thinking is a process which seizes and transforms the
reality of a given moment into that of another moment —it is the organizing
principle of the Bergsonian flux, the motor of the mental mechanism which
makes sense of rich sensations and feelings and tensions. To think of
something in one’s head is as active a matter as to push it or eat it or “zilch’’ it

and, as a result, operations seem no more hypothetical to Piaget than the
balancing motions of a juggler or the compensatory adjustments of a cyclist.

He goes on to say that one’s own knowledge of states of reality comes about
through transforming them; thus, the very actions which constitute thought
lead ultimately to knowledge of thought. To understand a state, you must
understand the transformation from which it results; to understand a
structure, you must focus on its genesis and its development. These positions

are developed in an increasingly technical epistemological exposition, and it
requires considerable immersion in Piagetiana before they become
comprehensible, let alone convincing. Yet one cannot hope to understand
Piaget fully and in depth unless this is done.
The stage of intellectual development which follows concrete

operations is called formal operations. Piaget has devoted less study to this
area than to the other levels of intelligence; yet here, too, his conclusions have
become a point of departure for other psychologists. Formal operations
develop at the time of early adolescence and may conceivably depend upon
certain of the neurological or hormonal changes of that period. But biological
or environmental factors can never be sufficient for the appearance of new
structures. Rather, the structures of formal operations are dependent upon

thought working on itself and reaching what Piaget regards as a new and
permanent form of equilibrium.
When Piaget first worked in Simon’s laboratory, his task

involved,among other things, standardization of verbal reasoning problems,
such as those of the “Edith is taller than Susan" ilk. At that time he noted that
reasoning exclusively in words was extremely difficult for preadolescents,

who were much more competent at manipulating objects or contemplating
potential actions upon objects. Only in the formal-operational stage does the
child become able to act not only upon real or imagined objects but also upon
propositions expressed in words or mathematical symbols. The clearest
examples of these problems are ones posed and answered exclusively in
words, such as the brain-twister about liars and truth-tellers familiar to
puzzle buffs. But Piaget’s examples tend to be drawn from the physics
laboratory: the child is given a task which cannot be conclusively solved
simply by physical manipulations on the objects.Instead, any correct solution
should reflect the hypothetico-deductive thought processes characteristic of a
scientist.
A child enters Piaget’s laboratory and is shown a kind of billiard game in
which a plunger is pulled and a ball shot against a wall, in order to hit one of
several targets spread at various points across the table. The angle of the
plunger in relation to the table can be varied, and the size of the angle will
determine where the ball will ricochet and which of the targets is hit.
Presumably the child does not know this principle: he is expected to tinker
with the game and to find out the governing law.30
Six- or seven-year-olds are concerned with their practical successor
failure: they do not consider the variety of means of achieving success and
generally pay no attention to the rebounds. Indeed, they appear to believe
that the ball’s trajectory is a sort of curve, rather than a set of rectilinear
segments. Piaget talks to the subjects and tries to determine their reasoning
about what happens but subjects at this age are usually restricted to general

statements like “It goes there and turns the other way.” Piaget concludes that
the child of this age never internalizes his actions as operations, not even as
concrete operations.
The eight- or nine-year-old child is aware of the rectilinear nature of the
trajectory segments and the course of rebounds. He comes up with general
formulations of the sort “To aim to the left, you have to turn the plunger tothe
left” or “The more the plunger moves this way, the more the ball will go like
that, and the more I push it in the other direction, the more the ball will go
like that.” Such subjects can work out the concrete correspondence between
the relevant rank orderings (the greater the angle, the greater the rebound) .
However, they are constrained to remain at the concrete level because they
do not look for the reasons behind the correspondences. They cannot explain
the behavior of the apparatus in terms of formal reasoning involving
implications.
Adolescent subjects of age fourteen or so search for a general

hypothesis which can account for the concrete correspondences between
angles.Unsatisfied with the empirical correlation between angle and rebound,
they seek a necessary reason for this relationship. They begin to search for
the precise angle, and achieve a convincing demonstration of the relevant
principle when they pull the plunger directly perpendicular to the wall and
with some excitement see the ball return directly to the point of departure.
They begin to talk of necessity: “You need two angles: the inclination . . .
equals the angle that the trajectory of the ball makes . . . therefore the two
must be equal.” For these subjects, the idea of a correspondence between the
incline of the plunger and the path of the ball seems to lead inexorably to the
idea of a necessary reciprocity.
In sum, only at this stage is the child able to view the experiment in
terms of the total number of possibilities and the necessary relations. This
capacity is achieved only at the formal-operational level, where the child
formulates verbal propositions about what he sees (let x = the angle of
incidence) and then relates these propositions to one another in a logical way.
Whereas the younger subject starts from the phenomenon and tries
unsystematically to tease out a general principle—commencing with the

concrete event and searching for the underlying structure— the older subject
starts out with the belief that there will be a system and performs various
experiments in order to ferret it out—proceeding from an assumption of

structure to an account adequate to the specific event.
With reference to any single Piagetian experiment, it is always possible
to offer counter explanations. For example, one might claim that the younger
subjects do understand the law as well, but that, ignorant of geometry,they
cannot speak in terms of angles and equivalences. Although this objection

carries some weight, it does not explain why the younger subjects do not even

try to find a necessary rule—a failure that does not seem attributable to a lack
of geometrical training. However, the Piagetian demonstration becomes
morefully convincing when one considers another problem which elicits the
same principal stages as those described above.
The child is given a series of bottles of chemical substances: four similar
flasks containing colorless, odorless liquids and a bottle, with a dropper, that
contains an indicator. Since oxygenated water (bottle 3) oxidizes potassium
iodide (the indicator) in an acid medium (dilute sulfuric acid in bottle 1), a
mixture of bottle 1, bottle 3, and the indicator will produce a yellow color. The
experimenter shows the subject that it is possible to produce a yellow color
but does not tell him which bottles must be used. The subject is simply given
some empty flasks and asked to produce the yellow elixir.
At the preoperational level, subjects are limited to mixing randomly two
elements at a time, noting the result, and giving some sort of a prelogical
explanation. For instance, Mam, aged five years nine months, first mixes the
indicator with a burette containing caustic soda and says, “It’s like wine,”then
mixes the indicator with sulfuric acid and says, “It’s like water.” Asked if there
is any color, he replies, “It went down to the bottom, it went away like that”
(he gestures) , and then mixes the indicator with more caustic soda.After
repeating the mixing of the indicator with the sulfuric acid, he comments,
“The red runs away in the glass—the color disappeared at the bottom,you
don’t see it any more. It melted.”31
At this age, neither a systematic approach nor a search for principles is
evident. Subjects in the second stage, that of concrete operations,

spontaneously and systematically associate the indicator with all the other
liquids; they fail, however, to make any other combinations. Even when the
subject is encouraged to combine several factors simultaneously, he makes
only a few tentative multiple combinations, and, even if lie does happen to
produce the correct color, is unable to demonstrate that there is but one way
to achieve it. Somewhat later on in this stage he does develop the idea of
making n X n combinations. But he still lacks a system—he only makes trial-
and-error combinations without ever organizing them in a comprehensive
manner. The source of the color is sought in individual elements and not in
the combination of them.
Whereas concrete-operational subjects start from an individual event
and go in search of an underlying structure, formal-operational subjects often

have a systematic plan from the first. Subjects at this higher level say, “You
have to try all the bottles.” They also label the purposes of the bottles;“This is
the substance that keeps it from coloring”; “this must be water”—because,say,
it didn’t influence any combinations. The subjects ask for a pencil and talk to
themselves in an attempt to insure that they haven’t missed any possible

combinations. And once a subject has found the correct combination, he does

not cease working, but attempts to determine whether alternative solutions
are possible. His interest, in other words, is not merely in achieving practical
success by a particular combination but also in understanding the role which
a given combination plays among all possible combinations. The subject seeks
to determine if specific substances play equivalent roles; if certain ones are
necessary for any chemical reaction; whether he can present a theoretical
basis for his findings.
More than a dozen experiments by Piaget and Inhelder and their
associates have amply buttressed the contention that the adolescent subject
is behaving in the experimental laboratory in a qualitatively different way
from his concrete-operational forerunner. The subject at the stage of formal
operations confronts the implications of each of his acts, has an overall view
of the possible combinations, and has arrived at the insight, essential to
experimentation, that one can only make distinct causal determinations if one
holds constant all the variables in an experiment save one. Younger

subjects,by contrast, will often proceed in an orderly way, only to vitiate the
prospect of success by changing two variables at a time, or by missing a whole

set of combinations.
As has happened at all previous stages, a new set of structures coalesces
during this last period. Concrete operations become the subject matter of
formal operations, which are operations to the second degree,involving
linguistic descriptions of actions rather than actions themselves.The resultant
structures are not the incomplete mathematical groupings of the concrete
stage but the sixteen binary propositions of formal logic. That is, in his
procedures and in his interpretation of the laboratory experiments, the

adolescent is reasoning the way a formal logician does. This should not
betaken as a claim that the bell-bottomed teenager is ready to make original
contributions to symbolic logic, nor that he is even likely to be aware of the
canons of modern logic; it does mean, however, that he has the necessary
cognitive structures for performing the full range of operations involved in
ratiocination: the capacity to express relations in terms of linguistic
propositions and to consider systematically the relations of the propositions

to one another, to make deductions and implications, and to draw conclusions
from a set of statements about a phenomenon. He is capable of reasoning
from the general to the particular and back again.
With the appearance in adolescence of this last and highest stage,Piaget

ends his account of human intellectual development. No one as yet has
seriously challenged this account; to do so, it would be necessary to

demonstrate that post-adolescent individuals are capable of a qualitatively
different level of reasoning, rather than merely a more expert application of

formal operations to more recondite or complex areas of concern.32 What
seems more likely from other studies, however, is that formal operations
reflect a level of reasoning which is reached, with effort, by most adolescents

in Western society but which is not a vital part of the lives of most, and which
achieves facility and full use only in those who go into the sciences.33 One
retains always the capacity to reason logically in areas that interest one, but
the kinds of suspension of reality and of belief in hypothetical possibilities
characteristic of logicians (“If tomorrow is Saturday, every Irishman is a
native”) are of interest chiefly to those professionally or avocationally
concerned with such matters.
Although no one is a formal operator in all his pursuits, the advent of

formal operations has considerable impact, in Piaget’s judgment, with
manifestations far beyond the realm of academic study. For the first time, the
teenager is comfortable dealing with hypothetical possibilities and reasoning

about the contrary-to-fact. He becomes a dreamer, interminably considering
the possibilities of his life; he begins to understand various philosophical
theories and speculations. Piaget attributes the idealism and revolutionary
tendencies of many adolescents to their initial encounters with the exciting

world of pure thought. (His autobiography documents the enormously
stimulating role which the reading of Bergson played in his own adolescence.)
This emergent ability to reason deductively and hypothetically confers

tremendous power on the adolescent, but may also be somewhat
disconcerting for him as, for the first time, he confronts the manifold
possibilities open to him. Identity crises or uncritical involvement in mass
ideological movements may result for those who experience difficulty in
adapting or accommodating their fascination with absolutistic theories to the
relevant aspects of their social world.
The newly developed structures of these adolescents must go on to
attain a state of equilibrium. The notions of equilibrium and of the process of
equilibration34 which underlies it are very important ones for Piaget, who
believes that intellectual development has its own pace and rhythm and
involves the same kind of organismic regulation as do physiological and
motivational processes. He conceives of equilibrium as a mechanism of
change and continuity, a state of balance between competing actions; a
system is in equilibrium when a perturbation which modifies the state of the
system has its counterpart in a spontaneous action which compensates for its
effect. Consequently, equilibrium is a function of the actor’s behavior.
Although Piaget has worked extensively on his theory of equilibrium,it
still, in the view of many observers, requires further elaboration. Nonetheless,
it serves as a reminder that, while the delineation of childhood intellectual
development would constitute a lifework for many of the most

knowledgeable and talented psychologists, it represents only one of Piaget’s
manifold interests and contributions. We can do little more than mention

some of the other areas of study to which Piaget has devoted attention in the
last half-century.

4. OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS35
With his associates, Piaget has developed a theory of perception which,
not surprisingly, emphasizes the amount of active construction involved in
judging visual arrays and illusions. Piaget has studied the history of the
various scientific disciplines, examined in detail the interrelationships among
the sciences, and founded a whole new field, genetic epistemology, which
traces the development of scientific thought in the various disciplines and in

the life of the individual, and notes the relationship between these two
developmental trajectories. Piaget has done original studies in sociology and
pedagogy, wherein he displays loyalty to Durkheim’s ideas, to the latter’s

conviction that morality arises from the need for interpersonal
cooperation,and lo his belief that there is an optimal rate at which structures
should unfold. This last conclusion has placed him in some disfavor with
meliorists like Jerome Bruner, who contend that intellectual development is
susceptible to rate changes and that complicated concepts can be presented

“at [a child’s or young person’s] own level.” Lastly, but of great importance,
Piaget has returned to his earliest passion—biology—not only pursuing his
studies of molluscs, but also penning a major work of synthesis, Biology and
Knowledge, in which his manifold findings on intellectual development are
related to pervasive principles of biological functioning. His overall

conclusion is that cognitive activities promote organic regulation—that
is,they help maintain physiological and bodily equilibrium—and constitute, in
effect, an organ that regulates exchanges with the environment, analogous to
the more purely physiological organs, which also achieve a form of
equilibrium.36 Whether in the realm of bodily function or of scientific

thought, development consists in the unfolding of structures according to
innate principles of functioning, in the active construction of new structures
out of earlier ones,in the steady alteration of a subject’s relationship to the

external world, and in the increasing comprehensiveness and integration of
that relationship.
It is as a genetic epistemologist that Piaget primarily views himself,
deeming psychology a tool by which he can get to the roots of knowledge in
biology and in the history of scientific thought. It may well be that his longest-
lasting contributions will come in this area, for he may have succeeded in
redirecting the entire thrust of scientific and philosophical thought. At
present, however, he is perhaps more readily identified as a psychologist who
has chosen a vast and formidable area to investigate. He has investigated it
with vigor and the most penetrating insight, and has demonstrated, quite
conclusively, that children at different developmental levels have
characteristic ways of thinking about the world. He has undermined“common

sense” notions of the child as either a passive reactor to the environment, a
mere imitator, or one in whom “innate ideas” will automatically unfold,
replacing them with a more comprehensive and intricate concept of the child
as an active constructor, one who acts upon the world and, in so doing,comes

to increase his knowledge of the world as well as of his own thought and
person. Piaget has made an impressive attempt to replace the behaviorist
emphasis on the primacy of the environment and the Gestaltist emphasis
upon the primacy of developed structures with a less elementary and more
enriched picture of intelligence, as a product of the interaction between
constantly evolving structures in the child’s mind and ever-varying aspects of
reality which the child becomes able to assimilate or accommodate. The

world is not just “out there,” waiting to impress itself on a blank slate; it is a
product of our actions upon it, of the relation between these actions, of the
symbolic embodiments of those actions.
Piaget has, furthermore, provided evidence that a whole variety of
mental actions and underlying schemes reflect structures which come to be

integrated at certain points in development and can be expressed in terms of
mathematical groups, groupings, and logical propositions. This mathematical
approach is of enormous promise, for it suggests the possibility of a common

language in which biology, psychology, and logic can be related to each
other,without loss of their individual integrity. Piaget is hopeful that evidence
for the structures he posits can be found in the nervous system, and he places
a premium in this regard on Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’s contention

that the nervous system has the character of the mathematical function called
a lattice.37
A final contribution rests in Piaget’s claim to have demonstrated the
distinct limitations of traditional philosophical conceptions of the nature of
knowledge. He has shown that many long-standing questions in philosophy—
for example, the nature of space, time, and number—can be illuminated by
considering their genesis in the young child; this approach suggests that the
contradictions found among traditional solutions to these questions were
only apparent rather than real, in that some of these solutions related to the
development of such concepts, while others were concerned exclusively with
the end state, or point of ultimate development, toward which all thought
tends.
Piaget makes a key distinction between wisdom—which is the end
result of an interaction between objective knowledge and personal values,
and constitutes the particular domain of philosophy—and knowledge, which
requires built-in controls and fixed criteria for truth and thus belongs to the
realm of science.38 He claims that reliable evidence is now available which
will elucidate the origin, terminus, and fundamental nature of a variety of
realms once thought the exclusive province of the philosopher, and that this
evidence can be elicited through the kinds of epistemological studies of the

foundation of knowledge which he has undertaken. While old-school
philosophers have not lain down and surrendered, as Piaget sometimes

implies he would like them to,it seems a certainty that his trenchant
reflections on philosophical wisdom and knowledge will have increasing

impact in the years to come.
Many philosophers have simply ignored Piaget’s work; others have

dismissed as naive his attempts to "define” number or causality genetically.
Numerous psychologists have found his work of little importance,and still
others have questioned both the methods he uses and the conclusion she
draws. The founding of a theory of infant intelligence on the study of a mere
three children—and one’s own, at that—has disturbed many empirically
oriented workers, who expect large samples to be taken, experimenters to be
completely free of bias, and systematic hypotheses to be tested. Talk of

operations,equilibration, schemes, groupings, and other invisible, nontangible
concepts has rankled even more sympathetic workers, who wonder if
evidence for or against the system will ever be accrued. Even Piaget’s most
basic assumptions have been challenged: perhaps, it has been suggested,
thought derives from modes of perception which are built into the sensory
system rather than from groups of actions gradually evolving in the motor
system; perhaps the ability to conserve various properties is a trivial one, of
little importance in other societies; perhaps Piaget’s view of knowledge is
parochial, his emphasis on logical thought unwarranted, his picture of
scientific thought too rational and orderly; perhaps, indeed, the whole
impetus to study change over time, and to postulate its basic mechanisms, is
misguided, as being a form of reductive thought which inevitably distorts the
full-blown phenomenon. Numerous other misgivings about Piaget’s
enterprise have been voiced, some serious and worth responding to, others
not; Piaget has paid more attention to his critics than most other social
scientists would, but has wisely not allowed his desire to convert skeptics to
distract him from pursuing the researches in which he believes.
And his work and output continue unabated as I write. Ensconced in his
Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, Piaget—now in his seventy-
seventh year—continues his arduous schedule of teaching,
lecturing,traveling, walking, and writing hundreds of lines a day. New
research monographs come out with numbing regularity, as do unexpected

pronouncements in one or another of the few fields on which he has
heretofore failed to comment.Piaget has the benefit of help not only of many
research assistants from the university, but also of his collaborator of thirty-
five years, Barbel Inhelder,and of many visiting scholars who brief him on
recent findings and join him in his quest for a science of genetic epistemology.
The questions he is addressing, no less than those that he has raised in asides,
will continue to occupy him and his co-workers for many years to come.
In 1967, Piaget made one of his intermittent trips to the United States to
give an address. Over the years he has made thousands of speeches,and has
received a score of honorary degrees. Yet, as David Elkind reports,Piaget was
particularly nervous on this occasion, for he was speaking at Clark University,

scene in 1909 of Freud’s only visit to the United States and of his famous

lectures on the origin and development of psychoanalysis. The significance of
the invitation to Worcester had not been lost on Piaget, and it was clear
during his two evenings of lectures that he was extremely moved to be
visiting this historic site. And, unable to speak English and uncertain of the
loyalties of his audience, he was understandably anxious when the series
began.39
In the chairman’s introductory remarks, he alluded to a time when

Piaget, an addict of pipe-smoking for many years, had been restricted for
health reasons to only three pipefuls a day. Although crestfallen, the master of
conservation was equal to the doctor’s challenge: he availed himself of his
pipe six times a day, but only placed half a pipeful of tobacco in each time,thus
giving himself the genuine feeling, and the intellectual illusion, that he was in
fact having six pipes a day. As this story was told, Piaget, who understands
more English than he lets on, smiled and gave his pipe a tiny clutch. This
action was not lost on the audience, whose affection he won at that moment.
The contrasts between Freud’s Clark lectures and Piaget’s addresses on
“Memory and Identity” were notable. Piaget, speaking through an
interpreter,felt no need to introduce or defend his system, but proceeded at

once to treat two highly technical aspects of his theoretical framework. He
was harsh on American critics of his work, assumed knowledge of technical

logic on the part of his audience, and made few jokes or direct comments to
the audience. And yet, as with Freud, his rapport with the audience was so
powerful that his remarks received rapt attention, even as his voice and his
emphatic facial and bodily gestures conveyed his sincerity and humanity.
Piaget’s talk had that directness, self-confidence, command of the material,

seriousness,incisiveness, sensitivity to nuance, and methodical thoroughness
which belong only to the most far-seeing and productive of minds. Through
both the content and the manner of his presentation, Piaget affirmed again his
central position among the psychologists of today and his claim to the mantle
of Freud.
It is related that when Freud came to America, the ailing William James
made a day-long pilgrimage to hear the Viennese doctor and that, at the
conclusion of the talk, he told Freud, “The future of psychology belongs to

your work.” Could James’s words perhaps be extended in application to
include the more recent visitor to Worcester, Massachusetts, on that wintry
night fifty-eight years later?40
Notes
1 The Bergson quotation appears in An Introduction to Metaphysics: The Creative Mind (Totowa, N.J.:
Littlefield Adams, 1965), p. 188.
2 The quotation from Piaget is cited by J. de Aguriaguerra and R. Tissot in “The Apraxias," in Handbook
of Clinical Neurology, Vol. IV (P. Winken and G. Bryn,eds.) (Amsterdam: North Holland
Pub. Co., 1969), p. 59.

3 The novel from which this quotation is taken is no longer readily available, a state of affairs with
which Piaget seems quite satisfied. The reference is Recherche (Lausanne: Edition la
Concorde, 1918), p. 249. No doubt a publisher will eventually reissue this work, if only to
cash in on a famous name. Piaget’s subsequently cited recollections, including the brief
quotations, come primarily from his autobiographical essay which appears in E. Boring
et al. (eds.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography (Barre, Mass.: Clark Univ.Press,
1952), pp. 237-56; this work focuses on his intellectual development rather than his
personal life. However, Piaget’s preferences and prejudices, as well as references to
pivotal personal events, occasionally come through in his scholarly writings, particularly
of late.
4 It is interesting, and perhaps not entirely accidental, that Freud undertook postdoctoral studies quite
similar to those of Piaget.
5 Piaget’s first articles appeared in French and Swiss journals and have not been translated. On the
other hand, each of his first five books was quickly translated into several languages and
made his name familiar to English-speaking audiences in the 1920's. The books were The
Language and Thought of the Child(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926); Judgment and
Reasoning in the Child (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928); The Child’s Conception of the
World (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929); The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality
(London: Kegan Paul, 1930); The Moral Judgment of the Child (London:Kegan Paul,
1932).
6 The Jean Piaget Society, recently organized at Temple University, plans to collect all of Piaget’s
writings, and may eventually issue a standard edition.
7 The affinities and contrasts between Piaget’s views of evolution and those of the discredited Lamarck
and Lysenko schools are too complex to permit review here. It is perhaps most useful to
note that a few eminent geneticists, among them C. H. Waddington of Edinburgh, share
some of Piaget’s views on genetics and development,but that most workers in the field
greet Piaget's evolutionary speculations with healthy though respectful skepticism. For a
detailed statement of Piaget’s views, see his Biologie et connaissance (Paris: Gallimard,
1967). Waddington’s views are put forth in an article which appeared in A. Koestler
(ed.), Beyond Reductionism (New York:Macmillan, 1970'); for a useful summary, see G.
Steiner’s review of this book in The New Yorker, March 6, 1971, pp.108-10.
8 The best brief introduction to Piaget’s theory will be found in his little book (with B. Inhelder) The
Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1969), and his chapter, “Piaget’s Theory,”
in Carmichael’s Handbook of Child Psychology (P. Mussen, ed.) (New York: Wiley, 1970),
pp. 703-32.
9 Piaget now regrets his introduction of the term “egocentrism,” because it has been so widely
misinterpreted. However, it is unlikely that a more neutral term can be successfully
substituted at this late date.
10 The sample story and Gio’s paraphrase appear in LT, pp. 99. 116.
11 The different uses of the word “because” are presented in JR, p. 17.
12 The child's notion of thought processes is described in CCW, p. 37. Specific examples quoted are
found on pp. 39, 45, 53, 100, 92, 119.
13 Today Piaget is less likely to draw parallels between primitives and children than he was in the
1920's. See Chapter 5 of this book.
14 “La premiere annee de l'enfant,” British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 18 (1927), 97-120, contains
Piaget's initial assessment of his observations of infants.
15 Piaget’s definitions of scheme, accommodation, and assimilation are difficult to pinpoint and to
summarize, particularly since he often shifts terminology without warning. Imposed
upon this is a language problem,with some translators speaking exclusively of schemes,
others only of schemas,still others employing both terms indiscriminately or in different
contexts.Here we will reserve the terms "assimilation" and "accommodation"for the
inseparable biological counterparts of all organic activity. The assimilatory pole
emphasizes an environmental interaction in which the organism does not make
significant adjustments in its behavioral repertoire, while the accommodatory pole
stresses an interaction in which the organism adjusts its repertoire so as to match the
form and structure of the environmental object.Note that it is necessary to postulate a
separate environmental object, even though Piaget claims that in a strict sense one
cannot conceive of an object apart from a constructing individual. The scheme is the
underlying pattern which allows the performance of a variety of acts, all of which have a
similar structure.
16 The description of a circular reaction appears in OI, pp. 91-2.

17 Laurent’s experimentation with the tin box is described on p. 201.
18 Jacqueline's exploration of new objects is described on p. 253. Jacqueline’s discovery with the box is
described on p. 272. Laurent's initial attempt to reach the watch is described on p. 283.
19 Laurent’s successful strategy is described on p. 283. Jacqueline’s adventures at the door are
described on p. 339. The renowned example of the opening of the matchbox is described
on p. 338.
20 Piaget’s description of the object concept occupies the first part of his tour de force, CR. In this work
he traces the early genesis of such epistemological categories as space, time, and
causality.
21 The description of Laurent playing with the box is found on p. 45: that of Jacqueline on the mattress,
on p. 51.
22 This attraction to A: The so-called "A, not B" phenomenon has been much studied of late, in an effort
to unravel the underlying mechanisms. Much useful work has been done by Gerald
Gratch; see, for example, G. Gratch and W. Landers, “Stage IV of Piaget’s Theory of Infant
Object Concepts: A Longitudinal Study," Child Development, Vol. 42 (1971), 359-72.
23 Lucienne's search for the watch is described in CR, p. 51; Jacqueline’s search for the coin, p. 79.
24 Poincare’s hypotheses about the mathematics of space perception are put forth in his book The
Value of Science (New York: Dover, 1958). Piaget’s speculations about the spatial group
are found in CR, Chapter 2.
25 Conservation studies are reported in J. Piaget and B.Inhelder, Le Developpement des quantiteschez
l’enfant (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestle, 1941). It has sometimes been argued that
Piaget is not testing the child's understanding of physical laws, but simply his grasp of
the terms "same,” “more,” and "less.”Although this criticism may well be logically
unassailable, it is, in my view,beside the point. The child has heard the words “same” and
“more” frequently since early childhood, and if he does not have an adult understanding
of these terms,it is because lie does not understand the underlying concepts. Once he
comprehends what “same" means on a nonlinguistic level, his performance on
conservation tasks and his understanding of the verbal interrogation will improve
accordingly. A demonstration that conservation tasks are more than a simple verbal
game comes from studies in which language is not employed: it has been shown that
physiological reactions are heightened when conservation of quantity is violated by
means of a special apparatus which covertly alters the amount of fluid. Cf. T. Achenbach,
“Surprise and GST as Indicators of Conservation,” Proceedings of the American
Psychological Association, Vol. 5, 1970, 281-2.
26 Most of Piaget’s conservation studies, including the first ones, were conducted with Barbel Inhelder.
his collaborator of many years. In what follows, Piaget’s name alone will often be used in
referring to work done in conjunction with Inhelder and other members of the Genevan
research group.
27 Classification tasks are described in EGLT. Conservation of number is treated in CCN.
28 Piaget’s research on concrete operations is usefully summarized in two books written with
Inhelder: GLT and EGLT.
29 For a critical review of Piaget’s claims, see J. S. Bruner, "Review of The Growth of Logical Thinking,”
British Journal of Psychology, 1959, 50, 363-70. and J. S. Bruner et al., Studies in Cognitive
Growth (New York: Wiley, 1960). Piaget’s response lo these criticisms is contained in his
lectures published as On the Development of Identity and Memory (Barre, Mass.: Clark
Univ. Press, 1968).
30 A detailed account of the stages involved in solving the billiards problem can be found in GLT,pp. 4-
19.
31 Mam's account is given on p. 110.GLT
32The claim that the adolescent reasons like a formal logician can be taken to mean that he has
constructed for himself the opening lessons of a modern treatise on logic. He is able to
appreciate all the possible relationships between two propositions, p and q, ranging
from implication (p implies q) to disjunction (either p and q, or not p and q, or p and not
q, or not p and not q). Naturally he need not be aware of the prepositional calculus, which
was not even formalized until recent decades. Rather, when faced with a verbal problem
or a scientific experiment, his reasoning appears to draw upon the cognitive machinery
necessary for an explicit knowledge of the propositional calculus. Of course, implicit and
explicit knowledge of these postulates need not be equivalent, but Piaget does not
speculate on the differences, if any.

33 It has been proposed that formal operations first emerged in societies where the majority of people
were essentially at the stage of concrete operations, but where those whose thought was
slightly more advanced were valued and rewarded. Drawing upon this argument, some
commentators have suggested that in a society where the capacity for formal operations
is widespread, thought levels aspire to a still-higher stage, which may be expected
gradually to emerge. While this idea is appealing, and consistent with Piagetian
developmental theory, I can see no way of assessing its plausibility.
34 Piaget has written one monograph on equilibration and is reportedly completing another one. He
considers this topic so important that he has lectured on it repeatedly in the last twenty
years and selected itas his major topic at a conference of specialists on child
development and at the first meetings of the Jean Piaget Society. An accessible, though
far from simple, account of his views on equilibrium some years ago can be found in his
essay “Logique et equilibre dans les comportements du sujet," in Etudes d’epistemologie
genetique. II(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), pp. 27-118, and in his
paper"The Role of the Concept of Equilibrium in Psychological Explanation,” in SPS, pp.
110-15. The present quotation is from GLT, p. 243.
35 To supply references for Piaget’s varied pursuits would take many pages. Some of his most
important books in areas other than child development are: The Mechanisms of
Perception (New York: Basic Books, 19969); Genetic Epistemology (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1970); Introduction a l’epistemologie genetique (Paris: Presses Univ. de
France, 1950); The Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (New York: Orion,
1970); Etudes sociologiques (Geneva: Droz, 1965); Biologie et connaissance (Paris:
Gallimard, 1967).
36 Even as the respiratory, digestive, and excretory systems function in an integrated manner,thereby
achieving physiological equilibrium, the cognitive systems of the child are so constituted
as to maintain maximum intellectual equilibrium consistent with their growth.
37 Some thirty years ago, McCulloch and Pitts proposed a mathematical model of the nervous system,
and their pioneering work has proved enormously influential in biological and artificial-
intelligence circles. Cf. W. S. McCulloch and W. H.Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas
Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics,Vol. 5 (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1943), 115-33.
38 Piaget’s recent thoughts on philosophy’s relationship to science appear in his introductory essay in
Logique et connaissance scientifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967) and in a lively volume called
Sagesse et illusion de la philosophie (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1965).
39 Elkind's account of Piaget’s visit appeared in “Giant in the Nursery Room,” The New York Times
Magazine, May 26, 1968, p. 25. Piaget’s lectures were published as On the Development of
Identity and Memory(Barre, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press, 1968).
40 H. Stuart Hughes relates this anecdote about Freud and James in his Consciousness and Society (New
York: Vintage, 1963), p. 113.

4
Levi-Strauss
Common readers, pardon my paradoxes, they must be made whenever one
thinks seriously. And whatever you may say, I would rather be a man of
paradoxes than a man of prejudices.
ROUSSEAU1
The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more toward the conclusion
that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.
—EDWARD TYLOR
In a semidelirious state at the conclusion of his enervating trip through

central Brazil, having reached the point where an anthropologist questions
the meaning of what he is doing, Claude Levi-Strauss conceived a play, which
he entitled The Apotheosis of Augustus.2 Essentially a new version of

Corneille’s Cinna, the play dealt with two men who had been friends in
childhood and encountered each other at moments of crisis in their highly

divergent careers. Augustus had been singled out at birth for participation in
the world and its honors, only to find that all his efforts were undermining
this world and its mocking plaudits; Cinna (or Levi-Strauss) had rejected the
world of material comforts and satisfactions in order to proceed away from
civilization, only to find that he was heading back to it by a complicated route

and, in so doing, had destroyed the value of the alternative which he had
supposedly embraced.
As Augustus undergoes the process of deification, he conies to realize
that his hold over his people is lessening, that his flatterers are scheming
behind his back, that he is being sanctified only because people want to
remove him from the scene. Cinna, meanwhile, having been away from
civilization for ten years, living an adventurous life among the savages, is
being lionized by the hostesses of Rome, intent on learning of his exploits.
Only he is aware that the celebrity he has acquired at such cost is based on a
lie. His adventures and his journey have been a deception and a myth; for
even as he thought to demonstrate his humanity by caressing every flower,

tasting every food, exploring every emotion, he became increasingly inhuman
and lost everything of value to him. Yet, as he attempts to convey the
emptiness and futility of his experience, it unavoidably becomes transformed

into a “traveler’s tale” which delights and mesmerizes all.
Both Augustus and Cinna have seen their goals revealed as fraudulent,
their aspirations as impossible to realize; the balance of forces in their lives

has been overthrown. The two men work out an elaborate scheme: Cinna will
murder Augustus, who will thereby win official immortality; Cinna will have
the dark immortality of the regicide, which will allow him to rejoin society
even as he continues to reject it.

Levi-Strauss describes this drama in his masterly autobiography, Tristes
Tropiques, a work whose impact upon the French intellectual world matched
that of Cinna’s voyages upon the salons of Rome—it catapulted its author into
a position of notoriety. Levi-Strauss has, nonetheless, the most serious of
intentions in introducing this fiction: it is his attempt to delineate “the
disordered state of mind” produced by the abnormal conditions of a traveler’s
existence.
A traveler, of course, is a mere—and admitted—spectator. But an
anthropologist must confront a deeper riddle: why does he reject his own
society while reserving for societies distant and different from his own the
patience and diligence he has deliberately withheld from his own people? For
Levi-Strauss, the irony extends deeper still, for while he rejected the French
way of life, he concluded after his travels in the Brazilian wilds that the
characteristics of man are everywhere identical, the apparent differences

between Western European and primitive peoples a delusion. Further, upon
returning to France with these findings, this somewhat retiring man, who has
a strong distaste for fads and fashions, was treated as a culture hero. However
disconcerting these paradoxes for the observer, they are part of Levi-Strauss’s
life and character; for his major argument about the nature of thought and of
society centers on the role of contradiction, opposition, and paradox in the
experience of man.
Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Belgium in 1908, son of an artist and
member of an intellectual French Jewish family. During the First World War
he lived with his parents near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi.
Although Levi-Strauss says little in his published works about his early
childhood, one gathers that he was a serious and somewhat romantic
youngster who loved to take long walks, to pause over the flora and fauna, to
muse upon philosophical questions. This interest was poetic and humanistic
in tone; Levi-Strauss did considerable reading among literary masterpieces
and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary serious music. Yet
there was also a scientific bent to his pursuits, reflected largely in a deep
interest in geology.
Indeed, Levi-Strauss acknowledges geological excavation and theory as
one of the three major intellectual influences in his life, the others being
psychoanalytic theory and Marxism.3 Geology taught him to seek for origins
of manifest features in the past history of an object. He learned to explore
various rock strata, looking for the subtle differences in jumbled arid rocks
which would indicate where an ocean once flowed. Or he would note two
plants of different species on opposite sides of a hidden crevice and
simultaneously observe that one of the fossils embedded in the rock had less
complex involutions than the other. “We glimpse, that is to say, a difference of
many thousands of years; time and space suddenly commingle: the living
diversity of that moment juxtaposes one age and the other and perpetuates

them.” Such explorations not only heightened one’s perceptual and aesthetic
sensibilities, but also pointed in Proustian fashion to the untold wealth of
history and lost experience latent in a tiny manifestation.
A first reading of Freud reinforced the lessons of Levi-Strauss’s
geological excavations. In both cases, the investigation starts with apparently

impenetrable phenomena (dreams, slips of the tongue in psychoanalysis), and
in both cases a delicately refined perceptiveness is needed to disentangle the
elements of the situation and note crucial differences. Yet the resulting order
is anything but arbitrary; rather, it all fits into a coherent scheme and thereby
reveals fundamental properties of the physical or psychical universe.
A Belgian socialist introduced Levi-Strauss to Marxism when he was

only seventeen, setting off in him that feverish excitement which occurs
perhaps only once in each young intellectual’s development.4 Not only did
Marxism provide an entranceway to the whole school of German
philosophical thought of which he had previously been ignorant; it also
demonstrated to him, conclusively, that social science is “no more based upon
events than physics is based upon sense perceptions.” What the scientist did
was to construct a model, examine its properties with reference to laboratory

tests, and then apply these observations to the study and explication of
empirical events.
From his trio of “mistresses,” Levi-Strauss learned to look at sensory
phenomena and to expect that if he took great care, they could reveal to him
the underlying nature and order of events. These intellectual influences
suggested that understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality
to another, that true reality is never the most obvious of realities, and that its
nature is already apparent in the care which it takes to evade detection. All
three of these realms posed for the young Frenchman the question of the
relation between reason and sense perception, a "question which was to play
an increasingly dominant role in his thinking and writing over the next forty
years.
Levi-Strauss entered the Sorbonne, where, as a member of a brilliant
group which included Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul
Nizan, he studied philosophy and law. Law was never really an interest—
rather, a concession to family—and philosophy increasingly antagonized him,

although he was as expert as his peers in the statement of thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis, in the exercise of hypothetico-deductive reasoning and

conceptual clarification. For he soon came to a sense of the uselessness of
these mental gymnastics, the stagnation of the different philosophical schools
and their mutual exclusiveness, and the impossibility of ever reconciling

conflicting cosmologies. After taking his degree, he set his foot on the first
rung of the French academic ladder, becoming a teacher in a lycee. But he felt
vaguely dissatisfied, and was constantly “on the lookout” for some more

attractive occupation.
Two events around this time were pivotal in determining Levi-Strauss’s

future course. The first was his reading of Robert Lowie’s Primitive Society, a
deeply moving firsthand account of the meaning of anthropological
experience. Levi-Strauss has described the book’s effect on him in glowing

terms:
My mind escaped from the closed circuit which was what the practice of
academic philosophy amounted to; made free of the open air, it breathed
deeply and took on new strength: like a townsman let loose in the
mountains, I made myself drunk with the open spaces and my astonished
eye could hardly take in the wealth and variety of the scene.5
Enamored of the life described in Lowie’s book, Levi-Strauss did not
take long to exploit the opportunity afforded by the second event. When an
acquaintance, Celestin Bougle, phoned him in the autumn of 1934 and asked
whether he might be interested in the post of professor of sociology at Sao
Paulo University, he accepted within three hours. This decision made possible
four years of occasional travels among the Indian tribes of central Brazil. The
story of these memorable journeys is related in Tristes Tropiques, and the
empirical data and intellectual capital of those years have been a major
source of ideas for all of Levi-Strauss’s subsequent work.
Anthropology gave the youthful scholar the opportunity to achieve the

goal of all philosophy—illumination of the dimensions of human experience
—by allowing him to come into contact with the lives of men of different
cultures, rather than just Western man. Antagonized by Gallic culture, Levi-
Strauss seems to have begun his studies and journeys with the usual tendency
to view primitives as “wild, different, romantic”; but, as he relates with
compelling detail in his autobiography, he was gradually disabused of this
stereotype. At first, he went in search of what Rousseau called “the barely
perceptible advances of the earliest times,” seeking the pristine state which
had so fascinated that renowned philosopher. And he thought he had found it

in the long-isolated Nambikwara6 of the Amazon jungle, whose society he saw
as one of extreme simplicity. As his stay with them went on, however, his
views changed; he was impressed by their sense of humor, their petty
rivalries, the political acumen of their chief. Ultimately he came to the

epiphanous realization that the similarities between the Nambikwara and
himself far outweighed the differences, that they, like himself, were “nothing
but human beings.” Looking for infinite variety, for a natural society “reduced
to its simplest expression,” for bloodthirsty cannibals or noble savages, Levi-

Strauss had instead discovered the common humanity of savages and savants
—and with it the central theme of his lifework.
In spelling out over many years the conclusions derived from his field
work, Levi-Strauss has surveyed the range of cultural institutions and
artifacts, from social organization to myth and art, in an effort to document

the underlying continuities between the disparate forms found in diverse

cultures. His way of approaching a problem—his way of thinking, if you will—
is to make a logical analysis of the arrangements possible in a given type of
institution and then, through both careful observation and leaps of intuition,
to relate theoretically possible forms to the ones actually realized in a society.

Variations among societies are treated as experiments in nature; unusual or
unexpected artifacts in one culture are regarded as questions which await an
answer in the form of a “structurally related” artifact to be discovered,

hopefully, in another culture. Levi-Strauss’s thinking is characterized by a
dialectical interplay between two dominant tendencies: a penchant toward
logical analysis and systematic comparisons on the one hand; a flair for the
suggestive metaphor, the unanticipated link, the synthesis of two apparently
contradictory notions, on the other. And this curious amalgam of the precise
and the poetic is reflected, naturally enough, in his writing, which consists in
methodical, dry presentations, sporadically and dramatically interrupted by
enthusiastic pronouncements, unlikely similes, sweeping generalizations.
Similar polarities enter into the very substance of Levi-Strauss’s work.
Thus, he considers primitive thought to be essentially logical in nature—the
perception of opposites and contrasts being the underlying common ground
of all human thought—while at the same time savage thought exhibits a

heightened sensitivity for the raw sensory data of the world, colors, smells,
sounds, together with the intuitive capacity to perceive links based upon
sensual parallels. His proposal of such an unlikely combination of intellective
proclivities is perhaps a principal reason why Levi-Strauss engenders both
extravagant praise and hostile criticism: those who share his dual vision
applaud his perspicacity, those who find his descriptions strangely alien are
repelled by both the substance and the style of his work. We shall repeatedly
encounter this curious mixture of art and logic, sensuality and rationality,
myth and philosophy, as we review the major products of Levi-Strauss’s pen.
In stressing the logical properties of primitive thought, Levi-Strauss
diverged markedly from his famous predecessor Lucien Levy-Bruhl, the
leading theme of whose work was the differences between primitive and
advanced societies. And in contrast to the functionalist school of Malinowski,
which focused upon the “uses” of institutions and the needs of people, Levi-
Strauss emphasized the essential autonomy of cultural institutions and the

extent to which they reflect the untrammeled operation of the human mind.
He embraced strongly the conclusion that the full gamut of human
possibilities and human experience is rooted in, and limited by, the intrinsic
structure of the mind, and that it can therefore be specified:
The ensemble of a people’s customs has always its particular style; they
form into systems. I am convinced that the number of these systems is not
unlimited and that human societies, like individual human beings (at play,
in their dreams, or in moments of delirium), never create absolutely; all
they can do is to choose certain combinations from a repertoire of ideas
which it should be possible to reconstitute. For this, one must make an
inventory of all the customs which have been observed by oneself or
others. With all this, one could eventually establish a sort of periodical
chart of chemical elements, analogous to that devised by Mendeleev. In

this, all customs, whether real or merely possible, would be grouped by
families and all that would remain for us to do would be to recognize those
which societies had, in point of fact, adopted.7
Making this bold and exciting claim was one thing, substantiating it
another. Levi-Strauss’s first anthropological contributions were in the
traditional vein: ethnographies of peoples he had visited, with particular

emphasis upon their family life. Owing to the vicissitudes of the Second World
War, however, he ended up in New York where, while teaching at that bastion
of European refugees, The New School for Social Research, he met the noted
linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson had been instrumental in introducing a

scientific approach into the study of language, and Levi-Strauss soon became
convinced that the revolution wrought in linguistic study was of critical
importance for anthropologists. Just as Jakobson had been able to show that,
underlying the tremendous diversity of language groups and phonological
components, there was a small set of distinctions which could generate

diversity of systems, so, too, Levi-Strauss felt that, if one could determine the
underlying units of culture, one could give an economical and accurate

account of the range of cultural systems—kinship, social organization, and
myth.
In a programmatic manifesto,8 Levi-Strauss announced that
anthropologists must follow the lead of their linguistic brethren. He outlined
the steps which must be taken in order to make a structural analysis of
cultural phenomena analogous to the analysis of linguistic phenomena
undertaken by the Prague school: one must study the unconscious
infrastructure of cultural phenomena rather than their surface
manifestations: one must treat not the terms or units of the realm, but rather
the relationships between those units, as independent entities; one must
regard the entire domain as a system, and search for general laws, using the
methods both of induction and of deduction. One can see here not only the
affinity between Levi-Straussian analysis and linguistic procedures, but also

strong influences from Levi-Strauss’s original masters—geology,
psychoanalysis, and Marxism.
Linguistic systems dealt with symbols or signs, arbitrary units which
“stood for” objects or concepts in the world and acquired meaning only when
so associated.9 In a linguistic analysis, then, it was heuristic to examine the
relationships among these signs and to consider the effect of various logical
operations upon a system of signs. As regarded the realm of culture, however,

the procedure was less clear. There were no necessary or conventional
symbols in the domains of family relationships, social organization, or
political processes, but instead distinct behavioral acts involving or

performed by individuals. The application of structural linguistic methods to
anthropological investigations thus remained problematic until Levi-Strauss

proposed that all cultural phenomena were of an order comparable to
linguistic phenomena and that cultural phenomena should therefore also be

considered in terms of signs. This crucial insight—based on an assumption that
cultural phenomena could for analytic purposes be treated as arbitrary—
enabled Levi-Strauss to undertake a structural analysis of various cultural
realms; he could search for signs (or symbols) which reflected the principal
factors in these domains and then operate upon such signs, with some
confidence that the relevant operations would reflect genuine relationships
among the phenomena themselves. In other words, he could, following Marx,

erect a model of the relationships in a given cultural realm, perform
operations upon this model, and then determine from ethnographies and
observers’ reports whether these operations produced the predicted
empirical correlates. Let us now look at the four principal phases of Levi-
Strauss’s scholarly work and see how he implemented his ambitious research
program.
1. KINSHIP STUDIES
Dating back to the time of Lewis H. Morgan, the great American scholar
who made detailed studies of the Iroquois’ system of kinship, ethnographers
have searched for laws or regularities among such systems; indeed, kinship
relations have traditionally been the area of greatest interest to
anthropologists. Accordingly, it was in this realm that Levi-Strauss made his
first efforts to apply the methods of structural linguistics to anthropological

data. He published his findings in a series of important articles which
appeared in the 1940’s.
After rejecting more traditional approaches to the subject because of

their lack of generality, Levi-Strauss makes a preliminary suggestion: he
proposes that kinship terms be equated with linguistic phonemes, the
smallest perceptible units in speech. Just as one might analyze the distinctive
features of a phoneme—e.g., is the sound p relatively low-pitched or high-
pitched? is it produced through the nasal cavity or not?—so, analogously, one
would ask of the term “father” whether, with reference to Ego (the subject) , it
is positively or negatively scored on such dimensions as sex, age, and

generation. After a brief flirtation with this approach, however, Levi-Strauss
discards it as well, as being neither accurate nor simplifying nor explanatory,
and so as incompatible with the goals of any scientific analysis. He then

introduces an alternative suggestion. In addition to a system of terminology
(a vocabulary system), a kinship network also involves a system of attitudes
held by kin toward one another. The system of attitudes, of affective relations
among individuals, is more directly analogous to the principal dimensions of
linguistic analysis, and accordingly affords the proper basis for the structural
analysis of kinship.
A long-standing concern in kinship theory has been the relationship
involving the maternal uncle. A boy and his mother’s brother often have a
special bond; either they are on familiar terms—a “joking” relationship—or

there is a rigid and distant relationship between them, with the boy fearing
and submissively obeying his uncle. Levi-Strauss suggests that a formal
transposition of the method of structural linguistics can help to penetrate the
mysteries of this phenomenon. He reviews with sympathy Radcliffe-Brown’s

pioneering attempt to account for the variations in this relationship, but
concludes that the British analyst failed to recognize the full extent of the
avunculate.10 For it includes not only the boy and his uncle, but a number of
other family members as well; the avunculate, in fact, is a global system,
containing four kinds of organically linked relationships or attitudes. Of these,
the crucial one is that among, and embodied in, four persons, and can be
expressed as a formula: the relation between the maternal uncle and the
nephew is to the relation between brother and sister as the relation between
father and son is to that between husband and wife. If one knows that among
the Tonga, a Polynesian people, the husband has a harmonious relationship

with his wife and the nephew enjoys a similar relationship with the uncle, it
follows that the relationship between father and son is distant, and that a
taboo exists between brother and sister. Similarly, among the Siuai of
Bougainville, if one knows of the affection between brother and sister, and
between father and son, one may then infer a distant and submissive
relationship of a nephew to his uncle, as well as a lack of harmony between
husband and wife. And so on.
It would be misleading to claim that Levi-Strauss’s assertion is
confirmed by all the relevant data, or even that there is complete consensus
about the meaning of his claim. (Which pair of relationships precisely is he
referring to? How does one resolve ambivalent feelings into positive or
negative? What would constitute counterexamples to the claim?) Indeed,

most commentators are skeptical about this analysis, no matter how it is
interpreted. Still, there is no denying that this kind of approach to kinship
structures has had enormous influence in anthropological circles and that use
of the linguistic model has created a revolution in the field. Even if the
avunculate is not in some sense the basic unit of kinship, the mere challenge it
offers to the primacy of the nuclear family is itself a significant contribution.
The possibility that one may find basic units or structures in cultural realms,
translate them into signs, determine the relationships among these signs, and
then make predictions about factors heretofore unknown, has been seen by
many anthropologists as a promise that their field may soon take on the
substance as well as the trappings of a true science.
Having provided a solution for the puzzle of the avunculate, Levi-
Strauss proceeded in his first major work to propose a key to the
understanding of all kinship structures in all primitive societies. This
enormous book, in “the grand tradition,” as a sympathetic critic11 put it,

began by considering the universal taboo on incest—a rule found in all
societies and therefore the rule of Society, the one which sets it off from
Nature. Levi-Strauss went on to provide abstract models for the major kinds

of kinship systems, pausing along the way for incisive discussions of gift-
giving, the relationship between Nature and Culture, the place of women and
words in a society, the mental capacities of children, the absence of incest
among the anthropoid apes, and wine-tasting in France. Although the detailed
discussion of kinship algebra which occupies a major part of the text has little
meaning except for professionals, the book’s principal themes are accessible
to the lay reader and have become a crucial part of Levi-Strauss’s enduring
legacy to the field of anthropology.
Standing behind and inspiring The Elementary Structures of Kinship was

the pioneering work of Marcel Mauss on the centrality of the gift. Mauss had
shown that exchange and the giving of gifts formed the solder which held
individuals and groups together, and had presented extensive documentation

concerning the various kinds of exchange found in diverse societies. He had
argued that gifts were social facts over which the individual had no control,
that there were no truly free or pointless gifts. Levi-Strauss recalls his
experience in reading The Gift as “like Malebranche hearing Descartes lecture,
the heart throbbing, the head seething and the mind invaded by a certainty
still indefensible but domineering, at having attended an event decisive in the
evolution of science.” In Levi-Strauss’s view, Mauss was the first

anthropologist to comprehend fully that universal phenomena must be
studied in their unconscious as well as their conscious form, that empirical
reality must be transcended in order to penetrate to more profound
structural realities, and that careful research may enable one to uncover the
innate structure of the human mind.12 The principle of reciprocity
represented one such basic form of human thought and behavior.
And yet, though Mauss’s contributions were of the highest order, he had
not carried his work through to its ultimate conclusion; he had led
anthropology to the Promised Land, but had not entered there himself. For, as
Levi-Strauss was to show, the centrality of giving extends not merely to
material goods, but also to the exchange of words and to the transfer of
women. Indeed, Levi-Strauss was to find in the exchange of women among
social groups the basis for the incest taboo and for the very origin of society
itself.
Levi-Strauss begins his discussion in The Elementary Structures by
questioning why the incest taboo is found in all societies. He rejects previous
interpretations (e.g., the development of physical repulsion between siblings,
familiarity breeding indifference) and suggests that the phenomenon can only
be explained by considering the nature and function of kinship systems. In
these terms, the fatal flaw of incest is that it prevents the formation of larger
units: if one marries one’s sister, the possibility of exchanging women and so
of establishing alliances is precluded. Inasmuch as society and survival are
thought to depend upon the building up of such alliances, incest cannot be
tolerated, and strong sanctions are devised against it.

The prohibition is seen as a manifestation of giving or self-sacrifice, as
the group’s way of saying that, in sexual matters, a person cannot do as he
pleases. Among primitive peoples, incest is regarded as socially absurd rather
than as morally repugnant, reflecting a sort of Cartesian principle that one
cannot marry oneself, or a part of oneself. Levi-Strauss cites a vignette which
points up the primitive person’s understanding of the reason for the incest
taboo:
[In answer to a question put by an anthropologist] What, you would like to

marry your sister? Don't you want a brother-in-law? Don’t you realize that
if you marry another man’s sister and another man marries your sister,
you will have at least two brothers-in-law; while if you marry your own
sister, you will have none? With whom will you hunt? With whom will you
garden. . . . whom will you go to visit?13
Levi-Strauss regards his explanation of the origin of the incest taboo as
the solution to a profound mystery: the transition from the state of Nature to
the state of Culture. Whereas animals have no incest taboo, and more
generally no rules, the capacity to state a rule binding upon all men is the
decisive factor in the formation of culture; from this epochal step, marriage,
social alliances, and reciprocity of all sorts follow. For Levi-Strauss, as for his
Rousseauian forebears, the transition made by man from being a part of

Nature, along with plants and animals, to a creature of Culture, with language,
customs, and traditions, was an issue of overriding philosophical and
humanistic importance; the claim to have clarified this mystery was a critical
one, of interest to many outside the anthropological field. However, as already
indicated, the major portion of The Elementary Structures consisted of a
detailed consideration of the various kinds of kinship structures possible,
and, in this area, he gave his anthropological contemporaries much aliment

for thought.
Surveying the hundreds of different kinship systems reported in the

literature, Levi-Strauss claimed to be able to reduce them to a few basic types.
In a restricted form of exchange, the obligation of reciprocity was fulfilled by
a direct exchange of females between two groups (A and B). This direct
exchange had the advantage that one saw and knew what one was getting,
and got it immediately, but the more damaging consequence that possibilities
for building up strong and complex networks of interrelated alliances were

effectively precluded. Thus, a more advanced form—generalized exchange—
developed in which A gave a woman to B, B to C, C to D, and so forth, and each
group took the calculated risk that this chain-letter kind of exchange would
eventually result in a fuller and more varied mesh of social structure. Levi-
Strauss, placing a high value on the increasing integration of social networks,

argued strongly and cogently for the superiority of this form of exchange.
The elegance of his work on kinship is discernible in a number of
contributions. He was able to take diagrams of basic kinship forms and show
how a simple change of one factor in the diagram would give rise to another

kinship structure; he could explain why certain of these structures were
frequent among primitive groups, whereas others seldom or never occurred.
Here was a literal representation of a kinship structure and the application of
a logical mathematical operation upon it—remarkable demonstrations in a

field which had often been pervaded by confusion. Yet, Levi-Strauss went
beyond such algebraic computations in his insistence that while, from the
formal point of view, men and women were interchangeable and equal, they
were not so from societal points of view: men exchange women, and not vice
versa. Theoretically, women could exchange men14—“it would only be

necessary to reverse all the signs in the diagram and the total structure would
remain unchanged”; practically, this never happened. Thus certain

transformations which might have been anticipated on mathematical grounds
simply never occurred. In addition, Levi-Strauss made the intriguing

discovery that two forms of cross-cousin marriage —a male marrying the
daughter of his mother’s brother or of his father’s sister—which were

equivalent formally were not equivalent in distribution in the world. This was
because, given the nature of exchange, it was productive to marry a mother’s

brother’s daughter, but not the father’s sister’s daughter. The former course
would lead to a widening of kinship ranks, the latter to a cutting off of
possibilities. Thus, marriage with the father’s sister’s daughter could only
yield a multitude of small systems: kinship relations which were equal from
biological and formal viewpoint were shown to be dissimilar from the
viewpoint of social utility.
Levi-Strauss believed he had reduced all the multitudinous systems and
elaborate rules to three structures and two forms of exchange, and that these
structures and forms depended in turn upon a single differential in a regime
—its harmonic or disharmonic character. All principles of kinship came down

to the question of the relationship between rules of residence and rules of
descent, with a disharmonic regime leading to restricted exchange, a
harmonic regime to generalized exchange. He had demonstrated, further, that
exogamy (marrying outside one’s group) was the archetype of all practices
based upon reciprocity, and that marriage alliances were the essential basis
of the social structure. He claimed to have shown the existence of basic
mental structures: the universality of rules, the principle of reciprocity, the
socially solidifying nature of the gift. He had shown kin relationships to be
analogous to linguistic systems, with members of society standing in binary

relation to one another, the members as lexicons or repertoires of terms, the
exchange rules as the grammar. Finally, he disclosed his personal value

system with his declaration in favor of generalized exchange as leading to
greater degrees of solidarity, and in his conclusion that language tended to
“impoverish perception,”15 stripping it of its affective, aesthetic, and magical

implications. Levi-Strauss was to adopt this elegiac tone increasingly in his
later writings.

What are we to make of Levi-Strauss’s specific thesis regarding such
systems as the avunculate, and his general one about the transition from
Nature to Culture? It is only fair to point out that he has excited and delighted
readers more than he has convinced them, and that his reputation, even
during the early years of his career when he was writing on traditional
subjects, has always been more exalted among the general intellectual
community than among his anthropologist colleagues. The reasons for his
mixed critical reception are manifold, and do not always redound to the credit
of the critic. Yet, nearly all but his most devoted followers would concede that
the empirical observations cited by Levi-Strauss can often be differently
interpreted, and that his theories about the nature of Nature and the
elementary forms of thought would be as difficult to prove as to disprove.
This said, it can be added that the stimulation provided by his path-breaking
work may be unequaled in the modern history of anthropology.
2. STRUCTURAL STUDIES OF CULTURE
The publication of The Elementary Structures vs Kinship made Levi-
Strauss’s reputation in the anthropological world, though it was probably a
book more talked about, in praise or condemnation, than actually read; his
publication of Tristes Tropiques several years later made him a well-known
figure in humanistic circles everywhere. In the meantime, however, he
published a considerable number of influential articles on other aspects of
culture, in an effort to test out his general notions about structuralism and to
unify diverse kinds of ethnographical data. Some of these articles, selected by
Levi-Strauss himself, appeared in book form in Structural Anthropology in
1958—a collection that is indispensable reading for those who want to apply
structural methods to various realms.
As the work represents the master’s selection from over one hundred
essays written in this period, nearly every piece is seminal from one or
another point of view. Worthy of special mention, however, are the papers on
social structure among the Bororo, artistic representation, shamanism, and

the analysis of myth. In these writings, Levi-Strauss demonstrated that the
perspective he was developing could uncover important facets in the most
unlikely kinds of realms. In his treatment of the Bororo. for instance, he

detailed first the people’s own claim about dual organization in their culture:
that there are two halves of the village which exchange women and gifts and
bury each other’s dead. This duality is reflected in the physical layout of the
village, which is divided into symmetrical parts and then for other purposes,
subdivided symmetrically again. Next, however, Levi-Strauss presents
evidence that each clan is also subdivided into three groups—upper, middle,
and lower—and that, in practice, one regulation takes precedence: uppers

from one clan marry only uppers of the other, middles only middles, lowers
only lowers. Despite appearances, then, the Bororo are really made up of
three endogamous groups. Levi-Strauss suggests that the various

“aboveground” institutions among the Bororo represent merely a
rationalization, covering up a true structure which the natives feel compelled
to hide. The crucial differences between the native’s conscious model of his
society, his unconscious model of the society, and the observer’s or

anthropologist’s model of the society are then discussed. Pervading this
discussion is the belief that thinking in oppositions—one moiety vs. another:
endogamy vs. exogamy—is a fundamental property of the human mind.
Levi-Strauss’s comparative discussion of the shaman and the
psychoanalyst16 provides an astounding example of the way in which

apparently diverse personages may be viewed as participants in closely
related structures. The urbane and literate psychoanalyst, meeting alone with
his patient daily for years on end while the patient relates his life and
attempts through rational interpreting to determine its meaning, is shown to
function in a manner strikingly akin to that of the primitive shaman, who

chants before a large group about the events in his clan and the particular
crisis they are confronting and can elicit an “abreaction,” or sudden release of
affect, by invoking supernatural forces.
In both cases, Levi-Strauss proposes, physical or organic changes in the
patient or group are brought about through a structural reorganization, as the
“patient” comes to live out a myth—either one received, or one created, by

him. The structure of the myth is, on the unconscious level, analogous to the
structure which underlies the disturbance on the organic level. That is, the
abreaction evoked by shaman or therapist brings about changes in the
patient’s interpretations of meaningful symbols which reflect changes in
bodily chemistry. Both healers work with symbols which can be understood
by the individual and which, when properly understood, bring about a
powerful affective reorganization tied to the use of words. In other
particulars, such as the source of their material and the activeness of their
participation, the shaman and the psychoanalyst are diametrical opposites, so

that here their roles have structures related by a single transformation, that
of negation. Freud’s findings are thus assimilated into a more comprehensive
framework even as the specific details of the psychoanalytic encounter are

placed in a new perspective.
In his study of split representation in the art of Asia and America, Levi-
Strauss examines the unusual artistic practices found among American
Indians of the Northwest Coast.17 Among the features of this art are intensive
stylization, schematization, and split representation; the animal is cut in two,
there is a deep depression between the eyes, and the head appears not as a
front view but as two profiles adjoining at the mouth. Sometimes the animals
are depicted as split in two with profiles joined in the middle; alternatively, a
front view of the head is shown bordered by a pair of adjoining profiles of the
body. The existence of a similar art form among the Chinese could, of course,
stem from reasons of history or diffusion, one group transmitting it to others;

but once this possibility has been eliminated, as impossible or highly
improbable, the traditional approach is reduced to speculation about chance
conditions or about the mysterious unity of mankind. Levi-Strauss instead
makes a sociological analysis of the two societies and concludes that, in each,
split representation expresses a deeper and more fundamental splitting,
namely, between the individual as a biological entity and the individual as a
social role which he must embody. The cultures emphasizing this split
representation are in fact “mask” or “tattoo” cultures in which the face
receives its position in a social structure, its social dignity and mystical
significance, only through decoration of some sort. Such civilizations are
characterized by prestige struggles, rivalries between hierarchies,
competition between social and economic privileges, and split personalities;
both the masks and the decorative split representation are embodiments in
graphic art of the underlying structure of such cultures.
SPLIT REPRESENTATION
Painting from a house-front representing a bear.
from Franz Boas. Primitive Art, Dover Publications, New York. Reproduced by permission.
Finally, in a major essay first published in 1955, Levi-Strauss introduces
a method for investigating the nature and significance of myths. Contrasting
his interest with those of his predecessors, who were likely to regard myths
either as meaningless conglomerations or as “charters for social action,” Levi-
Strauss proposes instead a breakdown of the myth into its component parts
or units, and a grouping together of those units which refer to the same point
or theme. When these groups of points are considered in relationship to one
another, the major themes as well as the structure and the message of the
myth can be deciphered. Proceeding through an elaborate analysis, Levi-
Strauss illustrates how the Oedipus myth in all of its versions has to do with

either the over- or the undervaluation of the importance of kinship structures
and with the question of men’s origin on the earth through either
autochthony (emergence from the earth) or childbirth. The myth does not
resolve these issues—myths by their very nature deal with insoluble
problems, the great enigmas of human experience—but it does provide a

point of equilibrium between competing notions derived from social
experience and from cosmology. (The procedure of myth analysis devised by
Levi-Strauss will be illustrated further when we come to consider in some

detail Edmund Leach’s examination of the Genesis myth, “Levi-Strauss in the
Garden of Eden.”)
The essay on myth analysis appears to have marked a turning point in
Levi-Strauss’s development as a thinker. Up to that point he had been intent
on demonstrating the relevance of his structural approach to classic

anthropological problems: social organization, kinship, primitive artifacts. In
each of these domains he attempted to determine what the elementary
structures were, in both nuances of that phrase: structures, in that he
discerned integrated complexes which could be transformed through

systematic operations into other related and integrated complexes;
elementary, in that the dimensions of kinship structures, social organizations,
and art forms were supposed to be basic expressions of “the human spirit,”
basic to human culture—the building blocks out of which the more complex
or hierarchical forms characteristic of advanced civilizations were to be
constructed.
3. THE SAVAGE MIND
At a conference of linguists and anthropologists held in the early 1950’s,
Levi-Strauss remarked that all the discussants had been pointedly avoiding
the “uninvited guest”: the human mind.18 Although he had referred only
infrequently to “mind” in his earlier writings, it is evident in retrospect that
he attributed the existence of a compact set of universal structures to the
construction of the human mind (and beyond that, to the constitution of the
brain and the nervous system). Restricted and generalized exchange, split
representation, dual organization were widespread, and possessed a certain

priority because of the way in which the human mind worked. But, as the
linguist Saussure had pointed out many years before, the development of
elements of culture such as kinship structures was constrained by certain
“reality factors”: the length of the lifespan, the location of other tribes, the
supply of women, the needs of reproduction and alliance. As a consequence,

the mind operated in these areas only under severe limitations. If one wanted
to see the mind working spontaneously, Levi-Strauss reasoned, it would be
vital to examine realms in which there were fewer givens and restraints, and
the mind could accordingly have “free rein.” For this reason his later work has
fixed upon domains such as myth classification, in which the mind can more
directly reveal its organization and its rules of functioning. And it is the study

of mind that he has come increasingly to regard as properly the primary
concern of anthropology.
In an interim period before embarking on his magnum opus, a four-
volume study of the myths of Indians in North and South America, Levi-
Strauss composed two of his most pivotal works: Totemism and The Savage
Mind. His purpose in these was twofold: to illustrate the basic principles by
which the human mind works, and to demonstrate that the mind of a so-
called “primitive” is no different qualitatively from that of a member of an
advanced Western culture.
Anthropologists of the nineteenth century were captivated by a
widespread practice called totemism, which involved the conferring of animal

or plant names upon individuals or clans. Various theories of totemism were
advanced, but none seemed to account for the majority of cases, and so the
theories, and the problem as well, disappeared from sight. Levi-Strauss begins
his treatment with an interesting account of past failures. Totemism, he

argues, is like hysteria, in that once one assumes that the hysteric (or totem
society) is qualitatively different from the normal person (or non-totem
society) , it becomes impossible to explain the puzzling phenomenon. It was

Freud’s great insight that there is no sharp dividing line between illness and
health, that what is salient in the hysteric can be discerned in more muted
form in the normal person. By a parallel line of argument, Levi-Strauss
demonstrates that the totemistic way of thought is simply a phase of all
human thought and that, with this realization, the mystery of totemism
dissolves.
Reviewing earlier explanations with characteristic incisiveness (and
perhaps a shade of condescension), Levi-Strauss is able to dismiss all except
those that posit some sort of resemblance between totem groups and the
names they choose. Such a resemblance, he stresses, is analogical, not literal.
It is not that members of, say, the Beaver Clan look, or live, like beavers, while
those of the Eagle Clan look, or live, like eagles. Rather, as animals differ from
one another—eagles and beavers live at different heights and differ in speed
and grace—so clans differ from one another in analogous ways, wearing
different masks, residing at different ground levels, featuring distinctive life

styles; and totemism is that system which seeks out and captures these
analogous differences between groups of men and groups of animals or
plants. Thus, one clan lives on the mountainside, and has high social prestige,
while the other lives in the valley, and has lower prestige, and this difference
is captured in their names, with the higher group having the same
relationship to the lower one as eagles are seen to have to beavers. In Levi-
Strauss’s succinct formula, “it is not the resemblances but the differences
which resemble each other.”19
This aphorism embodies much of Levi-Strauss’s view of the mind. The

mind builds upon its perceptions of the world, and its tendency is to perceive
oppositions, contrasts, differences. It does not perceive just height alone, or
depth alone; to see one dimension is to see, and comprehend, the other. Nor
does it see height or depth merely in one sphere: rather, the mind is driven to
look for analogies in various realms and, upon finding them, to encompass
such analogies in its systems of names and classification. Consciously, of
course, people are aware of concrete manifestations rather than of relations
per se; but the tendency to perceive relations is fundamental, though

unconscious. Levi-Strauss wittily proposes that the primitive does not name
his clans after eagles and beavers because of their functional use—they are
not good to eat—but because they are “good to think”: they are appropriate
vehicles for capturing the perceptual distinctions which have impressed
themselves upon the individual or group. In the theory of totemism, one must
pass not only from subjective utility to objective analogy, but also from
external analogy to internal homology.
Although the mind—primitive or advanced—is aware first of contrasts
and oppositions, it also is impelled to mediate between them. For this reason,
the animals, plants, or other objects that the mind finds “good to think" are
those which have within them the opposing qualities by which it had
originally been impressed. Thus, twins and birds are popular characters in
myths and totemistic systems, not primarily because of their utility or their
occurrences, but because in the primitive mind both occupy an intermediary
position between the Supreme Spirit and human beings: twins are Children of
God; birds fly between earthbound humans and the Heavenly Spirit.
Tricksters and jokesters—who have a touch of the supernatural while also
appearing estranged from society and somewhat ludicrous—and crows and

ravens, animals which eat carrion, are similarly seized upon by the mind as
intermediaries. All such “middle terms” aid in resolving contradictions or, at
the very least, in holding them in suspension so that they can be pondered.
Levi-Strauss makes the provocative observation that modern
structuralism confers a certain validity upon traditional associational

psychology, which emphasized the way in which the mind builds complex
ideas out of simple associations. The true insight of the associationists was
that the mind does work by a kind of elementary logic of conjunctions

between percepts; their flaw was the belief that this elementary logic simply
reflects the structure of the environment. Instead, Levi-Strauss proposes, the
perceiving of associations is the way the mind and brain are structured:20 the
logic of oppositions and correlations, exclusions and inclusions,
compatibilities and incompatibilities explains the laws of association, and not
the reverse. Linguists have demonstrated the mind’s capacity to make + /—

distinctions. Similarly, the human brain uses nonverbal elements of culture to
form a sign language; the selectional system used—the “algebra”—is an

attribute of human brains everywhere. With some satisfaction, he concludes
that an analysis of totemism has guided him beyond simple ethnographic

generalization to the laws of language and even thought.
Specifying these laws of mind in ever-greater detail has become Levi-

Strauss’s mission in his most recent writings. In The Savage Mind, he seeks to
inter for all time the (then) widely accepted notion that primitives think in a
childish way—with regard to totemism, for example, that they literally

believe they are animals or plants—that they are incapable of conceptual
thought or abstraction, that they are creatures of magic rather than science.
He advances his argument in two ways: by citing impressive instances of
conceptual or scientific reasoning on the part of primitive persons, and by

showing that the thought processes of contemporary civilized man display
many modes of perception or reasoning which are unhesitatingly labeled as
primitive when they are encountered in other societies.
As an instance of advanced thought among primitives, he cites this
ethnographical account of the Hanunoo of the Philippines:
Almost all the Hanunoo’s activities require an intimate familiarity with

local plants and a precise knowledge of plant classification. Contrary to the
assumption that subsistence-level groups never use but a small segment of
the local flora, ninety-three percent of the total number of native plant
types are recognized by the Hanunoo as culturally significant. . . . the
Hanunoo classify all forms of the local avifauna into seventy-five
categories. . . . they distinguish about a dozen kinds of snakes . . . sixty-odd
types of fish. . . . the thousands of insect forms present are grouped by the
Hanunoo into a hundred and eight name categories, including thirteen for
ants and termites.21
And, to provide an instance of a so-called primitive custom which is an
integral part of our own lives, Levi-Strauss has resort to the primitive belief in
the churinga, a stone or wooden object which is supposed to be the physical
body of a definite ancestor and is formally conferred on the living person as
his ancestor’s reincarnation; he forestalls our laughter at this improbable
notion by reminding us (or at least his fellow Frenchmen) of the
documentary archives which we secrete in strongboxes or entrust to the

safekeeping of solicitors and which we inspect from time to time with the
care due to sacred things, to repair them if necessary or to commit them to
smarter dossiers. On these occasions we too are prone to recite great
myths recalled to us by the contemplation of the torn and yellowed pages:
the deeds and achievements of our ancestors, the history of our homes
from the time they were built or first acquired.22
He alludes to the horror many individuals would feel if a document important
to history—say, the original of the Declaration of Independence—were
destroyed; he underscores the irrationality of our attitude to such relics of the
past in noting that, when we make our pilgrimages to see Van Gogh’s house or
Lincoln’s bed, it is in the last analysis not crucial whether what we see is
genuine or not. As in the case of the churinga, what is important is only that
we be shown it, told it is the house or the bed, and undergo the appropriate
emotion.
Although Levi-Strauss is intent upon revealing identities between
primitive and advanced thought, he is not so rash as to claim that the

primitive is operating exactly like the Western scientist. Rather, he proposes
two kinds or levels of science, and claims that the primitive practices the
science of the concrete. Both primitives and scientists may be said to operate
scientifically in that both engage in the classification of objects and
phenomena, which philosophers have identified as central to all scientific

activity.23 The primitive, however, bases his classifications upon the sensory
properties of materials: he groups together wild cherries, cinnamon, vanilla,
and sherry because they smell alike, whales and sharks because they look
alike. Such arrangements certainly have their own validity, and the Western
scientist might well make the same grouping of foods, for all contain
aldehyde. But the scientist would also separate the whale and the shark on
anatomical and evolutionary grounds, and this kind of classification is likely
to be missed by the primitive, who does not, in his science of the concrete,
give weight to the results of dissection or to the twigs on evolutionary trees.
Levi-Strauss suggests that the science of the concrete and the science of
the Westerner are two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge, both capable
of giving rise to organized, self-consistent systems. They require the same
kinds of mental operations—the identification of properties, and grouping

consistently in terms of these properties —but often differ in the types of
phenomena to which they are applied and in the bases upon which the salient
or relevant properties are determined.
In a revealing, if somewhat overdrawn analogy, Levi-Strauss suggests
that the thought of the primitive is akin to the technique of the bricoleur.24 A
bricoleur is, in France, a kind of professional handyman who helps with odd
jobs, and who uses means which a skilled craftsman might consider clumsy or
devious. Faced with the task, say, of repairing a faulty machine, he looks over
the materials at hand and improvises a solution. If the materials available do
not suffice, he may try to modify them in some way; but he is unlikely to seek
new tools or to redefine the problem.
In contrast, the scientist or engineer will not even bother to determine
what tools are available until a much later stage. Instead, he will refresh his
knowledge of how the machine is supposed to work, drawing a diagram or

even consulting a manual. Then, still proceeding on the plane of thought, he
will specify the points at which something could have gone wrong and the set
of possible repairs. Only at this point will he inventory the tools that are at
hand; and if the appropriate ones are missing, he will secure them, or, if
necessary, even invent them. As Levi-Strauss puts it, the bricoleur begins with
the event— the broken machine and the tools available—and attempts to
build a structure—a set of operations with the tools which will repair the
damage. The scientist begins with the structure—his knowledge of the intact
apparatus, his deductions about possible flaws—and then gradually
converges upon the event—the specific tools and actions needed to repair the
damage.

The thought of the primitive, and preeminently his myths, form a kind of
intellectual bricolage. The primitive has “in his mind” a vast set of
perceptions, ideas, events, objects, persons, and so on. Like the bricoleur, he
knows these percepts well and can put them to diverse uses. Yet the possible
application of each percept remains limited by the particular history of each,
and by its original use and the alterations it has undergone for other
purposes. In other words, the ideas and beliefs of the primitive, like the tools
of the bricoleur, comprise a large, but not an indefinite or open set: there are
only so many possible combinations to which they can be put and, as with the
pieces in a kaleidoscope, all possible combinations are preordained by the
structure of the machine.
While the engineer or scientist is always trying to break free of the
limitations imposed by his available set of elements and devise new ones, the
bricoleur or the mythic thinker is content to make do with the elements at his
disposal and simply continues rearranging them. Each choice made will
involve some degree of reorganization of the structure, and so the repaired

machine or the content of the finished myth will never be quite the same as it
was before. Like scientific thought, mythic thought works by analogies and
comparisons, but unlike the products of scientific thought, its products are
restricted to rearrangements of old elements. Myths and ideas are built up
out of remains and debris, odds and ends of thought put to service to help
resolve philosophical problems or issues confronted by the society, such as
the origin of man or the discovery of fire. They seem to be cemented in the
same nonrandom but not completely foreseeable way as the reveries of
young children falling asleep: fragments of phrases, poems, and songs
occasioned by casual observations, combined in a novel creation with its

distinctive rhythm, tempo, and phrasing.
Having proposed a model for the way in which primitive mythic thought
is structured, Levi-Strauss goes on in The Savage Mind to discuss practices of
naming, classifying, categorizing, universalizing, and particularizing which are
exemplified most clearly in primitive societies but are reflected as well in our
own customary thinking. He seeks to demonstrate that there is a rationale for
the labeling and grouping done by primitives, that this rationale is based not
on utilitarian or functional considerations, but on the way in which the mind

sorts, clusters, opposes, and mediates percepts and qualities. In this
discussion, Levi-Strauss remains fairly close to the level of sensory
perception, and so it has been argued, with some justice, that he is presenting
a logic of sensory, qualitative, or even aesthetic perception. Given his
perennial attraction to this problem, we may presume that he would not be
displeased by such a judgment.
Any honest evaluation of The Savage Mind must acknowledge that it is
an enormously erudite and recondite work which moves uncontrollably out

of focus even after numerous readings. Levi-Strauss is a master stylist who

seldom misses the opportunity for a double entendre or a paradoxical
opposition, and is not beyond stretching a point in order to turn a neat
phrase. One example may illustrate Levi-Strauss’s cultivation of paradox, the
difficulty of reading The Savage Mind, and the charge that things are seldom
as clear as he contends.
Having discussed certain animal-naming practices found in modern

Western society, Levi-Strauss summarizes as follows:
If, therefore, birds are metaphorical human beings and dogs metonymical
human beings, cattle may be thought of as metonymical inhuman beings
and race horses as metaphorical inhuman beings. Cattle are contiguous
only for want of similarity, race horses similar only for want of contiguity.
Each of these two categories offers the converse image of one of the two
other categories, which themselves stand in the relation of inverted
symmetry.
It would take many pages to define and place in appropriate context all
the terms and implications of these sentences. We can, however, bring into
focus the general point Levi-Strauss is trying to make, as well as the evidence
for it.
Levi-Strauss observes that we tend to give names to animals with which
we have regular contact. This practice is in itself of interest, since we could
number them, use their Latinate names, choose not to name them at all, or fail
to notice their distinctive appearances. But naming is the way in which we
declare our relationship to them, and their relationship among themselves,
and this is an important aspect of mental functioning. Given that we name

animals, then, do we draw their names from the same set? Do we name dogs
as we do race horses, cattle as we do birds? Levi-Strauss thinks not, and offers
an explanation for the particular naming practices in each case.
In France, birds tend to have names like Pierrot or Margot or Jacquot
(we may analogize these to Fritz, Peter, Florence) which are drawn from the
lexicon of human names; dogs, on the other hand, have names like Sultan,
Fido, or Medor (Fala, Spot, Butch), which are somewhat similar to human
names but not really of the same type— they are closer to stage names. Both
birds and dogs are kept around the house and thus are part of our human
society (and thus regarded in some sense as human beings); but birds are
thought to have among themselves their own society, with its own
relationships. We can afford to give them human names because they have a
parallel existence and will not be confused with our society. Domesticated
dogs, however, are a part of the family and do not have their own society.
Thus, rather than giving them human names, one confers upon them names
which are parallel to the kinds of names humans have, but do not come from
the same set.
Race horses and cattle are housed in the vicinity of human beings but in
no way form a part of our own society—thus, they are inhuman beings. Race

horses are intimately involved with a particular human custom or practice
(gambling on an animal’s performance); their individual identities are
important, and they are individually groomed and carefully evaluated. They
are given names which are not descriptive of them but which underscore
their distinctiveness and reflect upon their owner’s cleverness or
imagination: Beautiful Night, Native Dancer, Man o’ War. Cattle, on the other
hand, tend to be treated as objects, because there is no interest in their
individual identities, but only in the uses to which they can be put. Their
names, if they are given names at all, tend to come from the oral rather than
the learned tradition, and are broadly descriptive: Rustaud, Rousset,
Blanchette, Douce (Spotty, Bossy, Sweet). Whereas the horses, though

isolated, seem to belong to a different and duly constituted society based on
competition for prizes—and are therefore parallel to humans—the cattle, like
the dogs, are seen more in their relationship to human beings as an extension
of our technical and economic system. In contrast to dogs, however, their

subjective personal qualities are not appreciated.
Even this abbreviated exposition should suggest that Levi-Strauss is on

to something. It is evident that animals are not carelessly or randomly named,
and that each category of animal names has distinctive properties. And yet
the particular propositions Levi-Strauss advances should not be accepted
without challenge. Domestic animals are sometimes named after individuals
whom they resemble in one way or another, race horses not infrequently
have descriptive or qualitative names, dogs are sometimes given Christian
names, and on their own birth certificates. Furthermore, the division between
being a part of human society and not being a part is in practice very difficult
to draw, and as Levi-Strauss himself has shown, primitive people tend to

incorporate all animals into their group. Indeed, one could argue that any
animal on which one bothers to confer a name is ipso facto being seen as part
of human society. None of this in any way vitiates Levi-Strauss’s overall point
about the importance of naming and the different practices found in various
realms; what is being called into question are the specific refined
discriminations he makes here.
Similar reservations can be introduced on either the common-sense or
the ethnographic level about nearly every argument expounded in The Savage
Mind; but, revealingly, such disagreements are more and more coming to be
presented within Levi-Strauss’s own framework. He himself has remarked
that he is like a woodsman who has entered a virgin forest and must make
broad swathes before individual bits of pruning can be contemplated. Thus,
he would be satisfied if his overall orientation should become the basis for
future discussion about the nature of primitive thought and the savage mind.
It is toward this goal that the present phase of his research is directed.25
4. THE LOGIC OF MYTH

If The Savage Mind challenges all but the most sophisticated
philosophers and ethnographers, even the latter group has experienced great
difficulty with Levi-Strauss’s analyses of myths in his series of monographs
collectively called Mythologiques. One well-known anthropologist26 remarked

that reviewing the second book in the series was the most arduous task of
that sort he could remember having assumed. These books are rich in
ethnographic data about dozens of Amerindian societies, and contain, all told,
well over eight hundred myths whose details must be kept in mind as Levi-
Strauss guides one through a labyrinthine exposition of their components and

meanings. We shall attempt to come to grips with this enterprise through a
general overview of it, and through an excerpt from the work of Edmund
Leach, Levi-Strauss’s colleague and his principal interpreter to English-
speaking readers.
When weaving myth, the mind is freed from the obligation of dealing
with objects. Therefore, it should be able to reveal directly its own law of
operations and, indeed, "to imitate itself as an object.” Myths should reflect
the mind’s structure, reasoned Levi-Strauss, as he commenced his study of

the huge corpus of American Indian myth. If a visitor to Western society who
did not speak the language were to watch a series of card games being played,
he should eventually be able to figure out both the rules of the games and the
construction of the deck—the content and the form of the domain of cards.
Similarly, someone who samples the variety of myths produced across
different ethnographic settings should be able to pick out both the bits and
morsels which constitute the essence of the myth and the various rules of
combination which reflect the structure of the mind that is producing them.
This, in brief, was Levi-Strauss’s project.
If the language analogy was helpful in the earlier studies of cultural

phenomena, it was obviously relevant to the study of myth. It was necessary
to find units—in this case, the shortest meaningful utterances or “basic
constituents” —to discover their distinctive features and their rides of
combination, to note how they were combined in any given version of a myth
and how they were transformed over a range of myths. Levi-Strauss was
convinced that many myths in a culture work with the same set of materials
and that myths containing the same material do not have merely an
accidental relationship to one another, but that rather there are specific: laws
of combination or transformation which can enable one to get from one myth
to another; indeed, he has even devised an (admittedly obscure) formula for

doing so.27
And yet, noted Levi-Strauss, there are aspects of myth not easily
assimilated to a linguistic model. Consider, for example, the widespread
tendency to repeat parts of myths with great frequency, the numerous
variants of a given myth, the way in which the principal elements of myth
gradually “sink in” as the listener’s intuitive familiarity with them grows.

These and other aspects of myth seemed more akin to music, and so it was
such correspondences that Levi-Strauss chose to emphasize in the
Mythologiques. Music, in turn, has often been observed to have logical
qualities: a melody is composed of discrete tones or pitches combined in a
certain way, and various kinds of orderly transformation28 (e.g., diminution,

augmentation, retrograde inversions) can be imposed on a musical passage.
This transforming aspect was very important to Levi-Strauss, and in this
regard also—instead of embracing the most recent view of language, which
stressed its own transformational aspects—he relied on music as an analogy.

The Mythologiques are filled with musical references, including such section
titles as “Recitative Theme and Variations,” "A Short Sonata and Well-
tempered Anatomy,” “Rustic Symphony in Three Movements,” and “A Fugue
of the Five Senses.”
In Levi-Strauss’s treatment of myth, then, there are several competing
models: language as spoken in everyday discourse, formal or mathematical

language and its logical transformations, and the harmonic structures of
music, each of which can in turn be related to the other models, to the ecology
of the society, and to the myths themselves, singly or collectively. This
complexity, compounded by the richness of hundreds of unfamiliar tales
about jaguars, smoke, fire, peccaries, and cross-cousin marriage, makes the
landscape of the Mythologiques a strange and at times forbidding terrain.
What of Levi-Strauss’s goals in the Mythologiques? Quite simply, he
seeks to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt the method and the logic
inherent in myth corpora. He tries to show that simple empirical categories—
the perception of light, darkness, smell, noise, silence, etc.— can be treated as
conceptual tools for such abstract ideas as the relationship between Nature
and Culture, the characteristics of the incest taboo, and the importance of
certain kinship and social arrangements; and that these ideas, moreover, can
be incorporated into logical propositions. Indeed, he contends that myths
must be converted into symbolic logical terms if they are to be understood.
The relationships among the myths are seen as quasi-biological in character,
analogous to the physical transformations of anatomy and physiology which

relate animal species to one another.
In the first volume of the Mythologiques,29 entitled The Raw and the
Cooked, Levi-Strauss attempts to present a logic of qualities based upon the
difference between the raw or uncooked, which is part of Nature, and the
cooked, which is part of Culture, depending upon man’s discovery of lire. He
proposes that the opposition between raw and looked on the plane of food is
the same as that between Nature and Culture on the plane of society, between
profane and sacred on the plane of religion, between silence and noise on the
plane of sound. In the next volume. From Honey to Ashes, which also features
the eating of food as its central image, his aim is to convert content into
structure “without impoverishing it.” He tries to show that there is a logic of

form—contained and uncontained, inside and outside—underlying the logic
of qualities: honey is taken directly from Nature and constitutes the meal;
tobacco is of Culture and is consumed outside the meal. In a third volume. The
Origin of Table Manners, Levi-Strauss argues that a logic of propositions

underlies all systems or codes in a culture. And in the finale, The Naked Man
(L’Homme Nu), he explores the role of costume and commercial trade in
man’s relationship to the natural world; considers the closed nature of the
corpus of myths found among the Indians of North and South America; and
reveals how, taking as a point of departure a single tale of a family quarrel,
one can elucidate the major oppositions of earth and sky in the physical
order, man and woman in the natural order, and kin relationships in the
social order.
The Mythologiques represent, overall, Levi-Strauss’s comprehensive
effort to demonstrate that all patterns of human behavior are codes; that the
mind’s inherent structuring tendency—operating in terms of a limited set of

inborn principles—conditions and determines the form of social phenomena,
and of important forms of relations among human beings: differences in
status, networks of friendship, feelings of hostility, etc. Such relations are
dealt with in myths by means of various codes relating to categories of food,

sound or silence, smell and taste, landscapes, seasonal changes, climate,
celestial bodies, shelter, animal and plant life. The terms or objects appearing
in myths may differ, but the underlying laws of discourse, and the operative
ecological and social constraints, are invariable. Myths are designed to deal
with problems of human existence which seem insoluble; they embody and
express such dilemmas in a coherently structured form, and so serve to
render them intelligible. Through their structural similarity to given “real

world” situations, myths establish a point of repose or equilibrium at which
men can come to grips with the crucial components of the problem, and
become aware of the “fix" they are in. Thus, a myth is both intellectually
satisfying and socially solidifying.
Levi-Strauss was here making claims of a boldness rarely paralleled in

contemporary social science. He was suggesting, first of all, that the kinds of
principles which govern the use of language are also discernible in all other
realms of cultural activity, ranging from sex and cooking to hunting and child-
rearing. Each of these realms contains “languagelike codes,” which the human
mind imposes upon the flux of sense and experiential data and which are
embodied in the words and the musiclike qualities of myths. If one has a
sufficiently thorough understanding of the myth corpus, it should prove
possible to predict the form of myths which are as yet undiscovered, just as
an astronomer can predict the presence, size, and trajectory of a body which
has never been detected by his instruments.
Levi-Strauss has drawn parallels between language and reality because

he believes that, in the last analysis, they both reflect the structure of the

universe. Culture, he feels, shares with Nature this underlying structure, since
Culture is a product of men’s minds and men’s minds are themselves a part of
Nature.30 Whereas animals may reflect the mechanisms of life in a disjointed,

fragmentary way, the human mind, endowed with reason, provides a
relatively faithful reflection of the structured universe. And it is most
peculiarly in myth, where the mind is freed of the pressures of daily existence,
that it comes to “imitate itself as an object,” and thereby to give expression to

that reflection. The laws of the world are seen as identical to the laws of
thought, and one’s thought is seen as susceptible to study like any other
object.
In addition to these claims about the essential continuity between
thought and its object, Levi-Strauss attempts the stupefyingly difficult task of
analyzing the experience of the senses in a logical way. Whereas the standard
scientific inclination has been to ignore qualitative aspects of experience as
much as possible and to focus upon measurable correlates (or noncorrelates)
of these properties, it is Levi-Strauss’s aim to create a logic which will retain
the particular qualities of experience. For the experiencing person, and
particularly for primitives, objects are charged with affect and meaning, and
the operation of myths and of mind is comprehensible only if these qualitative
aspects are somehow retained. Levi-Strauss seeks to achieve this by allowing
percepts and images to function as signs, by treating them as counters in a
game which permits their expression in rules, while allowing them to
maintain their empirical significance; he aims to transcend the contrast
between the tangible and the intelligible by operating at the level of the sign,
by reducing experiences to the objectivity of signs while alluding to their
qualitative properties through inclusion of the particular sign. Thus, Levi-

Strauss specifies the qualities of raw and cooked, rather than of large and
small, of pure and polluted, of x and y; only by maintaining some link to the
content of experience can he hope to communicate his basic theses about the
laws of mind. The crucial question is whether he has succeeded in bridging
the gap between phenomenal experience and the logical analysis of the world,
or whether his effort falls between these poles, without capturing the essence
of either. Put another way, the Mythologiques constitute an experiment
designed to determine whether the sciences can elucidate qualitative and
aesthetic phenomena.
Any thoroughgoing critique of Levi-Strauss’s program and achievement
would still be premature, since the Mythologiques have just been completed,
and most scholars lack sufficient information and familiarity with the
materials to evaluate his enterprise properly. It is not even possible as yet to
offer a specific, detailed example of Levi-Strauss’s approach, because the
material is so unfamiliar to those unschooled in Brazilian ethnography as to

make pages of introduction necessary. Nonetheless, a picture of the sweep
and nature of Levi-Strauss’s claims may perhaps be partially conveyed if one
considers some examples drawn from a much more familiar source—the

Bible. Levi-Strauss’s colleague Edmund Leach has devoted his considerable
energy and creativity to making various structural analyses of Biblical
material and it is to these that we now turn.
First, let us consider an example of that oft-alluded-to operation, mythic
transformation. Leach summarizes Judges 11:30-40 as follows:
(a) Jephthah the Gileadite makes a vow to present a burnt offering to

God if he is granted victory.
(b) God grants Jephthah victory.
(c) By implication, Jephthah plans to sacrifice an animal or a slave in

fulfillment of his vow.
(d) God, in the form of chance, imposes a substitution whereby

Jephthah is made to sacrifice his only child, a virgin
daughter.
Outcome: Jephthah has no descendants of any kind.
—and Genesis 22:1-18 in this manner:
(a) God requires Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac as evidence
of his faith and obedience.
(b) As Abraham prepares to obey, God imposes a substitution

whereby Abraham in fact sacrifices an animal in fulfillment
of his duty.
(c) Abraham thus demonstrates his faith and obedience.
(d) God makes a vow that Abraham shall have countless descendants.
Outcome: Children of Israel claim descent from Abraham.31
Leach maintains that while the superficial resemblance between the passages
is slight, a structural analysis reveals these two stories to be mirror images of

each other. He suggests the following substitutions: “God” is changed to
“father,” “father” is changed to “God”; “virgin daughter” is changed to “virgin
son”; the sequence represented by the clauses (a) - (d) is simply reversed
across the stories and so the outcome itself is reversed. Leach concludes that
the two stories have an identical structure, since the second can be obtained
from the first by the simplest possible transformational rule: For each
element, substitute its binary opposite.
It is certainly an exaggeration to claim that the stories are mirror
opposites of one another—an assertion that critical consideration of any two
clauses will quickly refine. Meaningful passages are not easily converted into
arbitrary signs in this way. Yet Leach is convincing when he insists on a
strong structural parallel between the two seemingly unrelated and
independent passages. The claim here is reminiscent of the observation that

there are only a few basic plots, which can be varied and converted into one
another by simple modifications. Levi-Straussian analysis would insist that
the myths were formed by a process of bricolage: certain perceptual elements

were isolated because of their salience and opposition; these elements came
to be embodied in persons and characters, thereby becoming the bits and
morsels out of which myths could be made. The ways in which they could be
combined were conditioned and limited by the structure of the mind (the
kaleidoscope), and the relationship between any two variants could be
mapped by transformational laws.
A more elaborate illustration of these points is to be found in Leach’s
brilliant, somewhat overwhelming, tour de force on the opening verses of
Genesis—appropriately called “Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden.”32
Leach views the opening chapters of the Bible as a series of three

episodes which have the same general structure and which reflect the same
narrative impulse in the course of confronting various crucial questions. The
first story has to do with the creation of the world (Chapter 1 of Genesis), the
second with the Garden of Eden and the expulsion of Adam and Eve (Chapters
2-3), the last with the story of Cain and Abel (Chapter 4). Leach’s discussion is
rather dense, and oscillates back and forth between a text and a complex
diagram; I have attempted to simplify and clarify both, but would counsel
readers to refer directly to the opening chapters of Genesis, reprinted as an

appendix to this book.
GENESIS ACCORDING TO LEACH
In each of the three episodes, one can discern a series of categorical
oppositions, mediated by an intermediary phenomenon or category. Each
episode features a beginning with static forces, a middle section dealing with
moving forces, and a point of repose at the conclusion of the episode. Closer
parallels among the three episodes are pointed out in the diagram, and
various themes recur throughout the narrative.
In the first episode, light is separated from darkness, heaven from earth,
and fresh water above (rain) from salt water below (sea). These oppositions
are mediated by the sky; the next opposition introduced, that between sea
and dry land, is mediated by grass, herb-yielding seed, and fruit trees. Here
we have a shift from inanimate matter to living things; and the reference to
seeds, and in particular to fruit-bearing trees, serves as a transition to the
moving objects discussed in the latter sections of the first episode.
The dead or static world is opposed to the moving, living world in the
concluding parts of the first episode. Birds and fish are living things
corresponding to the opposition between things above and things below: sky
and land, salt water and fresh water. Cattle, beasts, and creeping things
correspond to the static collection of grass, cereal, and fruit trees (in column
3).
The conclusion of the first episode involves the creation of man and
woman, expressed in general terms, and the proviso that they will have
dominion over the rest of the earth. Thus, there are three references to God,
who stood alone at the beginning of the episode: the notion of dominance; the
statement that men and women are created in God’s image; the remark that,
his work being complete, God took a day of rest. However, the first episode
ends with unanswered puzzles, for the problems of life versus death, stasis
versus motion, and incest versus procreation —how will one be fruitful and
multiply?—have not yet been faced.
The following episode—the Garden of Eden story— does confront these
questions, and also expands the general picture of Creation through more
specific creative acts. The episode begins with an opposition between heaven
and earth, this time mediated by a fertilizing mist drawn up out of the dry
infertile earth. Adam is formed, like the animals, from the dust of the earth.
The dry lands of the real world are fertilized by a river coming out of the
ground of Eden, and fertile Eve is formed from the rib of infertile Adam. Here,
then, in briefer and more specific form, is a recapitulation of the Creation
described in the first episode.
Next, oppositions are introduced: the man and the garden, and (by
implication) the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death. The Tree of Death is called
“the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” which, according to Leach, refers to
potentially pernicious knowledge of sexual differences and knowledge of

logical categories. The positive aspects of language are introduced as Adam
names the animals about him. Then a moment of rest occurs; Adam falls
asleep, Eve is created from part of him, and they are of one flesh. The
structural parallels between the first and second episodes suggest the
following to Leach: Eve is equivalent to the category “creeping things” of the
first story; creeping things are anomalous in the categorical opposition “cattle
versus beasts,” and Eve is anomalous in the categorical opposition “man
versus animal”; the serpent, an actual creeping thing, is anomalous in the

categorical opposition “man versus woman” (the snake may be
hermaphroditic) .
The serpent also serves as an antipode to God and raises in concrete and
dramatic guise the questions of knowledge, temptation, and disobedience.

The incident that follows is the structural center of the three episodes taken
as a whole. At the climactic moment, Eve accepts the apple from the serpent,
she and Adam partake of it, become aware of sexual differences, acquire
knowledge, and face the inevitability of death. At the same time, of course,
pregnancy and generational life become possible. God shows wrath toward
both humans and the snake and pronounces curses upon them, revealing the
less positive aspects of language. Enmity, hostility, and pain are introduced
for the first time. At the conclusion of the second episode, Adam and Eve have
been barred from Paradise and innocence; the “idyllic world” has been
opposed by the real world and by conflict. God does relent to the extent of
clothing his children: but he expels them from the Paradise, and the episode
ends without our knowing the fate of Adam and Eve and their prospective
progeny.
Finally, but more briefly, the third episode recapitulates and epitomizes
the same structure. Cain and Abel are introduced as polar givens in the
opening section of the work, as static oppositions who foreshadow life and
death. Cain tills the soil (the static world) and Abel tends herds (the world of
motion), but paradoxically Cain must eliminate Abel and substitute a wife in
order that a sterile homosexual world may become a fertile heterosexual

world (And Cain knew his wife and she conceived. . . .) . Again God becomes
angry, confronts his child with an accusing question, and places the curse of
the earth upon Cain. Like his parents, Cain is estranged from the life of peace
and plenty; but it is this separation that makes possible the copulation
necessary for survival of the line. God again relents, for he places a special
mark upon Cain to spare him from all attempts on his life. The episode ends
with the first long recital of lineages, as if to confirm that, for better or worse,
the line of man has been unambiguously established. Leach points out several
other interepisodal parallels which are included in the diagram, but which I
will not dwell on further.
Although any contention that these episodes are completely identical in

structure is excessive, I am in agreement with Leach that the parallels are too

strong to be unmotivated accidents. As Leach comments:
I do not claim that this kind of “structural analysis” is the one and only
legitimate procedure for the interpretation of myth. It seems to me that
whether any particular individual finds this kind of thing interesting or
stimulating must depend on personal temperament; some may think it is
too like a conjuring trick. . . . the pattern is there: I did not invent it. . . . No
one will ever again be able to read the early chapters of Genesis without
taking this pattern into account.
Skeptics are invited to accept Leach’s challenge and to tackle the

opening chapters of Genesis without applying the above approach. What is
especially fascinating is that, even as the first chapters of Genesis provide an
account of how the most mysterious and central questions about man may be
resolved, these ancient writings serve as well as a model for all literature and
stories: the introduction of contrasting characters, the building-up of a
conflict, a central crisis, and a resolution. It is especially neat that each of the
episodes embodies in a small way the essential structures of a narrative,
while the three episodes together form a carefully worked out and integrated
whole.
That Edmund Leach, a noted anthropologist who has not hesitated to
criticize many aspects of Levi-Strauss’s work, should produce such an

impressive structural analysis is a significant tribute to the Frenchman’s
pioneering genius. If structuralism is to be more than a skillful display by an
imaginative writer, its method must be transferable to other scientists;
Leach’s success indicates the possibility of such a transfer. Yet two men who
can produce convincing structural analyses are hardly enough, either, to
prove the method’s scientific validity. The real question is whether a number
of analysts, having studied Levi-Strauss’s exposition (and Leach’s examples)
could each produce structural analyses of the same text, and whether these
analyses would point up the same factors, relations, and underlying
structures. Such a demonstration has yet to be done and would probably be
extremely difficult to carry out.
Herein lies the principal difficulty with Levi-Strauss’s contribution. His
ingenuity, brilliance, and resourcefulness are denied by few; but whether his
method has been sufficiently defined as to enable it to be meaningfully used
by others has been questioned by many persons, including those fully aware
of what he is trying to do. Not a few critics complain that Levi-Strauss is overly
clever: that he makes distinctions and syntheses where data are lacking or
ambiguous; that he ignores information incompatible with his theories and
overemphasizes the limited amount of information in their favor.
Furthermore, they resent the frequent inconsistencies and volte-face’s in his

work; they point to the numerous different ways in which he employs a term
like “model” or a discipline like linguistics, and they complain that he is
constantly changing direction—as when he first claims that the line between
Nature and Culture is absolute, then denies its importance, but continues to
refer to it nonetheless; they cite apparent contradictions, as when he first

argues that myths are means of considering or solving social problems, only
to declare in later writings that myths are untrammeled reflections of the
human spirit.
It must be admitted that Levi-Strauss can be irritating, particularly
when one is trying to determine exactly what he is saying, rather than merely
taking in the varied and beautiful illustrations, seductive prose, and brilliant
intuitions. Nonetheless, too many of his critics, in my view, are overly
concerned with proving him wrong on one or another point, rather than in
accepting such errors as the unfortunate concomitant of a courageous

attempt to take on issues of dizzying difficulty and to make some kind of
tentative sense out of them.
Although Levi-Strauss’s output continues at an unabated rate, his
lectures treat new topics each year, and further surprises are no doubt in
store, it seems fair to say now that his major influence has been of two sorts.
On the one hand, his exquisite sensitivity and his ability to write with grace
and poignancy about the anthropological calling have made him a hero to a
whole generation of young humanists, as well as to many youthful
ethnographers or anthropologists manqués. On the other hand, he has

grappled boldly with many of the most difficult technical problems in the
field, and though he has excited perhaps as much opposition as adulation

among his colleagues, his vastly stimulating impact overall is denied by
virtually no one. Let us, in conclusion, consider each of his contributions.
Levi-Strauss considers anthropology a way of life. He insists that his

students undertake field work and he encourages them to do anthropological
research even within their own society. As he attempted to convey through
his dramatic alter ego Cinna, the anthropologist is someone who consciously
rejects his own society in order to immerse himself in an alien one and must
live with the consequences of this decision. One’s going into the field is
considered a rite whereby one confronts the past tradition of the
anthropological discipline and one’s own ability to remain estranged from the
society in which one has been formed. For a youth soured on Western
civilization, yet searching for commitment and self-definition, this perspective
is as appealing as Sartre’s existentialism, and far less ethnocentric. Rather

than viewing con temporary civilized man as the hallowed terminus of all
previous evolution, structuralism calls into question the unique status of
particular human groups, while also challenging traditional humanistic

assumptions about free will and infinite cognitive creativity.
On the subject of the disappearance of primitive societies, Levi-Strauss
is passionate and inspiring. He notes that these groups represent our last
connection to the world of the past, and laments the fact that modern
techniques of investigation could not have been brought to bear on them

when they were still in their pristine state at the time of the first expeditions

to the New World. He inveighs against the ravages wrought by conquistadors,
missionaries, and land-hungry frontiersmen who wreaked havoc with the
mores of these societies and reduced them to disease, dysfunction, death, and
disappearance. Addressing a distinguished assemblage commemorating (in

1965) the birth of the founder of the Smithsonian Institution, he paid tribute
to the prescient anthropologists of the last century and urged scientists and
governments to give the highest priority to the study of primitive life while
there is still time:
If a planet were nearing the earth only once, we would spare no expense. . .
. Should not the same be clone at a time when one-half of mankind, only
recently acknowledged as such, is still so near to the other half that except
for men and money its study raises no problems, although it will soon
become impossible forever . . . for native cultures are disintegrating faster
than radioactive bodies. . . . That mirror which other civilizations still hold
up to us will have so receded from our eyes that however costly and
elaborate the instruments at our disposal, we may never again be able to
recognize and study this image of ourselves which will be lost and gone
forever.33
This somber, anguished appeal, especially impressive coming from a man

devoted to dispassionate analyses of kinship systems and myth components,
recalls the classic concerns of Rousseau, Bergson, and other great figures of
the past, even as it reflects the more advanced perspective of the present day.
Levi-Strauss has cultivated that tone of detachment coupled with emotion
which is particularly attractive in a society wedded to intellectual style yet
sensitive to sentiment; and its appeal has extended far beyond the boundaries
of his own culture.
As regards the technical details of his work and his overall contributions
to the field of anthropology, Levi-Strauss may be viewed as one who has

sought to wed the empirical concerns of the American and English schools
with the interest in pervasive and underlying structures characteristic of the
Durkheimian tradition. Although he may, and should, be faulted for his less
than scrupulous adherence to the positivism aspects of his own program,
there is little argument that the course he has proposed for anthropology is
an attractive and perhaps a necessary one. Levi-Strauss persuaded a
generation to look at the model of linguistic study, and even where this model
turned out to be irrelevant to their own concerns, the kind of analytical rigor
characteristic of such studies and the search for underlying structures
beneath the surface of a protean and diffuse reality were positive influences.
Just as Marx altered the intellectual community’s ideas about historical
change by applying the methods of political economy, so Levi-Strauss has
drawn upon the methods of structural linguistics in order to elucidate the
constancies in social and cultural institutions. His notion of societies as having

their own equilibrium, brought about through regulative exchanges of various
sorts, was also a needed antidote to the diffusionist and functional
approaches prevailing before his time.
Levi-Strauss’s most substantial—and most controversial—contribution

to anthropological studies has been his insistence on the importance of the
structure of the human mind. This idea is more foreign to the themes of mid-
twentieth-century anthropology and is felt by many to be outside its proper
scope. It was thus incumbent upon Levi-Strauss to demonstrate that the

elementary structures which he and others had found in the realms of kinship
and social organization reflected the basic structures of the mind rather than
simply the environmental or evolutionary forces usually cited. To achieve
this, he had to map out the rules of the mind, its predilection for
contradictions, contrasts, oppositions, mediations, perception of relations,
associations, and so on. This pursuit continued to draw upon the insights (if
the linguists but also brought him closer to psychology and soon carved out a
place for logic and music as well. Levi-Strauss chose to focus on those areas
where the mind’s own operation would be least obscured by external factors,
and so examined classifying and naming practices, myth-making, and the
numerous relationships between these manifestations as found in different

societies, including his own. He also examined the various codes built up by
humans on the basis of their sensory perception and argued vigorously that
there was an underlying logic in qualitative perception which studies of myth
could bring to the fore.
The chief aspiration of Levi-Strauss’s program is clear. He has hoped, by
focusing on the mind, to bring out the nature not only of human psychology
but also of cultural and social organization. He wants to bring into a fruitful
harmony the diverse traditions of social anthropology, to integrate the central
insights of Freud concerning the relationship between affect and cognition,
symbols and reality, with those of Marx concerning the relationship between
the technical and economic capabilities of the society and its ideology.
Learnedly interpolating quotations from Virgil, Euripides, Mallarme, and
Playboy in analyses of the disparate myths of the American continents, he has
sought to dramatize the affinities between savage thought and the thought of
“advanced” civilizations. Indeed, he wants to dissolve the borders between
disciplines, to remain close to and illuminate the relatively nonrational realms
of intuition, feeling, sensory perception, and dreams, while revealing the
scientific basis for such thought and underlining its essential affinity to more
logical forms of thought. He wants to illuminate the meaning of myths by
focusing upon their structures, and the solidarity and endurance of societies
by focusing upon their kinship practices. If his achievement in all these areas
has been less than complete, the grandeur of his vision is inspiring.
Notes
1The quotation from Rousseau is taken from Emile (New York: Dutton, 1962); that from Tylor is found
in Primitive Culture (London: J. Murray, 1871), p. 22.
2 Levi-Strauss’s play is described in TT, pp. 376-80.p. 113 Most of the account here of Levi-Strauss’s
early life is gleaned from his autobiography; L-S includes a few more facts, and Levi-
Strauss himself provides scattered additional information throughout his writings.
3 Levi-Strauss’s enthusiastic remarks about geology are found on p. 60 of his autobiography.

4 His encounter with Marxism is described on p. 61.
5 His description of reading Lowie is found on p. 63.
6 His encounter with the Nambikwara is described in TT, p. 310.
7 The characterization of “a people’s customs” is found on p. 60 of TT.
8 Levi-Strauss’s anthropological "manifesto” is presented in his essay “Structural Analysis in

Linguistics and in Anthropology,” in SA, p. 35.
9 Defining the terms “sign,” “symbol,” and others in the area of denotation and meaning is a major
undertaking, which has inspired the new scientific field of semiotics. Piaget, for example,
uses “sign” and “symbol” in a way directly opposite to that of other specialists, and any
resolution of the inconsistency would be rather arbitrary. In the present discussion,
therefore, both these terms will be used to refer to arbitrary elements; units which are
not totally arbitrary (such as the words “twenty-one” or “blackboard”) will be so
designated.
10 Levi-Strauss discusses his solution of the avunculate problem on pp. 41-50 of his essay “Structural
Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology,” in SA. (Part I of this book also contains
other early articles on the same subject.) In order to clarify this solution,however, I have
made some assumptions not spelled out in the original.Levi-Strauss does not indicate
whether one has to know one or two of the four possible relationships, nor does he
indicate which two of the possible relationships are necessary or whether any two will
suffice. Brief consideration reveals that his hypothesis varies in its force, depending on
whether one interprets it weakly (knowledge that two units have opposite signs will tell
you only that the other units will also have opposite signs) or in a strong form
(knowledge of the sign of the first member will tell you the sign of the third member;
knowledge of the sign of the second member will tell youth sign of the fourth member). I
have interpreted his thesis as follows: if one knows that two relations have the same
sign, one can infer that the other two will have opposite signs. Almost no one, perhaps
not even Levi-Strauss himself, maintains that his original formulation is adequate; and a
fair case can be made that either he is clearly wrong or his point is trivial and
uninteresting. Why, then, even introduce this example? In the first place, most other
examples of the structural analysis of kinship are simply too complex and technical to
introduce in a book of this sort. Second, even if the facts do not fully support the claim,
the present example does provide valuable clues to what an effective structural analysis
might be like. The simplicity which renders it vulnerable constitutes at the same time its
scientific (and aesthetic) appeal.
11 The "sympathetic critic” was R. H. Lowie, the distinguished American anthropologist whose book on
primitive society had originally attracted Levi-Strauss to the field.
12 Levi-Strauss’s assessment of Mauss’s work is found in a long introductory essay to the collected
papers of Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Univ. de France, 1950). His own
initial encounter with The Gift (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1954) is described on p. 33 of
that essay.
13 The vignette appears in Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New
York: Morrow, 1935).
14 Levi-Strauss’s comment on theoretical exchange of men by women appears on p. 144 of ESK.
15 This lament appears in ESK, p. 496.
16 Levi-Strauss analyzes the roles of the shaman and the psychoanalyst in two essays, both reprinted
in SA: “The Sorcerer and His Magic" (pp. 167-85) and “The Effectiveness of Symbols” (pp.
186-205).
17 The discussion of split representation appears in the essay “Split Representation in the Art of Asia
and Africa," in SA, pp.245-68.
18 Cf. Levi-Strauss’s remark to an interviewer, quoted in The New York Times, January 21, 1972, p. 47:
"These experiments,represented by societies unlike our own, described and analyzed by
anthropologists, provide one of the purest ways to understand what happens in the
human mind and how it operates. That’s what anthropology is good for in the most
general way and what we can expect from it in the long run.”
19 Levi-Strauss’s "succinct formula,” as well as his expatiation on totemism, is found in his little tome,
T.
20 Levi-Strauss’s theory of the brain appears in T.

21 Hanunoo activities described on p. 4 of SM.
22 The similarity between the churinga and modern archives is discussed in SM, p. 238.
23 On the centrality of classification, see G. Simpson, Principles of Animal Taxonomy (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1961).
24 The bricoleur'sactivities are described on pp. 16-22 of SM.p. 142 Naming practices are discussed on
pp. 204-10 of SM. The extract here is taken from p. 207.
25 Levi-Strauss’s remarks about his own work were made in a personal communication to the author.
26 One well-known anthropologist: David Maybury-Lewis.
27 Presented by Levi-Strauss in his essay “The Structural Study of Myth,” in SA, p. 288, and again in Du
miel aux cendres (Paris: Plon, 1966), p. 212. It reads: Fx(a) : Fy(b) ≃ Fx(b) : Fa —l(y). I
have been unable to make sense of this formula, and no other commentators seem to
have been able to shed light on it, either.
28 The transformational aspect of music brings it close to the kinds of cognitive systems described by
Piaget. These similarities have recently been examined by M. Pflederer, "Conservation
and the Development of Musical Intelligence," Journal of Research in Music Education,
Vol. 15 (1967), 215-23.
29 References for the Mythologiques are: The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row, 1969);
Du miel aux cendres (Paris: Plon, 1966); L’Origine des manieres de la table (Paris: Plon,
1968); L’Homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971).
30 Levi-Strauss's remarks concerning the underlying affinities among the Mind, Culture, and Nature
have appeared frequently in recent interviews and writing. See, for example, the
Introduction to ESK, p.xxix.
31 Leach’s structural analysis of Judges and Genesis is found in M. Lane (ed.). Introduction to
Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 248-92.
32 Leach’s version of Genesis is presented in his essay “Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden,” in CL-S, pp.
47-60. His characterization of his own exercise appears on pp. 59-60.
33 Levi-Strauss’s remarks on the mission of anthropology were made in an address on the occasion of
the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Smithson, founder of the
Smithsonian Institution. The address, entitled "Anthropology: Its Achievements and
Future,” was subsequently published in Knowledge Among Men (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1966). The passage cited here appears on p. 122.

III
An Assessment of Structuralism:
Problems and Prospects
5
The Relationship Between Two Varieties of

Structuralism
Every psychological explanation conies sooner or later to lean on biology
or on logic.
—PIAGET1
Suppose you, as the proverbial visitor from a distant planet, were to
land in Yankee Stadium. A baseball game is in progress and, curious about the
folkways of earthlings, you follow the action with great attention. At first, the
activities seem senseless; you do not understand the reasons for uniforms of
two patterns and colors, the crowd of people in the stands, the numbers on
the scoreboard, the public-address system, the peculiar behaviors of the
players. Ignorant of the spoken language, you must rely exclusively on your
visual perception of these activities if you are to unravel their meaning.

Within a reasonably short period of time, however, you should begin to
discern certain regularities. You notice that the men in the dark blue uniforms
remain stationary throughout: that the “players” fall into two distinct groups,
housed in two separate “dug-outs”; members of each team alternatively
remain each at one place in the field, then take their turns at bat; after about
three hours everyone leaves. It would take longer to discern the subtleties of

play: the way in which balls and strikes are determined, the rules governing
runs, hits, and errors; the system of innings and complete games. And you
would probably have to watch for many months before successfully sorting
out the gyrations of the first- and third-base coaches, ground-rule doubles,
earned-run averages, pennant races, the unique features of each contest.
Eventually, however, given sufficient ingenuity and patience, you should be
able to achieve a fairly complete picture of the game, teasing out the merely
incidental features (color of uniforms, the seventh-inning stretch, peanut

vendors, size of the ball park) from the essential ones (number of men on a
team; rules for pinch-hitting; procedure for a double play).
1. TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF STRUCTURALISM
In its broadest outlines, the task confronting the structural analyst is

akin to that of the outer-space visitor to Yankee Stadium. In both cases, the
observer stands removed from a human activity, one which he does not
understand, but which he assumes to be characterized, like all other forms of
behavior, by perceivable regularities. He first watches the activity very

carefully, making preliminary guesses about what is going on. He tries out
these hypotheses, dropping those which are consistently refuted, embracing
those which receive consistent confirmation, waiting for crucial tests of

ambiguous ones. He devises preliminary models of what is going on, utilizing
those elements he feels are basic to the activity, and reduces to a secondary
status those features—often equally salient— which appear to be random or
nonfunctional. Ultimately, he may well decide that the actors themselves are
only partially aware of the rules governing their behavior; they may be
enacting their parts in a structure while innocent of its wider significance. The
man from outer space may see the ballplayers as part of a larger social and
economic structure serving interests of which the athletes are ignorant.
Crucial to the analyst's view is the assumption that despite the
numerous apparent differences between one game, activity, or culture and
another, a sufficiently probing analysis will detect deep-seated continuities

across the range of individual occurrences. The analyst not only points out
these underlying regularities, but also singles out for particular attention
those rules or factors which can account for the differences between two
games, activities, or cultures. Basic elements in the two specimens will be the
same; only their arrangement will be different. Therefore, the rules of
transformation between the possible arrangements of elements become a

pivotal concern for the structural analyst.
Considering, for example, the outcomes of two baseball games, the
analyst may propose that a combination of three basic elements—pitching,

hitting, and fielding— will account for a team’s performance. In the case of
game 1, a team triumphed through a combination of good pitching and

fielding, despite poor hitting, while in game 2, success followed upon strong

hitting, despite indifferent pitching and fielding. The simple operation of
reversing the signs of pitching, fielding, and hitting—all positive elements
become negative, all negative ones positive— establishes the winning
combination in the two games. Although the value of each constituent factor
varies from one contest to the next, the underlying structure of victory or
defeat is shown to be a simple structure or its complement (algebraically: P +
F + H— or P —F —H + ). Another example: A structuralist interested in the
relationship between football, baseball, and basketball would point to the

existence of two competing teams, a set of different positions, the alternation
of offensive and defensive phases as common features of all these activities.
The relationship among these sports can be appreciated by contrasting the

stress on physical contact and power in football with the comparatively high
premium on agility and timing in basketball and in baseball; the possibility for
scoring many points at one time in football and the large possible payoff from
the home run in baseball, with the repetition of many low-scoring plays in
basketball; the penalties for fouls in basketball and football with the relative
absence of penalties in baseball; the equal opportunities for scoring in

baseball, each side having twenty-seven outs, with the stronger possibility for
controlling the ball in the other two sports. It should be possible to carry out
an exhaustive structural analysis of these and other sports (e.g., hockey) by
noting their distribution on such pivotal dimensions; once this has been done,
a method for transforming one game into another by changing the signs on
these components becomes feasible.
Such an analysis suggests that basketball and hockey are structurally
similar games, although hockey employs equipment and places a relatively
higher premium on physical power. Football has a structure somewhat apart
from the other sports by virtue of its emphasis on a central player,

assignment of ball possession to a team for a certain number of plays, greater
possibility for rapid change in the teams’ respective scores, highlighting of
physical contact. Baseball, finally, comes close to being a structural
transformation of basketball, as the two sports come out differently on
virtually every dimension. Each game is defined by its differences from other
games, rather than on its own terms. One might infer from such an analysis
that a trend in spectator interest away from baseball would work to the
benefit of basketball; one could then relate such a trend, say, to the fact that
baseball players and basketball players differ in average educational level.

Then, one might attribute the growing popularity of football to the fact that
football scores positively on nearly every dimension which, for the

contemporary fan, adds excitement to the game, and so is perhaps the “most
glamorous and dramatic” of spectator sports.
A STRUCTURALIST LOOKS AT SPECTATOR SPORTS
use of relative possibility central penalties regularly each

equipment/ emphasis of player (influencing timed team has
no on power dramatic directing play of schedule spatially

equipment and change in team/ game)/ for control localized
other than contact/ score/ players no penalties of ball/ goal/
the ball speed total roughly quick common
and non- composed equivalent shifts, goal
contact of possibility
repeated for
little controlling
scores ball
Baseball + - -/+ + - + -
Basketball - -/+ - - + - +
Football +/- + + + + +/- +
Hockey + +/- - - + - +
Key
+ = dimension before the /
- = dimension following the /
+/-, -/+ = aspects of both dimensions
The kind of an analysis I have been attempting here, though drawn from
an unpretentious domain, is representative of structuralism. Piaget, Levi-
Strauss, and their colleagues focus on separate domains, search for the crucial
variables, attempt to map the latter’s relationships with one another. The size
of the domain, the nature of units, the degree of precision with which rules of
transformation are spelled out will vary for different analyses and different
analysts; but one can discern an underlying set of principles governing their
activities. Here I propose to sketch out the philosophy which I believe
motivates those associated with the structuralist movement. Subsequently, I
will initiate a direct comparison of Levi-Strauss’s and Piaget’s views on
various crucial aspects of human culture and development, concluding with
my own suggestions about how a resolution of the differences between these

two thinkers might come about.
A method or approach rather than a carefully formulated catechism,
structuralism is an attempt to discern the arrangements of elements
underlying a given domain isolated by an analyst. The structuralist notes
variations in these arrangements; he then attempts to relate the variations by
specifying rules whereby one can be transformed to another. Structuralism in
psychology and anthropology takes its inspiration from mathematics and

allied disciplines, such as logic, linguistics, and physics. Typically, one seeks a
structural model whose elements and transformations can be couched in

formal-mathematical terms. And just as mathematics and linguistics have
come to be regarded as autonomous fields, susceptible to exhaustive

description in their own terms, so, too, the newer domains explored by
structuralists are seen as self-sufficient, having certain necessary properties,

subject to lawful transformations. The structuralist is particularly eager to
find underlying regularities among seemingly disparate phenomena, since a
“determination of basic structures” will result in simplification of a mass of

data as well as confirmation of the existence of laws governing that domain.
Thus, Levi-Strauss searches for structures—a myth formula, a kinship unit—
which will unify disparate cultural products or the mental structures of
primitive and civilized man: while Piaget demonstrates that a wide range of
performances and tasks are isomorphic with the nine groupings of concrete
operations. The structures discerned—be they in the realm of folklore or of
child reasoning—are viewed as self-regulating, closed, and whole, reflections

of the organized human mind. Nothing is more likely to please a structuralist
than a demonstration that the behavior of crowds at an athletic event and the
behavior of microbes in a diseased region of the body or the globe are
reflections of the same mathematical function.
One may discern three principal elements in the structural approach.

The strategic aspect, demonstrated in our discussion of games, refers to the
customary way in which structuralists proceed. The strategy is to focus upon
the unconscious infrastructure of a realm, rather than upon its superficial

aspects: to look at the relationship between elements rather than at the
elements per se; to search for an organized system governed by general laws.
The guiding principle postulates that meaningful accounts of structures can
be given; that structures really exist in the behaviors under observation and
are not merely the product of the analyst’s imagination; that structures in
disparate realms will ultimately be related, perhaps by a meta-theory of
structures unifying the Babel of disciplines which plague contemporary social
science. The level at which one searches for structure is a matter of crucial
importance; both Levi-Strauss and Piaget see it as an intermediary— Piaget,
between the nervous system and conscious behavior: Levi-Strauss, between
the economic infrastructure and the ideological superstructure.
The formal aspect involves the structuralist use of mathematics and

related disciplines. Once the elements of a structure have been isolated, the
aim (not always realized) is to formalize all relationships through some sort
of logical model or system. Particularly influential is the work of the
anonymous school of French mathematicians that signs itself “N. Bourbaki,”

which has daringly set out the three basic or “mother” structures giving rise
to all mathematics. One of these structures—the algebraic group—has
particularly inspired structuralists of a formalistic bent, and structuralists in

general are ever watchful for new mathematical tools.2
At the same time that structuralists look to mathematics, they are also
drawn to biological science. The organismic aspect reflects a belief that
structures are not a pretty invention of man or machine, but rather a
reflection of the biological properties of organisms. Even as a biological
organism is viewed as a totality whose parts are integrated into a hierarchical
whole, so structures are seen as biological wholes, with a dynamic as well as a
static aspect to them. Any change in an organism will affect all the parts; no
aspect of a structure can be altered without affecting the entire structure;

each whole contains parts and is itself part of a larger whole. Following the
biological motif, the organismic aspect of structuralism stresses the
integration of related facts; the perception of relations rather than absolute
properties; the centrality of configurations and Gestalten. Human products

are thought to reflect man’s biological, rather than mechanical, nature;
structural principles reflect the nature of the brain and of human
psychological functioning; all biological functions are assumed to have
meaning. Even though the organismic aspect is often implicit rather than
explicit, appreciation of structuralism is enhanced by the knowledge that
Piaget was trained as a biologist, and that Levi-Strauss was deeply influenced
by the work of the naturalist D’Arcy Thompson3 on growth and form, and by
the school of Gestalt psychology.
By speaking thus of “aspects” of structuralism, I have sought to

underline that there is no “essence,” or unique definition, of structuralism.
Nor is there a single method of approach: Piaget and Levi-Strauss will usually
tackle problems in a different way each time, although they do have a few
methods that might be termed characteristic; others under the structuralist
umbrella will embrace yet other techniques. The justification for speaking of a
single movement inheres in the fact of a group of workers having arrived at
certain tacit understandings and procedures which yield analyses of a related

sort and may constitute a new paradigm in the social sciences. They look for
organized totalities which may be said to exist at a level between the
biological and the logical; they seek to express in formal terms the relations
which govern the behavior of organisms; they focus on questions and
domains which seem on an intuitive basis to have coherence and to be central
in human experience. It is unnecessary (and would be misleading) to claim

that the structuralists have achieved their ambitious goals; even the two men
under discussion here frequently change their views, seldom concur
completely on an interpretation, and often proceed in divergent ways. Yet

structuralism is worthy of study, and potentially of great significance, I feel,
because its foremost practitioners have sensed which questions need to be
asked, have developed methods which significantly elucidate these-questions,
and can be seen as laying the groundwork for a more completely integrated
social science.
Because they most fully reflect the development and the aims of the
structuralist movement. I have chosen to focus on the writings and
achievements of Levi-Strauss and Piaget. These thinkers stand out because

they have so tenaciously and productively adhered to the three strains in
structuralism cited above. Both men embody the structuralist desire to
capture the biological properties of the human mind and its processes in
formal logical models through careful attention to underlying properties of

behavior and institutions.
Thus far I have considered the two men individually. Now, however, I

propose to make a comparison of their work and ideas, taking into account
both their similarities and their differences. As regards the former, they
appear to have embarked on similar investigations and to have achieved
considerable agreement and complementarity on major issues in the realm of

cognition. The differences between them, while also significant, lie in areas
other than is usually supposed, and are themselves illuminating for the study
of the human mind.
2. A COMPARISON OF PIAGET AND LEVI-STRAUSS
What, then, are the similarities between Piaget and Levi-Strauss? Both
men were born in the shadows of 1900, both were precocious students, both
rejected the illusions of philosophy while finding themselves increasingly
taken with the formal elegance of mathematics and linguistics. Their scholarly
careers have parallels as well: each man traveled unexplored paths, working
initially in isolation, examining the relations among various biological and
mathematical disciplines, inspiring much abuse and misunderstanding, as
well as a small group of devotees who understand well. Both men have finally
achieved international eminence, though they are somewhat mistrusted by
colleagues of the older generation, and they epitomize for many the
Continental approach to psychology and anthropology.
Yet all these biographical and circumstantial considerations are
(relatively) insignificant compared to the intellectual or philosophical
parallels in their lives and careers. For, first, Piaget and Levi-Strauss are
offshoots of the same stem in that they are both deeply steeped in the French
intellectual tradition, and have accepted its problems as their problems; and
second, they have both created original and powerful new methods for
probing the nature of thought, language, and the human condition. Consistent
with the trend toward an empirical approach in examining cognition, each
has chosen for investigation a group the study of which promises to shed light
on humanity as a whole: Piaget has looked to children of various ages, Levi-
Strauss to primitives of diverse cultures. In so doing, they carry on the work
of Darwin and Freud, who helped define and delimit the human condition by
specifying the relationships between man and animal, sickness and health.
They have searched for the significant detail in the commonplace, the
revealing link between seemingly disparate data, the apt example or pregnant
metaphor which can illuminate a hitherto obscure area. With one eye set on
the biological nature of man, the other on the logical nature of all thought,
they have forged ahead in detailed observations and investigations of human

beings, and then have stepped back, searched for underlying structures, and
put forth their best guesses as to the ultimate nature of the mind. In sum, the
thrust of their inquiries, the methods they have evolved, and their provisional
findings have all been strikingly similar.
Piaget and Levi-Strauss have sought to prove that the range of human

cognition is not unlimited: human knowledge can be studied and known just
because it has specific ascertainable structural properties. Piaget has
proposed three broad stages of human development and has claimed that a
small number of logical-mathematical formulations embraces the nature of

each. Given these demonstrations, a plethora of observations and test data
can be organized, an underlying structure postulated, the role of actions,
coordinations, operations, and structured wholes spelled out. Levi-Strauss,

for his part, has insisted even more explicitly that the forms of human thought
are limited and specifiable. Relying heavily on an analogy with structural
linguistics, he has uncovered evidence of a basic mental propensity to think in
opposites and contrasts, to extract perceptual information from the
environment along certain predetermined lines, and to freeze and combine
these percepts in classifying, naming, and mythic systems. These systems can
be related to their variants through a series of ordered transformations,
expressible in mathematical forms which themselves exemplify human

thought processes.
Our two thinkers, then, share a deep conviction that mental structures
“really” exist, and that some reflection or manifestation of them—describable
in mathematical and logical terms—will eventually be discovered in the

human brain and nervous system. Both men lay strong stress in this
connection on “group” functions and the logical system of the prepositional
calculus, believing that it is these two types of mathematical constructions
that are most likely to prove descriptive of the workings of the central
nervous system; and they speak approvingly of biologists and
mathematicians who have done work along these lines. By this profound faith
—one perhaps not entirely justified by current evidence—that mathematical

constructs are a key to the understanding of human cognition, one sees that in
Piaget and Levi-Strauss the spirit of Descartes lives on.
Were the two men in substantial agreement on all outstanding issues,
such a state of affairs would be interesting, but might render careful study of
both superfluous. One need not master the evolutionary arguments of both
Darwin and Wallace, since Darwin stated their shared ideas with such
thoroughness and competence. It happens, however, that there are also
strong divergences between Piaget and Levi-Strauss. These differences make

it worthwhile to return to their formulations once more, in an attempt either
to discern the stronger position or to reconcile differences. We shall look at
some questions which have intrigued social scientists, examine the views of
each man, and then assess the amount of disagreement or potential
convergence.
When one is attempting to solve a problem, an assortment of mental

processes undoubtedly occur. We tend to use the blanket term “thought” to
refer to these processes, but the identity of the components of thinking has
been heatedly debated by philosophers and scientists. Perhaps most

controversial is the role played by language in thought. Some observers have
believed that all thought is simply a reflection of language:4 the thinker is
speaking aloud or to himself and in either case his solution emerges from
words, their interrelations, and their referents. Growing out of this position is
a belief that language determines the subject matter about which one thinks
as well as the way one thinks about it; in this case it follows that individuals
who live in cultures with widely different languages will never be able to
communicate with one another, since their words and concepts, the members
of different species, cannot be mapped onto one another.
The opposite view states that language or speech is, at best, one of many
components which enter into the thinking process. Chimpanzees can solve
problems involving tool use, maze-running, or complex visual
discriminations; since they lack language, but evidently can think, they must
be using images, gestures, and assorted kinesthetic cues which should be

regarded equally as vehicles of thought. Champions of this view also question
the depth of differences between languages. All speakers, they feel, are
dealing with the same world of sounds, colors, and sights; although languages
may well slice up the verbal world in somewhat different ways, such
differences are superficial compared to the wealth of common sensory and
motor experience.
At first glance, Piaget and Levi-Strauss seem to take opposite positions
on the relationship between language and thought. In his early writings,
Piaget stressed the contributions which language made to thinking. He asked
questions in words and carefully noted children’s verbal retorts; a decline in
the “coefficient of egocentrism” was seen as an index of intellectual advance.

His observations of his own infants convinced him, however, that the key to
thought and intelligence lay not in language and speech but rather in action.
An individual’s intellectual level was determined by the range of actions he
could perform on the world, the extent of coordination among actions, the
degree to which these actions could be performed implicitly or mentally as
“operations.” More recently, Piaget has underscored the centrality of action
by arguing that the child’s operational level determines his use of language
rather than the reverse. He enthusiastically cites studies which demonstrate
that the congenitally deaf, who presumably have no access to language as we
know it, are capable of operational thought because they have acquired
knowledge through action.5 And with even greater exuberance he dwells on

the research of his colleague, Hermine Sinclair-de-Zwart, who has studied the
language used by children solving conservation problems.
Sinclair found that preoperational children spoke of objects in terms of
absolute qualities: “the big one,” “the little one,” etc. Even when attempts
were made to alter such usage, to get preoperational subjects to use the
comparative forms spontaneously embraced by operational children (e.g.,
“longer than but thinner than”), only a slight trend toward conservation

responses was noted. Once, however, the child’s operational level had
changed —presumably because the crucial actions of reversing, negating, and
compensating had coalesced into a structured whole—his language became
permeated with relational terms. Piaget interprets these findings as a strong

demonstration that language makes at best only a small contribution to
thought, that for the most part the reverse is the case, i.e., operational level
determines the use and level of language. Indeed, Piaget speaks of the
“prelogic” inherent in language usage: a child may appear to be thinking
logically because he uses certain expressions like “because,” “if . . . then,” etc.;
but careful investigation may reveal that such terms are actually being
employed in a prelogical way.
Piaget, then, has come to minimize the role of language in thought. The
thrust of Levi-Strauss’s work, however, has been in the opposite direction.
Levi-Strauss not only takes his lead from the structural linguists but
attributes to language a determining role in thought.6 One probes the minds

and cognitive structures of primitive peoples by noting their naming and
classifying systems; one discerns the basis of kinship, customs, art, and social
organization through a determination of the codes governing these realms.

Mechanisms which presumably underlie language use—alertness to
opposites, sensitivity to distinctive features, capacity to relate units to one

another, or transform utterances—are also posited as the basic components
of thought. Indeed, Levi-Strauss has remarked, with characteristic sweep, that
“Language, an unreflecting totalization. is human reason which has its
reasons ... of which man knows nothing.”
Here, then, appears to be a clear dispute regarding the constituents of
thought, with Piaget starting from action and denigrating language, Levi-
Strauss proceeding from language and minimizing the significance of specific

behavioral acts. Final resolution of this conflict must wait upon an overview
of both systems; but it is worth pointing out that at least part of the
disagreement may be terminological rather than substantive.
Whereas Piaget inveighs against language, and Levi-Strauss finds it the
source of all reason, neither man, when confronted with a given specimen of
language, is particularly concerned with the manner in which the speaker has
expressed himself—his syntax, style, vocabulary choices, and the like. Levi-
Strauss examines all variants of a myth that are available, while Piaget poses
as many questions, in as many forms, as is practicable. Like Freud, both men
pay scant attention to the manifest content of the given message; they are
interested not in who did what or how, but rather in the nature of the
reasoning or operations at a level below overt language. In studying the
responses of a child, Piaget picks out the significant underlying propositions,

which he can then express in the logical parlance of p’s and q’s. The mental
actions reflected in the protocol are a series of operations performed on

words, which themselves represent actual or potential acts upon the

environment. Piaget concedes that at the level of formal operations ordinary
language is necessary, since such operations require expression in natural or
logical language.7 The capacity to deal with possibilities and with

hypothetico-deductive reasoning depends upon language use; and so, as one
advances beyond concrete operations, language does come to play more of a
determining role.
Levi-Strauss, even more than Piaget, ignores the manifest message in his
search for the principal propositions underlying it. These propositions are, of
course, expressed in language but, as with Piaget, Levi-Strauss is interested in
the referent of the language—the experiences and actions reflected in it—
rather than in the specific wording. The crucial aspect of the referent lies in
the sensory perception of the speaker, the kinds of contrasts and dichotomies
he discerns in the world, as well as the logical bifurcations he imposes on it.

Such divisions of the experiential flux are fundamental in nature, being
imposed by the intrinsic workings of the brain, while the specific
discriminations made in a given culture are accidents of environment.
Percepts are organized, bricoleur-fashion, into classificatory and mythic
systems which are necessarily linguistic. Obviously, language is important in

transmitting these systems to successive generations; but the language itself
is a reflection of what the individual has perceived in the world of objects and
persons because of psychological processes common to both perception and
language. Language is attractive to the student of thought because of its
universality and availability, rather than its uniquely faithful mirroring of the
cognitive process. Thus, Levi-Strauss’s position is, at most, a diluted version of
the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which would confer upon the actual categories of
the language a determining role in the thought processes of individual

speakers.
Examined more closely, then, the dispute over relationships between
language and thought seems much less dramatic. Both men are really
interested in a level beneath the language that is spoken or heard—in the
actions or percepts reflected in language. These actions and percepts, in turn,

are significant because the mind is constructed in a specific way. It is not
surprising that Levi-Strauss should have a less than total commitment to
literal language, given his description of himself as thinking not in words but
in impulses, feelings, tensions, and pulls.8 Furthermore, his relative de-
emphasis of a linguistic model in his later work, in favor of a model
constructed after music, may be viewed as a tacit admission that language

cannot account for all of thought. The indicated conclusion, then, is that Levi-
Strauss’s greater claims about the role of language in thought simply reflect a
broader view of what might be considered “language,” while Piaget’s

minimizing of the role of language in thought results from a stricter definition
of language (as distinct from its underlying operations).
Ever since the travels of explorers and conquistadors first revealed a

dispersion of humans across the globe, there has been an abiding interest in
whether individuals from wholly alien cultures possess the same mental
processes, follow the same pattern of mental development, attain the same
intellectual level. While agreement on definitions has been infrequent, this

has not stopped observers from speculating about the mind of Civilized Man,
the mind of Primitive Man, the degree of disparity between these
idealizations. Dating back to the Biblical rejection of the barbaric Philistines
and reaching forward to modern controversies on race and I.Q., the question
of commonalities of thought among different groups has continued to perplex
and to fascinate. And the mind of the primitive has seemed a particularly
attractive subject for study because, on the one hand, he appears to subscribe
to outlandish customs and superstitions, while, on the other, he is capable of
astonishing feats of navigation, calculation, and artistry.
In their views of the minds of primitive and Western man, Piaget and
Levi-Strauss once again appear to differ.9 In his early work, Piaget drew
explicit analogies between the reasoning of children and of primitive peoples.
Both, he said, exhibited in their thinking animism, artificialism, realism, and
other irrational mergings between aspects of the environment and their own
thought processes. This view, understandably enough, drew heavy fire from
Levi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship; in it he maintained that

the five-year-old’s thought was qualitatively similar to that of the adult’s,
since both, for example, perceived the world in terms of opposition and
contrasts. Just as Piaget had relied heavily on Levy-Bruhl’s view of the
primitive, Levi-Strauss drew extensively on the work of Susan Isaacs, a
contemporary of Piaget’s, who had found wisdom in the words and acts of
kindergarteners. Levi-Strauss argued that the content of what children say

may reflect insufficient familiarity with the surrounding culture but that their
forms of reasoning are like those of adults. The mind is programmed to reason
in certain ways, but it takes time to become acquainted with the elements of
one’s environment, knowledge of which can not be preprogrammed. Levi-
Strauss drew parallels between the Western view of primitives as children,
and primitives’ view of Westerners as children—a comparison based in each
case on the failure of both the strangers and the group's own children to have
assimilated the culture of the adults. The inference, he indicated, is that for
children as for foreigners this lack of assimilation is due to the strangeness of

the environment rather than to intellectual deficiencies.
Again we appear to be witnessing a direct conflict between Piaget and

Levi-Strauss on the relationship between child, primitive, and adult thought.
Yet, it is striking how both men have modified their positions since their early
writings.10 Consistent with his de-emphasis of verbal expression, Piaget now

declines to speculate about the relationship between primitive and child
thought, though he hazards a guess that primitive tribes may not advance
beyond concrete operations. He is content to leave to empirical research,
however, the task of determining just how distinctive the primitive mind may

be.
For his part, Levi-Strauss no longer draws dose analogies between five-
year-olds and adults, and has allowed that there are two kinds of science, the
science of the concrete and Western science. The science of the concrete
seems to be roughly equivalent to concrete operations: the primitive is able to

deal systematically with the objects and percepts of his environment but
restricts his concern to their manifest, surface qualities. In this he is different
from the Westerner, whose science focuses upon underlying structures and
offers classifications and explanations at a more abstract level. Levi-Strauss

still claims that the two sciences differ more in content than in kind; he would
probably deny the existence of intellectual operations which Western man
but not the primitive can perform.
If we wish to test the notion that the primitive can reason like the
Western formal operator, it seems sensible to focus upon the primitive's
mythmaking, since his division of the natural environment into elements

which smell or look alike seems like a manifestation of concrete-operational
thinking. In making and relating myths, the primitive is dealing with verbal
propositions rather than with concrete objects, and is operating entirely on

the level of ideas, rather than with the physical manipulation of material
reality. It should be possible to examine myths and to see whether one can
find in them the same forms of logical operations as Piaget finds in the
protocols and systematic actions of his adolescent subjects.
Once one starts to examine the myths, however, a serious problem

arises. It may very well be, as Levi-Strauss claims, that myths are replete with
examples of hypothetico-deductive reasoning or illustrations of the logical
calculus. The myths, however, are the products of thousands of years of
telling, borrowing, and retelling:11 when an individual relates a myth, he is

not constructing it on its own; he is transmitting a product gradually built by
countless individuals over a long period of time. One must question whether
these two activities—solving a problem by oneself in the laboratory or
relating a myth which belongs to the culture—are at all equivalent as tasks,
and the answer is clearly that they are not. Thus, an impasse is reached on the
question of the intellectual level of primitive thought.
At present, the relationship between primitive and modern thought

remains an open question, and numerous psychologists and “cognitive
anthropologists” are in the field trying to get answers to it in the only
conceivable way—by testing individuals from different cultures on various
problems and tasks and noting their level of performance. So far, the evidence
suggests that Piaget has a stronger case:12 concrete operations seem to take
longer to develop in primitive than in Western cultures and are possibly not
reached at all in certain of them; formal operations have been seldom studied
and are difficult to find evidence for in the bush. But the difficulty involved in

all such investigations should not be minimized. The testing situation is a
familiar one to children in a technological society; it is part of their (concrete)
reality. The materials used and the verbal interrogation methods pose no
problem. On the other hand, the whole entourage of experimental personnel

and equipment is alien to the more primitive tribes; radical adjustments may
be necessary before a study can be regarded as a routine affair and before the
experimenter, who almost always works through an interpreter, can convey
what he is looking for.
Thus, social scientists still debate whether true cross-cultural tests on
Piagetian tasks are possible, particularly in milieux where there is no
schooling. It has already been found, for example, that primitives perform at
higher operational levels when the materials and actions are familiar and
meaningful. They can count potatoes more readily than poker chips; if they
are farmers, they are more likely to exhibit understanding of the conservation
of liquids if they can pour themselves than if the experimenters do the

pouring. One easy conclusion is that primitives are restricted to “concrete”
materials and hence not capable of higher forms of abstraction. But it is

always possible that within their own society they do practice high-level
abstraction; it is also possible that if tasks analogous to those of Piaget were

put to Western children in a setting equally bizarre to them—an initiation
rite, say—they might fail at those tasks. Still, before one concludes that the
intellectual operations used by both groups are identical, it seems reasonable
to demand that a primitive himself solve some logical problem rather than
merely repeating a tale he has learned at his parents’ feet.
In any event, it may safely be said that, from what may have appeared
irreconcilable differences, Piaget and Levi-Strauss have moved somewhat
closer together. Piaget no longer draws unsupported analogies between

children and primitives, while Levi-Strauss allows that there may be more
than one kind of science and no longer glorifies the abilities of five-year-olds.
The situation here parallels that regarding the relationship between language
and thought: Piaget notes that children and adults focus on different aspects
of a situation and interpret events differently, and so concludes that child,
primitive, and adult thought are different. Levi-Strauss claims that what is
crucial is the very capacity to perceive contrasts and to interpret events; since
this capacity is found in all human beings, he tends to minimize the
distinctiveness of varieties of thought. Similarly, Piaget notes that children
and adults have different theories of causality, while Levi-Strauss stresses

that both have adopted causal models of the world. In sum, as regards two
classical problems on which they seemed far apart, Piaget and Levi-Strauss
may indeed evince a measure of agreement; and neither man has been proved
clearly wrong on either issue. However, clear differences remain between

them, most notably in their respective emphases on structure and
development and in their treatment of perception and action.

Let us say that one is undertaking a study of the Leitmotiven found in
the Ring cycle of Wagner. One approach would simply be to list all the
prominent motifs, to say what they refer to, and then to note how they were
sometimes combined. This method resembles the promulgation of a cast of
characters, who can be defined before the work begins, and may be said to
have an existence outside the work—so that one could, for example,
recognize the Valhalla motif even if it occurred in a work by Arnold

Schoenberg. How, though, does one come to know that a certain sequence of
notes actually stands for Valhalla, when one is listening to the opera without a
scorecard? Presumably what takes place is some sort of a gradual correlation
process, where one recognizes a theme as having been heard before, and then
discovers that it always appears when the scene is set in Valhalla or when
some reference to Valhalla has been made. One’s apprehension of the theme
will also change, depending on the events of the opera and the way in which
the theme is used; and if the same configuration of notes should appear in a
totally alien setting—say, in a show tune or rock ballad—one would either
assume that the use was ironic or that it was totally unrelated to the Ring
cycle.
The first of these approaches to Leitmotiven frequently characterizes

the philosopher, who asserts some sort of a connection between two
elements—let %=Valhalla-—and then honors this distinction consistently

and unfailingly. In contrast, the psychologist, and particularly the
developmental psychologist, is not interested in arbitrary connections
posited independently of the normal functioning of an organism. Thus, x
cannot simply be stated as equivalent to Valhalla; no perceiver can be
expected to assume that some connection exists. Rather, the listener must
slowly discover the relationship between the series of notes and a specific
idea; nor will the relationship ever become frozen, for each fresh encounter
with the theme or with the concept of Valhalla will occasion some adjustment
in the correlation between the two. This latter approach is often termed the
developmental or genetic one, while the approach adopted by philosophers
may be thought of as an agenetic, structural one.
Piaget has eloquently argued that one begs the question merely by
stating that a structure or relationship exists. True, for some definitional or

philosophical purposes, this may be adequate; but comprehensive
understanding of the nature of a structure can only come about through a
careful exploration of its prior evolution and through an appreciation of the

direction in which it will continue to evolve. Philosophers for centuries
argued about the nature of number, yet came to no agreement. This was
because, in Piaget’s view, “number” is no single entity or construct, but rather
a series of actions and operations, a few of which can be performed by very

young children, but most of which await a coordination of schemes only
possible at the age of seven or eight. An understanding of number is thus
dependent upon an appreciation of its ontogenetic components and a mastery

of the process by which they are joined. Similarly, Piaget believes that one
cannot comprehend such entities as emotions, laws, or concepts unless one
examines their history, which alone accounts for their present form,
tentativeness, and flexibility. In an oft-cited formula, Piaget declares that

there is no structure which lacks a genesis, and that the process of genesis can
only be understood in view of the structure which exists at the beginning and
the structures into which it will evolve.13
In a sympathetic treatment of Levi-Strauss, Piaget concedes that the
ethnographer has been placed in an impossible position as far as gaining
knowledge of genesis is concerned. The early history of primitive peoples is

forever closed to him, and as a result he can never know what led up to their
myths or customs as currently constituted (though he may be able to make
shrewd guesses) . But, Piaget emphasizes, the inability to secure

developmental or historical evidence about primitive tribes is no license to
claim, as some structuralists have been tempted to do, that the knowledge
involved in customs or language is innate and that no learning or interaction
with the environment is necessary for its unfolding. Such a view runs
completely counter to Piaget’s orientation, which emphasizes the active role

played by subjects in the construction of knowledge and avows that
development will not proceed unless various environmental conditions are
present. Piaget concludes that the ethnographer had best leave open the
question of how the customs he studies have come to develop; the lack of data
regarding genesis dooms him ineluctably to an impoverished structural
approach.
Piaget does feel, nonetheless, that Levi-Strauss might receive one lead
from the developmental approach: the concept of equilibration. Only a notion
of this type, Piaget contends, will enable him to explain why a culture might
choose one set of cultural systems rather than another; and the
anthropologist should recognize that the collective intellect reflected in such
products as myths or kinship systems is a form of social equilibrium resulting
from the interplay of individual operations over the course of time. Such a
reorientation would remove the ill-considered (to Piaget) bias toward the
assumption that all cultural systems are innate—a set programmed into the
mind from which each tribe makes its selection—and substitute instead the
constructivist view of knowledge which Piaget feels has been shown to be
correct.
Levi-Strauss is understandably sensitive on these issues, since he has

emphasized in his own writings the extraordinary difficulties involved in
tracing the development of an institution. As a result of these difficulties, he
has downgraded the historical approach in ethnology and, more

fundamentally, has highlighted the relativity and tentativeness of all historical
studies.14 In the dazzlingly obscure closing chapter of The Savage Mind, a

lengthy and sharp attack on the dialectical materialism of his polemical rival

Jean-Paul Sartre, Levi-Strauss tries to show that the genetic approach to
history is not free of mythmaking. The schoolboy may believe that there is
only one account of the American Revolution; but the sophisticated historian
must acknowledge that there are many myths of the American Revolution or
the Civil War, each of which has maintained a tenacious hold on different
segments of the population despite the passage of time. The mere listing of an
event and a date is a value-laden act, for one must ask: why choose that
event? and why that particular date in the midst of the event? While written
records promise a more reliable link to the past than the oral tradition on
which primitive tribes must rely, the existence of archives in no sense
guarantees an unambiguous determination of what really happened. Indeed,

Levi-Strauss seems to argue that such a quest is inevitably doomed to fall
short: we are all victims, to a greater or lesser degree, of various myths, of
elements of the past which influence present thought, and the possibility of
nonmythic history or histories is forever precluded.
Elsewhere, it is true, Levi-Strauss does pay lip service to the importance
of genetic studies, of investigating the foundations of institutions or societies,

and alludes to studies of this kind that he himself has undertaken.15 However,
it seems just to accept his insistence that he is not actually much interested in
such explorations. As for Piaget’s unsolicited advice, Levi-Strauss would likely
agree with the view that cultural codes reflect the coordination of individual
actions; emphasize the technico-economic infrastructure’s role in
determining which set of codes is adopted; argue that the brain is
programmed in a highly specific way with regard to the structures underlying
the choices; and throw up his hands at the lack of historical evidence about
primitives which might help to answer questions about the development of

institutions and codes.
Levi-Strauss, then, regards a society as a sum of codes, each of which
captures the crucial elements of a cultural realm and which can be mapped
onto other codes by a series of transforming laws. The forms of the codes are
dictated by the structure of the mind, their contents reflect the elements in
the environment—the particular flora and fauna, the view of the sky, the
technology—and the make-up of man’s perceptual apparatus. Levi-Strauss
sometimes calls primitive societies “cold”: they are caught up in a timeless

void, without history, repeating with predictable variations the same set of
practices as their ancestors. They have reached a satisfactory equilibrium,
and, so long as they are unaffected by external forces, they will see no need to
change or to make a history. Their spot on the Mendeleev ( hart of codes is
fixed. In contrast, modern Western societies are “hot,” because they have
made constant change a part of their structure and are wedded to such
notions as history and progress. Levi-Strauss leaves little doubt that he

himself prefers to see a certain balance between Nature and Culture, the
attainment of a state of relative equilibrium. Indeed, he might accuse Piaget of
reflecting the Western bias toward change.16

In marked contrast, Piaget views society as a group of actors who have
reached various points in intellectual development and whose relationship
with one another reflects these levels. He allows that a whole society may be
moored at a concrete-operational level and would not be surprised to learn
that adolescents in primitive societies often progress on their own beyond the
level of concrete thinking, only to fall back upon it when their use of formal
operations receives no support from their cultural environment.17 (This

hypothesis, if confirmed, would make quick work of any claims that
primitives are “innately stupid” or suffer from hereditary limitations
preventing an advance beyond concrete operations.) Nonetheless, Piaget
insists that man’s final level of equilibrium is at the level of formal operations
and that, given a supportive society, and the right kinds of questions and
materials, a child will naturally equilibrate his thinking there. It may be that a
society’s reliance on formal thinking will preclude a “cool” culture, since
applications of formal operations will lead to further progress or changes in

the technico-economic system, and perhaps even to “post-formal” thought.
Yet it is also possible that formal-operational thinkers may elect to reject this
advanced mode of thinking or to resist its application in realms where it could
lead to unwanted further progress (or to regress) ; such a trend may be
discernible in certain pockets of contemporary society.
Piaget remains suspicious of any approach which denies the perpetually
ongoing processes of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration. He
might well feel that primitive societies are only “cool” from a distance—that if
one knew in which areas to look, one would turn up considerable change over
time, both within individuals and within the culture. If there are structures in
all societies, as Levi-Strauss has shown, there must just as surely be geneses
in all societies; the fact that dynamic changes are not as easily discernible is
more likely a reflection of our own ignorance about where to look than a
demonstration that these societies are in fact devoid of genetic evolution.

Since continuities between individual and cultural development have already
been demonstrated in Western society, we may well expect to find similar
continuities in other areas of the world.
As a reflection of their different emphases on structure and
development, Piaget and Levi-Strauss embrace different root metaphors or

core concepts in their thinking about thought.18 Piaget, of course, ties thought
to action, and sees the level of thought as a direct reflection of the actions
which the child is capable of, either directly, in the case of sensorimotor
action, or implicitly, on the level of operational, or representational, thought.
His guiding picture of the child attaining knowledge depicts a seeking,
exploring individual; the child is continuously acting, and coordinating his

actions, until they eventually coalesce into structures which allow
reversibility of states and an understanding of these states. If Piaget wanted

to study an individual, but could not gain direct access to him, he would ask to
see a film of the individual, so that he could witness his various actions in

relation to one another. Even in analyzing verbal protocols, Piaget is
attempting to ferret out the actions, or the propositions which refer to them,
in order to determine the relations of operations obtaining among these
actions.
For Levi-Strauss, the major facet of cognition is the perception of

opposites or contrasts in the world. Perception is in a certain sense active, of
course—a comatose organism does not perceive. But the physical actions
upon the environment which play so central a role in Piaget’s thinking are
hardly treated at all by Levi-Strauss. He appears to believe that, as a matter of

course, and with little antecedent exploration, the mind will perceive
oppositions and contrasts in the environment, and that these will be (and
already have been) directly embodied in cultural systems and products. The
mind does not “photograph” the environment, it dichotomizes it, building
myths and other cultural systems out of the perceived oppositions. Levi-
Strauss does not require films of natives engaged in activity in order to assess
their intellectual structures; records of their myths, examples of their
artworks, accounts of their kinship systems (whether or not the regulations
are in fact followed) , snapshots of their village, form the bases of his analysis.
In his less-guarded moments, Levi-Strauss has even suggested that he can

know the mind of any other person simply by exploring his own. This
Cartesian conceit is epitomized in his remark:
If the final aim of anthropology is to contribute to a better knowledge of
objectified thought and its mechanisms, it is in the last resort immaterial
whether the thought processes of the South American Indians take shape
through the medium of my own thought or whether mine take place
through the medium of theirs.19
That he is far less concerned with the active “epistemic” subject is also borne
out in his companion comment that
I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths
operate without their being aware of the fact.20
Although one might be able to translate this view into Piagetian
operational language, the intentions of both men would be distorted by so
doing. The possibility emerges here that Piaget and Levi-Strauss, despite their
unmistakable continuities, on the one hand, and intermittent disagreements,

on the other, are engaged in complementary rather than either identical or
opposing missions. Piaget’s route to the universals of thought takes him to the
behaviors of individual subjects at different times in their developmental

trajectory, whereas Levi-Strauss’s path is through the cultural (languagelike)
codes of various primitive societies as they have functioned at a given
moment in time or throughout human history. The kinds of thought in which
the two theorists are respectively interested are also somewhat different, and
should be specified if our comparison is to be comprehensive.
Piaget has deliberately restricted his investigation to logical reasoning.
He is interested in the development of science and in scientific thought; as for

the creative imagination, he candidly remarks that “It is a magnificent subject
which remains to be investigated.”21 He views play, fantasy, and imitative
role-playing as unintelligent, insufficiently adapted behaviors (play being the
preponderance of assimilation over accommodation, imitation the

preponderance of accommodation over assimilation) which gradually
disappear as intelligent (read “scientific”) thought gains in ascendancy. The
content of the child’s area of study is irrelevant: the task of exploring the
principle of seriation or conservation involves identical mechanisms, whether
it happens to be concerned with pebbles, rocks, balls, coins, or beads. Indeed,
Piaget’s aim in his experiments is, disregarding particular content, to focus
exclusively on the form—the coordination of actions—of the reasoning

process.
Levi-Strauss, by contrast, is not particularly interested in scientific

reasoning, except as it figures in the concrete classifications of the
primitive.22 If anything, he wants to reduce rather than explore differences

between what he and the myth-telling savage are doing. When he admits that
he is attracted to primitive thought in part because he finds a generous dose
of it in his own mind (and in the mind of Bergson) , he is acting no differently

in principle from Piaget, who has obviously identified from an early age with
the scientific community. Although Levi-Strauss might not explicitly

acknowledge an interest in the structure underlying aesthetic perception, he
clearly is intrigued by the logical aspects of the qualitative realm. Since he
dwells on qualities—raw/cooked, hot/cold, noisy/silent, jagged, mossy, full—
and on their interrelations, he finds himself in a paradoxical epistemological
position. On the one hand, as an aspiring formalist, one interested in the
discovery of laws of thought, he wants to probe beneath qualities to the

logical algebra which governs their use. Yet, on the other, intent upon
studying the particular configuration of qualities in each society, he cannot
treat all qualities as interchangeable. To say that the mind contrasts qualities
a and b, or that one myth is transformed into another by a negative operation,
is to make a statement that is devoid of interest in qualitative terms. It is vital
for Levi-Strauss’s theory that a primitive be found preoccupied with rawness
and cookedness rather than, say, three-pointedness and six-pointedness; an
interest in such dimensions as temperature and cuisine is symptomatic of
those questions about, and qualities of, the nature of man and culture thought
to be most central in all minds. Important as it is for Levi-Strauss that the
mind perceives oppositions, fortunate as it is that the operations can be

described abstractly, it is equally crucial that the mind focuses on specific
qualities such as heat and cookedness. Any comprehensive theory of mind,

and certainly his theory, must not lose sight of either element.
Piaget’s and Levi-Strauss’s notions of thought emerge most clearly in

the formal models and diagrams which populate their works.23 Piaget
reduces all the reasoning of his subjects en route to the stage of formal
operations to sixteen propositions of binary logic and to a Viergruppe,24

containing four operations. This forms the core of his demonstration, and
whether it is based on problems involving billiards, chemicals, or pendulums
is irrelevant. Levi-Strauss nearly always includes in his charts the specific
qualities discerned by the primitive. That is necessary, for the specific quality,
as well as its logical relations to other properties, is of cardinal significance.
If, in response to one of Piaget’s test problems, a child suggests the use
of a knife to cut an apple into parts, the particular utensil recommended and
the particular object cut are of minimal import. What Piaget focuses on is the
action of cutting and other subsequent actions involving the materials, such
as joining, clustering, dividing, adding. The fact that a number of actions have
occurred, and the nature of the relationships between these actions, are
paramount.
On the other hand, if a character in a myth knifes another, it is
insufficient merely to note that there has been an action involving one object.
Nor can one equate these actions and objects with any other set and simply
notate them with identical symbols; reducing experience to arbitrary signs
results in too great an impoverishment. Rather, “knifing” has a set of
associations quite distinct from shooting or burning alive and implies an

instrument with a cold, metallic blade, a thrust, the subsequent shriek of pain,
effusion of blood, feelings of triumph, betrayal, or loss. The effect,

effectiveness, and significance of a myth or rite depend on the term “knifing”
(or, possibly, on a synonym like “stabbing”), and its accompanying cluster of
social implications, religious overtones, economic references, and secondary
allusions to cuisine, technology, and magic. Exquisitely sensitive to this
aspect, Levi-Strauss has sought to include the numerous “distinctive features”

of such terms in those intricate diagrams and equations which outline the
structure of a myth. As the mere mention of “knifing” cannot always convey
the qualities implicit in the word, explicit reference to its dimensions and an
exploration of their possible permutations do much to vivify the concept. If

Piaget’s descriptions stimulate one to take out a paper and pencil in order to
check the logical validity of the child’s reasoning process, Levi-Strauss’s
descriptions will more likely cause one to “relive” the experience of the
primitive.
We may conclude, then, that for Piaget the form of reasoning takes clear
precedence over the content, whereas in Levi-Strauss’s approach these two
aspects of thought are more nearly matched in importance. The consequence

of this difference in emphasis is that Piaget’s viewpoint is well suited for
analyzing scientific reasoning but of limited value for forms of thought which
extend into nonrational domains; while Levi-Strauss’s formulation is less
useful in the scientific realm, and generally inferior in formal power to

Piaget’s model, but highly suggestive in the realms of qualities, art, and
intuitions. Levi-Strauss’s closeness to ordinary language is epitomized in this
difference: just as he finds language a more appropriate model for thought

than does Piaget, so, too, the kinds of analyses in which he engages are tied to
the particular nuances of language. Myths are intimately involved with
language, both the particular properties which characterize ordinary
language (sets of opposites, distinctive features, a certain freedom in

translation) and those features which distinguish it from formal mathematical
languages (lack of precise denotation, unsuitability for translation into a
different symbol system) and from action (lack of reversibility) . Levi-

Strauss’s analysis comes closer to capturing the distinctive properties of
those forms of reasoning which are languagelike, while it is less germane to
forms which do not depend upon natural language.
Our comparison above has pointed up differences between the theories
of Levi-Strauss and Piaget, though perhaps not in those areas where they
might have been anticipated. Whereas a preliminary review indicated vast
disagreement on the relationship between thought and language, and
between primitive and scientific thought, a more careful analysis has

suggested a fair degree of agreement and tentativeness on the part of both
men. On the other hand, a surprising degree of complementarity of
perspectives has emerged in two other areas: Piaget has emerged as a
staunch defender of the structural-developmental approach, one whose root

metaphor for intelligent thought is action; Levi-Strauss is equally committed
to an agenetic structural approach, and finds perception to be the most
appropriate model for intelligent thought.
An important question now arises: are these two approaches merely
complementary, in the sense that one can put them together to make a whole;
are they antagonistic to one another, one precluding the other: or is a
productive synthesis possible? I find no reason to believe that the two
approaches exclude one another. Indeed, from nearly every perspective
except the most fine-grained analysis, Levi-Strauss and Piaget appear as
engaged in highly similar pursuits. The complementary nature of their

positions is difficult to deny, but merely to say that they sum up to a whole is
to reject the more challenging job of an attempted synthesis. One can say that
Freud and Marx, or Freud and Darwin, or indeed, any other two great figures,
are complementary to one another and that their approaches should be

combined; but it takes effort and evidence, rather than exhortation, to bring
about such rapprochements. I shall not pretend to execute the grand
synthesis, but, picking up clues from recent work in linguistics, and drawing
on my own research, I shall essay some proposals concerning possibilities for
convergence of Piaget’s and Levi-Strauss’s positions.
3. NOTES TOWARD A SYNTHESIS
Inasmuch as linguistics has traditionally served as both an impetus and

an exemplar for advances in the social sciences, it is not surprising that the
great linguist Roman Jakobson was one of the first individuals to sense points
of contact between the structural approach and the developmental approach.

In 1941, Jakobson published Child Language Aphasia and Phonological
Universals, a comprehensive monograph in which he sought to demonstrate
that the same laws describe both the acquisition of language by the child and
its dissolution in the adult suffering from brain damage. He began by noting
that in infancy every normal child will babble all manner of sounds, but that a
time will come when his babbling will cease and future sounds will unfold
according to the principle of “maximal contrast.” (Explanation of this

remarkable fact practically demands a structural orientation.) At the first
stage of language development proper, the acquisition of vowels begins with
a wide vowel, that of consonants with a forward articulated stop. In other
words, a will be the first vowel and a sound produced by the lips, p or b. the
first consonant, the contrast being the simplest and greatest possible—total
obstruction, p or b, followed by unfettered openness, a, of the vocal apparatus.
The first consonantal opposition—nasal vs. oral stops (mama/papa)
emerges next in child language, then the opposition of labials and dentals
(papa/tata and mama/ nana) . these comprising the minimal consonantal
system for all languages of the world. These consonantal oppositions are
followed in turn by the first vocalic opposition— a more narrow vowel being
opposed to a wider one (pipi/ papa) . Jakobson adds:
... if we now consider those acquisitions of the child’s consonantal or

vocalic system which exceed the minimum already discussed, a fact of
great importance comes to light—the amazingly exact agreement between
the chronological succession of these acquisitions and the general laws of
irreversible solidarity which govern the synchrony of all the languages of
the world.25
The evolution of sounds continues to follow universal “laws of solidarity”: no
child or language can have fricatives until it has stops. These laws of solidarity
are also said to be panchronic—i.e., they obtain at every stage in all languages
and dissolve in reverse order in cases of speech pathology ranging from
dream talk to severe aphasia.
Jakobson’s study is of particular interest because, unlike others in
structural linguistics, it is oriented toward developmental and psychological
questions. He comments explicitly on this connection:
. . . this system is by its very nature closely related to those stratified

phenomena which modern psychology uncovers in the different areas of
the realm of the mind. Development proceeds from an undifferentiated
original condition to a greater differentiation and separation. New
additions are superimposed on earlier ones and dissolution begins with
the higher strata.
This development from the simple and undifferentiated to the differentiated
and stratified, it will be noted, reflects a cardinal principle in the work of
Piaget.
While it is unnecessary to follow here the full course of the evolution of
child language, one issue raised by Jakobson has especial suggestiveness for
our efforts at synthesis. On the basis of reports that speech sounds are
perceived by many individuals as possessing, like visual sensations, degrees

of lightness or darkness, chromatism or achromatism, Jakobson explores the
relationship between the perception of sound and that of light.26 He suggests
that the most productive way to view auditory stimuli in this context is to
consider vowels as varying in chromatic quality and consonants in “lightness”
and “darkness,” vowels being analogous to the varied colors of the spectrum,
consonants to the hueless gray series. Chromatism thus becomes the specific
phenomenal feature of vowels, while consonants, without marked
chromatisms, become the dimension of light and darkness, with labials (b, m)
having a dark, and dentals (d, t) a light, quality. After reviewing a mass of
supporting data, Jakobson concludes that persons capable of such synesthetic
perception (phenomenal experience in a sensory modality other than the one
stimulated) tend to make similar sound/light associations, so that synesthetic

perception may be seen as non-arbitrary, regular, and consistent. The vowels
o and u are linked to the specifically dark colors, and e and i to specifically
light colors; further, more chromatic vowels are linked to variegated colors (a
with red, for example) and ii and i are connected to the least variegated
colors. Jakobson closes by remarking that “the development of the color

‘instinct’ (and its pathological disturbances) provides striking analogies to the
development and dissolution of the phonological system”—although he
leaves it to Levi-Strauss to cite another scientist’s bold claim27 that “there
probably exists in the human brain a map of colors, part of which is similar
topologically to a map of sound frequencies there.”
In addition to its intrinsic interest and argumentative force, Jakobson’s
discussion in Child Language Aphasia is relevant here for two principal
reasons.28 First, he demonstrates the possibility for a developmental analysis

in a complete, isolated system such as language. Indeed, his analysis of
changes over time proves very revealing about language and thus belies
reservations voiced by earlier linguists about the fruitfulness of such

investigations. Second, Jakobson shows that language learning need not be
considered in isolation from other kinds of psychological activity. In fact, he
suggests that the same principles which appear at work in the perception of
language also influence perception in the visual realm—and, by extension, in
other sensory and cognitive domains as well.
Jakobson appears to have demonstrated, then, that structural and
developmental approaches can be productively combined. From structural
linguistics, he draws the approach of concentration on a specifiable code and
analysis in terms of binary opposition and distinctive features; from
developmental psychology, he takes the notion of differentiation and
integration, the idea of structured stages, the notions of progression and
regression according to specifiable principles. His concept of irreversible

solidarity embodies an important principle of developmental psychology; that
the attainment of an advanced stage necessarily implies that one has passed
through the earlier stages.

Although Jakobson has clearly demonstrated the possibility for a
combined structural-developmental analysis in a languagelike realm, a
staunch Piagetian might still have reservations about the relevance of this
work to cognitive development. It might be argued, for example, that the
phonology of language is only a very limited area, whereas Piaget has
attempted to ferret out principles which govern all of thought. This kind of
argument loses its force, however, when two additional considerations are
taken into account. First of all, as we have already suggested, it is misleading
to suggest that Piaget has focused upon all forms of cognition; rather, he has
taken as his preserve the realm of Western scientific thought, which, however
crucial it may seem today, does not represent with any fidelity or
comprehensiveness the forms of thought valued in other cultures or during
other periods. (In contrast, human language is of course a universal
phenomenon and, as Levi-Strauss has shown, is integrally involved with

forms of thought found throughout the globe.) In the second place, Jakobson
has not in fact restricted his developmental analysis to the phonological realm
of language. In later work, he has outlined the development of six forms of

verbal communication,29 which range from the conative (language expressing
wishes) to the metalingual (language referring to language) and the poetic
(language which calls attention to itself). Jakobson argues that these, too,
unfold in a systematic and regular order, with the later forms of

communication dependent upon the stability of the earlier ones. He also
allows the environment a far greater role in bringing out the later forms than
is the case with phonological evolution, which seems more closely tied to
hereditary and physiological factors. Although Jakobson has not, to my
knowledge, elaborated on this point, it seems quite likely that these aspects of
language depend upon an interaction of the child with other persons in the
world, as well as with the codes of his culture, and that they reflect structures
akin to those studied by Piaget (e.g., action upon the object, action upon the
action, the decline of egocentrism). Whatever differences may remain
between language, as broadly viewed by Jakobson, and cognition, as defined
by Piaget, the developmental analysis put forth by the former suggests the
possibility of a meaningful synthesis between the two branches of the
structuralist school.
A second area of difference, and potential reconciliation, (enters around
Piaget’s stress upon actions and his concentration upon operational thought,
and Levi-Strauss’s reciprocal emphasis on perception and the role of
distinctive features of objects. These emphases follow logically from the

particular realms the two investigators have respectively elected to explore—
actions and operations being more evident in children’s behavior, perceptual
properties and distinctive features in myths and the arts; yet I feel that each
analyst could conceivably have couched his treatment in the jargon of the
other. A slight shift of focus regarding the work of each man will illustrate the
potential for translation.

In studying the sensorimotor stage, Piaget focuses on the various
actions of the child which eventually coordinate with one another to produce
the formation of the object concept. It seems probable that sensitivity to
contrasting qualities plays a constructive role in this stage of development.
The infant acting upon objects perceives aspects particular to each object and
develops schemes appropriate to these distinctive aspects: edible/nonedible,
graspable/nongraspable. His ultimate definition of an object may be viewed

as a sum of the appropriate actions which he may perform upon objects, and
these in turn rest upon his prior analysis of the distinctive features of an
object. Similarly, his identity or equivalence judgments— which Piaget finds
crucial at every stage of development —naturally involve the consideration of

certain features as defining and others as nondefining; such an analysis is a
perceptual task fixing upon similarities and contrasts. (For example, at the
concrete-operational level an identity operation involves states identical or

equivalent in distinctive features, whereas reversing and compensation
operations comprise permissible transformations or rearrangements of
distinctive features.) And in regard to a specific domain such as conservation

of liquids, the need for a distinctive-feature analysis becomes quite
compelling. A child can only become aware that water remains the same in
amount irrespective of the shape of its container if he is able to coordinate
changes in such properties as the height and width of the water. He must
realize that the change in height is compensated for by a change in width,
which clearly involves an analysis of the relation of opposition obtaining
between distinctive features. To discern features is certainly a sign of
flexibility, but there is no reason to believe the flexibility is infinite; rather, the
features to which an individual can be sensitive must reflect, in the last
analysis, the structure of his perceptual system. Thus, even an analysis which
focuses upon actions in the world of objects implicitly acknowledges the role
of perception in the recognition and comprehension of these objects.
Correlatively, if Levi-Strauss or Jakobson were to focus on the
relationship of cultural systems to the individual’s activities, or on the way in
which an individual is able to proceed from one “transform” of a cultural
system to another, they might well find an analysis in terms of operations a
most appropriate and informative one. Any structural analysis of a scientific
or mythic classification in terms of distinctive features would have to take
into account, either implicitly or explicitly, alternative ways of classification,

the psychological process by which the individual embraces one mode rather
than another, the dynamic way in which features are combined and
manipulated. Or, if the interest centered upon a kin relationship like the
avunculate, the existence of such a system would seem dependent on the
individual’s capacity to adopt different attitudes toward other individuals and

to fit himself into an overall system of attitudes. Such analyses seem most
readily and profitably viewed in terms of developing operational structures.

Even the naming and classifying systems of primitives, which Levi-Strauss

often presents as if they were cultural givens, involve generative activity on
the part of an individual who is acquiring the system or on the part of a
culture confronted with a new object or experience to name. Whether these
activities are constructive and open to conscious examination, as Piaget

prefers to view them, or a reflection of unconscious mental activities, as Levi-
Strauss might describe them, is less important than the probability that some
active, generative transforming mechanisms are involved in either case.
The point I wish to make is not that the two approaches need inevitably
merge into one, but that they might well be consistent with one another. In
describing the operation of reversing, Piaget postulates states A and B; that
the person is able to take cognizance of A and B implies some sensitivity to
the defining and distinguishing characteristics of each. By the same token, in

speaking of possible combinations of distinctive features, Jakobson and Levi-
Strauss suggest that different units may stand in a series of definable
relationships to one another. The way in which the individual or the society
negotiates these relationships may be appropriately formulated in terms of
such operations as identity, compensation, or reversibility. (Compatibility of
the notions of distinctive features and operations needs to be further
explored, but that technical task is best laid aside until another occasion.)
While we have outlined above the possibilities for reconciliation

between the overall approaches, genetic and agenetic structuralism, and
between the analytic terms, operations and distinctive features, we are still
left with respective predilections for different root metaphors— Levi-Strauss
committed to perception as central, Piaget devoted to action as the prime
mover. Some of my own work with young children has suggested that, here as
well, there is much potential for agreement; I will briefly review some of the
evidence on this point.
If one performs a motor activity in front of an infant—for example,
opening and closing the mouth, protruding and withdrawing a finger—any of
a number of results can follow: the child may ignore the behavior, reproduce
it completely, or reproduce selected aspects of it. A number of studies of
imitation have now indicated that the infant is particularly sensitive to the
“modal” properties of a behavior. The child will seize upon such aspects as
“opening and closing” or “extending and withdrawing,” and will imitate them
even when he is still unable to match the bodily zone appropriately. An open
hand may elicit an open mouth; rhythmic alteration of the finger may
stimulate matching tongue movements. Similarly, when he views a spectacle
in his environment, or hears an unusual sound, the child is likely to become

involved with the display in a bodily manner; he will settle upon the display’s
dynamic, or “vectoral,” properties—its force, direction, degree of balance,

penetration, rhythm, etc.—and reproduce these vigorously in his behavior,
even while eliminating aspects closer to the physical properties of the
stimulus but differing in dynamic quality.

I would hypothesize that this sensitivity to “modal” and “vectoral”
properties of the environment, to generalized aspects of force, direction,
rhythm, and action, derives at least in part from the child’s own bodily
experience of these aspects, which reflects, in turn, the activities of which he
is capable. In the course of his daily life, the child experiences fullness,
emptiness, openness, closedness, penetration, withdrawal, regularity,
imbalance, and various degrees of pressure and direction. For reasons we do

not yet understand, he is able very early to extract similar properties from the
perceived environment, and to embody these properties in his own
spontaneous behavior. His perceptions and actions come together through
these distinctive modes,30 which form a bedrock of his experience and his
behavior. The sensitivity to modal/vectoral properties (which cut across
sensory modalities and are manifest in both the perceptual and the motoric
realm) is, I would suggest further, a necessary antecedent for the use and the
comprehension of symbols, and remains fundamental to our cognition in the

adult years, though it may to some extent be superseded by more precise
(and limiting) methods of classifying, perceiving, and acting. In other words,

all of us perform an analysis of external events we observe in terms of their
phenomenal openness or penetration, even as we assume analogous attitudes
and perspectives in our personal behavior and activities. The scientist strives
to eliminate these “subjective” aspects from his published reports, even
though they may assist him in his preliminary investigations, while the artist
seeks to preserve such general properties in his finished product.
The major structuralists have each made analyses of the sort described
just above. In his discussion of play, dreams, and imitative activity, Piaget
gives copious examples of the child’s sensitivity to these general forms or
properties; and, though he points out how they may interfere with
operational thought, he recognizes them as a necessary factor in
development. It is Piaget’s greatest weakness, I believe, that he has not
followed through on analysis of the development of these forms of perception
and action. Levi-Strauss and Jakobson, for their part, are centrally involved
with such qualities, both as they are reflected in the language which the
individual hears and speaks (open/ closed sounds), and as they are embodied
in various cultural forms, ranging from social structure (balanced/
disharmonic) to works of art (empty/full, above/below) . Indeed, the kind of
synesthetic experience which they attribute to the operation of the nervous

system may well depend upon a sensitivity to modal properties, which are by
their nature cross-sensory, or “inter-modal.”
Both branches of structuralism, then, would probably agree that the

child processes information of a modal sort, and is sensitive to qualities and
their opposites, from a very early age; that these properties are not limited to
any particular sensory modality; and that there is some predisposition to

retain this kind of bodily involvement in dynamic activity throughout the life

cycle. Modal properties, I would submit, undergo a characteristic evolution
(e.g., sensitivity to openness and closedness should develop before sensitivity
to intrusion and introception) ; they are found universally, and they should
emerge in characteristic configurations, depending upon the personal history

of the individual and upon environmental influences in the given culture.
Through the concept of modes and vectors, a further synthesis of the

work of Piaget and Levi-Strauss should become possible. The mode may serve
as a new “root metaphor” for thought, indissolubly linking the concepts of
perception and action. Piaget’s emphasis upon actions and objects and Levi-
Strauss’s reciprocal stress on properties and features are both encompassed
in this formulation. For modes (and vectors) , deeply embedded in the
biological makeup of the young organism, constitute the basic developmental

matrix out of which more refined behavior and thought evolve; specific
qualities result from the combination and mixture of various modes, and
operations are the possible relations obtaining among modes. Modes also cut
across the division of form and content, for they are formal properties which
nonetheless acquire significance and force in the person’s subjective

experience. Finally, modes serve as a transitional element in the child’s
development from a sensorimotor operator to an individual whose world is

defined in terms of language and other forms of symbolic mediation. Modes
serve as the initial referents for cultural symbols like words, and remain as
principal referents for more personal kinds of symbols, such as those
involved in subjective experience or in the arts. Even as the development of
the object concept constitutes the pivotal event in the development of
scientific thought, modal perception and activity form a leitmotif for the full
range of human development, manifest in the earliest days of childhood, yet

persisting in the most intricate and sophisticated encounters with aesthetic
objects or with other persons. Standing midway between object and
distinctive feature, between perception and action, between art and science,
the concept of the mode may serve as a link, tying together principal
orientations in the study of mind.
I have long felt that convergence of structuralist methods would be
greatly facilitated if an area could be found in which units could be isolated
and a clear end-state propounded. I have now proposed that “modes” may be
the possible units for such an analysis, and have implied that the artistic
development and mastery might be a suitable end-state.31 One can outline

with some precision the end-state of artistic development, the kinds of skills
and capacities a talented artist or performer—or connoisseur—must have.
There should be stages en route to this end-state, for example, appreciation of
the concept of representation or the capacity to ignore dominant “figures” in
an array and attend instead to stylistic or expressive features. Piagetian
methods could be brought to bear in devising tasks for children of different
ages and in assessing their degree of comprehension and achievement. And

Levi-Strauss could make a singular contribution in this regard, for it is in his

work, more than in that of any other contemporary thinker, that one finds
clues as to the building blocks of aesthetic creation and creativity: the kinds of
modal qualities, perceptual sensory aspects which are salient to all people
and which assume a significant place in the myths, customs, and art objects of
diverse cultures. Wedding Levi-Strauss’s sensitivity to these universal
categories of phenomenal experience to Piaget’s careful methods of clinical
investigation offers hope for a structural approach which can shed light on
the range of human intellectual power and creative activities in diverse
cultures. The fact that it is so difficult to contrast the science and philosophy
of different cultures, yet natural and suggestive to compare their paintings,
music, or myths, gives further impetus to such an undertaking. As both men,
dating back to their earliest years, have maintained an interest in humanistic
studies, and have been intrigued by the operation of irrationality and affect in
human life, while maintaining a steady commitment to scientific methods and
procedures, such a study would help to achieve goals close to the hearts of
both: the integration of the social sciences, the specification of
characteristically human forms of thought, the inclusion of the full range of

content to which they refer. Indeed, the intense curiosity which both men
exhibit toward the “mysteries of musical creation” suggest that this domain
would be a particularly promising one to investigate, one that might perhaps
even lead to a synthesis of the structural and developmental approaches.
Both of our thinkers have revealed on occasion the full vista of their
aspirations in the sciences.32 Levi-Strauss has indicated his belief that
structures are not merely the invention of the analyst, that they really exist in
the culture, and in the minds of the members of that culture, because of the
nature of man’s nervous system and his genetic endowment. Indeed, Levi-
Strauss has, of late, even drawn the curtain which separated Nature and
Culture, indicating that in the last analysis, Culture is also part of Nature and
that the structural approach may eventually effect a merger of man and
Culture into the larger realm of biological and physical Nature. The Finale of
the Mythologiques includes a rhapsodic passage on the structuralist
implications of DNA, animal communication, the relationship between
protozoa and bacteria, the visual system of cats and frogs, and the related
shapes of the brains of birds and men. Levi-Strauss expects to find the same
determining principles underlying the communication of apes, the

reproduction of plants, and perhaps even in the beloved rocks of his
childhood, as he discerned in systems of kinship or corpora of myths; there

may be a single key to understanding the universe, after all.
Piaget, though usually more taciturn about the poetic aspects of his
vision, has also, in recent writings, indicated his belief that in the search for
structures one will arrive at fundamental properties of the universe. Not only
do structures really exist in the mind of the operating child; but, Piaget
suggests, they are similar to the structures in the world probed by the
physicist, that is, in the world of physical objects. Perhaps, he implies, it is

because we are built to interact with that physical world of physics— matter,
gravity, probability, and entropy—that our actions assume their peculiar
structures:
There are physical structures which, though independent of us,

correspond to our operational structures. . . . here we have remarkable
proof of that pre-established harmony among windowless monads of
which Leibniz dreamt . . . the most beautiful example of biological
adaptation that we know of (because it is physico-chemical and cognitive
at the same time).33
Having discussed such matters with no less an authority than Niels Bohr,
Piaget recalls the physicist’s warning: “The analogy between operations and
the physical world is a suggestive one, but one that is perilous as well.”
However, it is with a twinkle in his eye that Piaget repeats these words.
Despite, then, their concerted efforts to rid European psychology and
anthropology of idealism and unsupported speculation, both Levi-Strauss and

Piaget themselves entertain grandiose thoughts at times about the
implications of the approaches they have developed. It is not surprising, and
it is somewhat gratifying, to discover this facet of the program, since the
ability to discover new intellectual horizons would seem closely linked to a
strong imaginative power which can perceive connections and syntheses

where others see only isolated particles of information. There is, to be sure,
an attendant danger in such creative efflorescence: one may claim unities in

the absence of evidence, or in the face of contrary evidence; one then moves
out of step with the scientific credo, though one may with such boldness lay
the foundation for a scientific breakthrough. Indeed, it is with regard to the

scientific status of the two theorists, the relation to work being done by other
persons, and ultimate claims to reliability and verifiability, that the strongest
debates about the structuralist school have centered. It is to a review and
assessment of structuralist claims, achievements, and problems, therefore,
that we now direct our attention.
Notes
1 Piaget’s remark on psychological explanation appears in The Psychology of Intelligence(Paterson, N.J.:

Littlefield Adams, 1963), p. 3.
2 Piaget believes that a metatheory of structures will be forthcoming, and looks to the newer branches
of mathematics for clues regarding its form. His Center for Genetic Epistemology seeks to
translate this vision into a reality.
3 D’Arcy Thompson’s most distinguished work in his two-volume essay On Growth and Form
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1942), a careful study of the mathematical
properties of naturally occurring forms.
4 A defense of the determining role of language in thought can be found in the writings of Benjamin Lee
Whorf. See his Language,Thought and Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956). The
opposite view is insistently expressed in J. Hadamarad, The Psychology of Invention in the
Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,1945).
5 Studies on thought in the deaf include H. Furth, Thinking Without Language: Psychological
Implications of Deafness (New York: Free Press, 1966); M. Vincent-Borelli, "La Naissance
des operations logiques chez les sourds-muets,” Enfance, Vol. 4(1951), 222-38; H.
Sinclair-de-Zwart, Langage et operations: Sous systemes linguistiques et operations
concretes (Paris; Dunod, 1967). Piaget’s reference to the “prelogic inherent in speech” is
found in his Biologie et connaissance (Paris:Gallimard, 1967), p. 191.

6 Levi-Strauss’s respect for language is apparent throughouthis writings. The remark quoted here
comes from p. 252 of SM.
7 Piaget's remarks on formal operations are found in GLT, passim.
8 Levi-Strauss's own thought processes are the subject of comment in J. Hadamarad, The Psychology of
Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1945), p. 90.
9 Piaget’s comments on primitive thought antichildhood thought are found in CCW.Levi-Strauss

answered this analogy in his chapter on “The Archaic Illusion,” in ESK, pp. 84-97.
10 Levi-Strauss’s altered views on primitive and modern thought appear in the opening chapters of
SM; Piaget’s most recent remarks on primitive thought appear in his book S, p. 117, and
in “Necessite et signification des recherches comparatives en psychologic genetique,"
International Journal of Psychology, Vol. I (1966), 3-13.
11 I do not mean to suggest that myth-making is a passive process, consisting primarily of repetition.
There is ample room for inventiveness, development of intricate skills, evolution of new
thematic material or stylistic techniques. Cf. A. B.Lord, The Singer of Tales
(Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960). The difficulty in assessing the intellectual
operations underlying mythopoetic activity stems from the near-impossibility of
ascertaining which portions of a myth originate with the teller and which are slight
modifications of earlier versions. It is as if individuals in our culture were taught the laws
of physics in a rote manner as young children, and were later asked in the same terms
learned earlier to describe what was happening in a laboratory experiment.
12 Cross-cultural studies of Piagetian tasks are reported in J. S. Bruner et at., Studies in Cognitive
Growth (New York: Wiley, 1966), D. Elkind and J. Flavell (eds.) Studies in Cognitive
Development (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), and recent volumes of the
International Journal of Psychology.
13 Piaget’s remarks on Levi-Strauss’s structuralism are found in his book S, Chapter VI .
14 Levi-Strauss vacillates in his attitudes toward history. He makes sympathetic comments in his
inaugural lecture at the Collegede France (The Scope of Anthropology[London: Jonathan
Cape, 1967]), yet is openly critical of the craft in The Savage Mind, published shortly
afterwards.
15 For Levi-Strauss’s views on genetic studies, see his essays “Structure and Dialectics" in Structural
Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 232-44, and his graceful study “The
Story of Asdiwal’’ in F.. Leach (ed.), The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (London:
Tavistock,1967).
16 For Levi-Strauss’s remarks on hot and cold societies, see The Scope of Anthropology (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1967); that this dichotomy is a vast oversimplification is demonstrated
by such so-called “primitive'' societies as the Manus, studied by Margaret Mead, which
adapt to change more readily than many “modern”societies.
17 Findings of regression in the thought of adolescents living in a concrete-operational society are

reported by L. Kohlberg; see his “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive Developmental
Approach to Socialization," in D. Goslin (ed.). Handbook of Socialization:Theory and
Research (New York: Rand McNally, 1969), pp. 347-380.
18 The description of root metaphors in cosmic theories has been introduced by S. Pepper in his book
World Hypotheses (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1948).
19 Levi-Strauss’s remarks on South American Indians and his own thought processes appear in the
overture to The Raw and the Cooked, p. 13.
20 His views on how myths operate are given on p. 12.
21 Piaget’s remarks on the creative imagination are found in his book L'Image mentale chez
l’enfant(Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1966), p. vii.
22 Levi-Strauss’s allusions to the character of primitive thought are found in TT andThe Scope of
Anthropology (London:Jonathan Cape, 1967).
23 The contrast between Piagetian and Levi-Straussian analysis outlined in the pages that follow is
amplified in my article “The Structural Analysis of Myths and Protocols,” Semiotica, Vol. 5
(1971), 31-57.
24 The Viergruppe,composed of the operations of identity, negation, reciprocity, and correlation,is

described in Traite de Logique(Paris: Colin, 1949) and applied to the analysis of
adolescent thought processes in GLT.

25 Jakobson's book was translated in 1968 (The Hague: Mouton). Jakobson’s notes on solidarity
appear on p. 51; his remarks on development, on p. 65.
26 Relations between color instinct and phonological systems are characterized on pp. 73 ff.
27 The scientist making the “bold claim” was D. I. Mason, cited by Levi-Strauss in SA, p. 92.
28 Presentation of Jakobson’s ideas, and the irrelevance for our efforts at synthesizing the
developmental and structural approaches, is undertaken at greater length in my article
“Structure and Development,” in The Human Context (in press, 1972).
29 Jakobson’s discussion of the six forms of verbal communication is found in "Closing Statement:
Linguistics and Poetics,” in T. Sebeok (ed.), Style and Language(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press 1960), pp. 350-77. His developmental analysis has been presented in various
lectures, including an unpublished series delivered at Harvard University in 1968-9.
30 For an extended discussion of the notion of the mode,see my article “From Mode to Symbol,” British
Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 10 (1970), 359-75.
31 For considerations pertinent to a psychology of the artist, see my forthcoming book, Art and Human
Development (New York: Wiley, in press), Chap. 3, and my essays"Problem Solving in the
Arts,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 5 (1971), 93-114; “The Development of
Sensitivity to Artistic Styles,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 29 (1970), 515-
27: “From Mode to Symbol:Thoughts on the Genesis of the Arts,” British Journal of
Aesthetics, Vol. 10 (1970), 259-75.
32 Levi-Strauss’s cosmic views have emerged in various interviews he has recently granted: G.
Charbonier (ed.), Entretiens avec Claude Levi-Strauss (Paris: Plon-Julliard, 1961); S. de
Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies," in CL-S,pp. 3-21; “A contrecourant,” Le
Nouvel Observateur (January 25, 1967), pp. 30-2, as well as in numerous asides in his
Mythologiques. Piaget’s search for universal structures is most fully explicated in his
book on structuralism.
33 The relationship between physical and operational structures is described in S, pp. 37-51. The
quotation actually represents two separate extracts, from pp. 41 and 45, respectively.
Piaget quoted the remark by Niels Bohr in a personal conversation with the author.
6
Structuralism as a World-View
The human sciences will be structuralist, or they will not be at all.
-LEVI-STRAUSS1
Not Levi-Strauss, not Piaget, but Marx, Mao, and Marcuse, were the
heroes of the French students who marched through the streets of Paris in
May 1968, throwing the regime of General de Gaulle into turmoil.2 The
students, workers, and thousands of other Frenchmen who joined in these
short-lived but epochal uprisings were protesting against grave injustices
they found in their seemingly prosperous and peaceful country. While the
reasons for these events were quite complex, and a subject of heated
argument, there was considerable agreement that the balance of power

among the French intelligentsia was altered by the events of May.
During the Second World War and in the immediate postwar years, the
philosophy of existentialism (in its Marxist and phenomenological varieties)

exerted a dominant influence on educated French youth. Sartre, Camus, de
Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty spoke of the importance of engagement,

involvement, and passion; these intellectuals became involved in political and
social conflict and made their stands known. By the 1960’s, however,

widespread disillusionment over the Algerian rebellion and the Cold War had
brought about a reaction against such political commitment, and a new
intellectual style became popular. Among those who reflected this “cooler”
style were the structuralists such as Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Michel
Foucault,3 who, whatever their political persuasions, despaired of influencing

events which they saw as under the control of remote and impassive forces. A
retreat within, toward scholarship, analysis, objectivity appeared to be taking

place: articles appeared chronicling the death of existentialism and the
emergence of Levi-Strauss as the principal intellectual figure in France.
Whether or not those heralding the demise of the “engaged intellectual”
had pinpointed a genuine phenomenon, the uprising of 1968 signaled a new
shift in intellectual allegiance among French students. Among French
intellectuals, Sartre stood almost alone in publicly taking the side of the
rebellious students; other members of the academic community generally
took a dim view of the Guevarist tactics espoused by the militants, and tended
to espouse a liberal, rather than a radical, critique of the French scene.
“Structuralism is dead,” cried the students; whether or not they had ever read
a word of Lacan or Levi-Strauss, they sensed a tie between the philosophy of

these men and the establishment they had come to despise.
That there is at least a surface connection between trends in the social
sciences and the French rebellion cannot be denied. The uprisings began in
the new University of Nanterre, progressive by French standards, where
contemporary sociology and psychology were extremely popular subjects.
Indeed, Daniel Cohn-Bendit,4 one of the leaders of the movement, was himself
a sociology student, knowledgeable about currents in the social sciences, and
sufficiently convinced of their perniciousness to begin his published version
of the course of events with a scathing attack on these sciences. For students
like Cohn-Bendit, the evil of the French university and the French state
consisted in their bureaucratization, their inaccessibility, their
imperviousness to change. De Gaulle stood aloof from the masses and their
problems, preferring to identify with the remote past, to which he attempted

to subordinate the present situation. Other institutions were similarly
indifferent to current pressures and forces, had not changed in centuries, and
seemed even to glory in their rigidity. As one commentator put it, the French
university was like structuralism:5 a language sufficient unto itself, devoid of

goals or meaning. The cycle of studies was reduced to a pure code, to which
the students could make no contribution: all had already been decided. The
culture dispensed by the university appeared to be a class culture, as alien
from today as a dead language. Structuralism was an effort to inject into the
domain of ideas the patent immobility which characterized social structure
during the present era. In short, the university was nonsense, meaningless.
The adequacy of this critique from the left will be taken up a little later,
after we have introduced some of the criticisms of the work of Levi-Strauss

and Piaget made from within the academy, and chiefly from the right. What is
clear to begin with is that for a variety of reasons, structuralism has aroused
strong feelings both within and without intellectual circles and has even been
implicated in the most dramatic: event in recent French history. Why

structuralism has merited this attention, what there is in the analyses of Levi-
Strauss and Piaget which can engender such debate and bitterness, is an
intriguing question which may reveal something about the status of scientific
inquiry in the contemporary world.
1. CRITICAL REACTIONS TO STRUCTURALISM
Piaget’s early studies of children’s reasoning were widely acclaimed by
psychologists as pioneering attempts to chart the world-view of the young

child. In contrast, his subsequent works on infancy and on the development of
concrete and formal operations were largely ignored for several decades,
except by scattered cognoscenti. It was only in the sixties, due in large part to
the Sputnik-inspired resurgence of interest in intellectual development, that
Piaget’s work of the intervening years came to be recognized.
By and large, reaction to his work has been favorable from those who
have studied it carefully.6 His disdain for statistical methods has been
criticized by nearly every American commentator; but as replications have
verified most of his findings, these critics have been disposed to write off
Piaget’s “sloppy” reporting methods as a Gallic idiosyncrasy. Relevant
criticisms and modifications of aspects of Piaget’s theory have come chiefly
from those within the general structuralist camp—from psychologists like
Jerome Bruner,7 who questions the need for the terms “operations” and
“equilibrium,” or from researchers like Thomas Bever and Jacques Mehler,
who find evidence for understanding of conservations of number far earlier

than does Piaget. For the most part, such criticism has been couched in
respectful terms
Outside the group that agrees with or has been convinced by his
approaches, however, Piaget has not been much discussed. He has proposed a
new approach or “paradigm” for research in psychology;8 he assumes the

subject can reveal interesting things about himself and that the subject is
perpetually and actively constructing knowledge about the world; he views

behavior as an interaction of present structures with assimilable aspects of
the environment, rather than as a series of responses to independently
definable stimuli. The dominant behaviorist tradition, in contrast, subscribes
to the notion that a subject’s testimony or interpretation provides no clue to
psychological processes, and that the subject acquires knowledge or “learns”

by merely reflecting what is present in the environment, rather than by
actively transforming it. Since behaviorists and Piagetians speak different

languages and proceed from different assumptions, there can be (despite
some valiant attempts in this regard by “neo-behaviorists”)9 no “meeting of

the minds” between these two approaches. The Gestalt school, so
revolutionary and promising when Piaget began his work, is no longer active
as a separate force, and its most enduring contributions have long since been
absorbed into general psychology. The battle for the loyalty of the new
generation seems to be between the constructive, cognitive Piaget school and
the behavioral learning tradition; the outcome is as yet uncertain.
The reception given Piaget beyond the borders of psychology—among
philosophers, mathematicians, and biologists, among others—resembles that
accorded Levi-Strauss within the field of anthropology. Both men have been
viewed as taking revolutionary leaps in thought, stating them boldly, but
providing insufficient documentation. In the frequent and heated disputes
over the merits of their ideas, they have been regarded as either designers of
a new science, incorrigible and destructive iconoclasts, or mysterious and
suspect characters whose opaque writings obscure as much as they reveal.
Levi-Strauss is recognized for having charted new areas for study, and as
having had a stimulating effect on ethnography, but he is seen as having
proved few of his key assertions satisfactorily. A practice has developed—and
indeed become something of a minor industry—of an anthropologist aspiring
to publication writing a brief, devastating article either refuting a theoretical

point of Levi-Strauss’s or introducing an empirical counterexample to, say,
the latter’s interpretation of the bull horn among the Indians of central Brazil.
These critics are conspicuously united in their lip service to the grandeur of
Levi-Strauss’s scheme and in their claims that one must, nonetheless, take
one’s time in going from hunch to scientific generalization.10
Whatever the disagreements over the nature and extent of Levi-
Strauss’s positive contributions, it is clear that his critiques have helped
significantly in effecting the downfall of the principal schools of earlier
theory: Malinowskian functionalism, Radcliffe-Brownian structuralism, and

the lingering vestiges of evolutionism, diffusionism, and historicism. Many
investigators have been content just to write out their detailed ethnographies
of individual peoples, while those concerned with theory have tended either
to embrace a kind of anthropologically viable Marxism or to join the rapidly
growing school of cognitive anthropology, or ethnoscience.11 Ethnoscientists

examine the classifying, naming, and kinship practices of diverse cultures in
an effort to draw semantic maps of the structure of such domains and to find
parallels between domains in disparate societies. While the goals of this
movement resemble Levi-Strauss’s program, its methods tend to be
quantitative rather than qualitative, its focus narrow, and its results
disappointingly thin when weighed against those achievable by the simple
exercise of common sense. Yet the hopes of American (and perhaps also
world) anthropology seem pinned on this movement, which is less dependent
upon the imaginative flair of a unique “great man.”
As is all-too-customary in academic circles, some of the attacks on Levi-

Strauss and Piaget have been quite vicious, particularly those from
representatives of the earlier traditions which the structuralists are, more or
less explicitly, rejecting. These opponents have tended to focus upon the
validity of positing “basic units and structures,” the status of such terms as
distinctive features, operations, or kinship structures, or the abandonment of
such widely accepted notions as drive reduction, imitation, and empirical
learning in favor of “constructivist” or “mentalistic” noting of how behavior is
caused and how it unfolds. Since none of the leading structuralists is disposed
to shy away from a good fight—indeed, they seem to relish one—the learned
journals have come to feature generous doses of personal aspersion as the
two sides repeatedly square off. In a personal communication to one such

combatant, Levi-Strauss explicitly referred to the exchange as a potlatch, and
hinted that, as in that form of ritual exchange, the greater prestige would
accrue to the more destructive participant. Piaget has an interesting way of
handling his opposition: he is likely to invite a worthy adversary to spend

time at his center, and to seek to win him over to the truth of genetic
epistemology. As if they were trophies of battle, Piaget now proudly lists in

his books the names of former antagonists who have since subscribed to the
worthiness of his enterprise. It is said, however, that some of these

reconciliations have been more personal than intellectual, and that some of
the collaborations to which Piaget proudly points exist, as in some joint
diplomatic communiques, more in name than in spirit.
Both men have had their problems, not only with their detractors, but
even at times with their admirers and disciples, of which each has more than
his share. Although both have repeatedly emphasized their distaste for the
role of founder of a school, and there is little reason to doubt their
ambivalence about an enthusiastic: yet uncritical following, each is burdened
with sycophants willing to defend every quotation, aside, and comma (even
when the Master has already changed his mind). These disputes and
apologies will not concern us here, since they so often deal with specific:
points of detail and are linked more to pride than to substance. It does seem
relevant, however, to mention some of the more general criticisms leveled
against the structuralist movement.
On the methodological level, Piaget and Levi-Strauss are both
criticized12 for careless reporting of data, lack of statistical tests, failure to

specify the way in which examples were chosen, and excessive reliance upon
one, two, or three cases. The issue of care in reporting seems to reflect, to
some extent, different scholarly practices in Continental Europe and America:
scientists in the United States are far more preoccupied with sample sizes and
tests of significance than their European counterparts. As for the use of a

small population, both Piaget and Levi-Strauss subscribe to the notion that
one case scrupulously investigated and thoroughly understood is far more

valuable than scattered data collected on a variety of subjects. Both,
nonetheless, have encouraged their associates to document their findings

with further examples and have themselves taken the criticism of limited
sampling more fully to heart in later work. In this regard, at least, the
pressures exerted by a skeptical scientific community appear to have
engendered a positive result.
As spiritual descendants of Descartes, however, both men are prone to

place great trust in their own insights, intuitions, and formulations. What
seems clear to them tends often to be treated as self-evident in their books,
and many terms in need of careful definition are casually adopted without
comment. In addition, the overtones of idealism which we have discerned in

their more recent writings—the suggestion that structuralism may prove the
key to the ancient mysteries of life and the world—are an irritant to more
prudent or pluralistically disposed thinkers. All these factors serve not only to
make reading of their works difficult, but also to suggest the possibility that
the structuralists are not themselves aware of all the problems raised by
certain of their positions. However, their practice of “thinking aloud” is at

least understandable, in the light of both men’s constant attempts to map out
new areas; in their fervor to communicate principal points, they inevitably
forgo the infinite care which individuals working in more traditional and
delimited areas can take with their work.
The positing of constructs and entities for which there is little or no

direct evidence is a practice for which the two men have been subjected to
heavy criticism. There is a persistent (and undeniably praiseworthy)
tendency in contemporary science to rid reports of metaphysical terminology,
of constructs which do not lend themselves to operationalization and
disproof. That Piaget and Levi-Strauss rely so frequently on metaphor and

unhesitatingly introduce new constructs or analogies rankles even
sympathetic readers and calls the rigor of their approach into question.
The grand assurance with which structuralist claims are often put forth
is also a bone of contention. Many individuals, while impressed by Piaget’s
and Levi-Strauss’s observations and their resulting middle-level
generalizations, resent structuralism’s pretensions to be a new worldview or
academic ideology. Such critics argue that the structuralists' findings can be
satisfactorily subsumed under the currently established paradigms of

psychology and anthropology—i.e., behaviorism and functionalism. It is here
that we touch on the real crux of the dispute over structuralism. Every social
scientist implicitly or explicitly assumes a certain perspective toward

knowledge in his work and adopts a certain picture of how organisms
function. For many years, an image of man as a struggling biological organism

with strong drives which govern his behavior, and a view of knowledge as a
reflection within man of the "real” contents of the environment, have held
sway in Anglo-American social science. Structuralism threatens this outlook,
for it attributes to the individual more innate mental structuring and
functioning; regards the subject as playing an active role in the construction

of his knowledge; stresses the universal similarities among men, regardless of
differences in their social organization; finds no need to posit “needs for” or
“functions of” structure; and, in its Piagetian variant, asserts that children
pass through qualitatively distinct stages which can be understood in their

own terms. As these views have received increasing support from
structuralist (and some non-structuralist) research, the findings have become
more and more difficult to assimilate into the traditional framework;

conventional accounts of learning, of social structure, of cultural products
become undermined, and the possibility arises that behaviorism and
functionalism must be abandoned as viable theoretical approaches. Many
scientists, particularly those who have established reputations within the
behaviorist-functionalist tradition, have a vested interest in the older
paradigm and, rightly or wrongly, are not going to surrender to the

approaching structuralist troops without a prolonged siege.
Objections to the structuralist approach have not, however, been

restricted to attacks from the academic rear guard concerning the merits of
applying its perspective to specific problems in psychology and anthropology;
its entire implicit world-view has also been assailed as pernicious by various
articulate critics of a different persuasion. The most notable (and notorious)

of these attacks has been that of Jean-Paul Sartre on Levi-Strauss’s program,
in his Critique of Dialectical Reasoning.13 Proceeding from a Marxist-Hegelian

view of society, which is rooted in history and which contrasts opposing
viewpoints in order to achieve a “higher truth,” Sartre denigrates Levi-
Strauss’s analytic approach for restricting itself to classification, as well as his
“objective” perspective, in whose terms man is treated as an “ant” and his
unique human values are denied. Sartre’s own philosophy is firmly rooted in
politics and history: he adheres to the Marxist eschatological view that the
proletariat will overthrow capitalist society; the anthropological proposition
that primitive man, having rejected history, is forever distanced from civilized
man; and the philosophical claim that man can determine his own fate. These
perspectives are directly threatened by Levi-Strauss, who views each society
as possessing its own integrity, Western man as in no way privileged, and
men as controlled by the structure of their brains, which permits them only a
quite limited range of cultural and intellectual options. While Sartre considers
structure in dialectical reasoning to be a product of men’s activity in the

technological world, Levi-Strauss reverses the argument, claiming that all
practical activity presupposes a structure.
Although to many outsiders this debate may seem a bit like a tempest in
a teapot, raging only within the narrow confines of French intellectual circles,
it is in fact of considerable consequence. At stake may be the traditional
humanistic view of man, or more precisely perhaps, of the special status of

literate man and of his capacity for self-definition, free will, and infinite
creativity—not to mention the Marxist critique, which, in its Sartrean variant
especially, demands that one choose sides in the class struggle. Levi-Strauss

remarks coolly that it is Sartre who is being inconsistent, for if he believes in
economic determinism, there should be no free choice anywhere; and if he
believes in the purity of history, why should he subscribe to one particular
mythic version of history—that of Marx? His own viewpoint, he argues, is

much less ethnocentric than Sartre’s, since he recognizes the dignity and
individuality of non-Western men, whereas Sartre seems to be saying that he

knows what is best for them.14
A corollary of Sartre’s position, and one often propounded during the
May events, presents structuralism as a reactionary force which does not
recognize the possibility of or need for change and therefore supports the
status quo. To such charges Levi-Strauss, who signed the intellectuals’
manifestos of protest during the Algerian conflict, responds with some anger.
He denies that structuralism has any political relevance whatsoever; it is

simply a scientific: procedure for studying behavior and can be applied
indifferently by Maoists, liberal democrats, or royalists to studies of
communism, fascism, or anarchism. He also alleges that existentialism is itself
counterrevolutionary, since it is a misguided and anachronistic attempt to
preserve philosophy as a humanistic reserve, man as a hallowed vessel.
One can agree with Levi-Strauss that structuralism need not necessarily
imply a single world-view, and recognize that men who call themselves
structuralists have widely different political views, while still allowing that
there may be a connection between ideology and politics, and questioning
whether Levi-Strauss himself is completely free of ethnocentrism or
“humanistic” feelings. In the first place, ideas seem never to have developed in
total isolation from the extant forces in a social system; sociologists of

knowledge have little difficulty linking the intellectual and cultural scene in
the early part of the twentieth century with the reaction against a behaviorist
hegemony and the development of the structuralist perspective. With
hindsight, indeed, these parallels become obvious: the desire to avoid

favoring one society over another, curiosity about cross-cultural
comparisons, respect for mathematical formulae and models, suspicion of
overly simplified, atomistic, reflexive, and environmentalist positions, interest

in the properties of mind for their relevance to the education of children and
the development of superior technology. Individuals do, moreover, embrace
philosophical positions for personal and temperamental reasons,
philosophical assumptions do influence personality, and it is easy to see how

the views of Piaget and Levi-Strauss fit in—indeed, merge—with their
personalities: Piaget, the serious ascetic observer of man and animals, deeply
interested in the source of his own precocity, somewhat uncomfortable with
disrupting affective factors, desirous of a grand synthesis of all the

multifarious areas which he has been able to master, living in a country where
the mind can afford to explore freely since it is less susceptible to political or
social turmoil; Levi-Strauss, the romantic adventurer turned cool savant,

disaffected from the superficialities and games of his own society, cultivator
of sensory experiences and qualities, pursuing the essence of man as he finds
and knows him, a sometimes irrational but ever comprehensible creature
who receives his deepest confirmation from spiritual flights into poetry,
music, nature, and art. Certainly structuralism is a theory and a method of its
time, and its magnificent creators are themselves unable to step completely
outside the period, although both—in this, too, consistent with their
personalities and ideologies—have been extraordinarily successful in freeing
themselves of parochial biases.
As Piaget’s work is less directly connected with issues of social structure
and change, he has avoided conflicts with sociologists and political theorists,
but has become instead the whipping boy of meliorists in the educational
realm.15 Piaget has concluded from his work with children that development
has an optimal rate, which is peculiar to each individual and is tampered with
only at its peril. He is opposed to attempts to “speed up” development and has
a somewhat fatalistic attitude about the possibilities of radically altering
intellectual level through quick “enrichment” programs. Consequently, those
eager to improve the lot of “disadvantaged” groups through “head starts” or

"leaps” consider Piaget an ominous figure (much as feminists attack Freud
and Erikson) , seeing the drift of his approach as an insistence that things are
the way they have to be. Actually, however, Piaget’s position is more subtle
than some of these opponents imagine, for he does allow substantial variation
in developmental rates depending upon the amount and kind of organism—
environment interaction. Identical twins raised, respectively, in Newton,
Massachusetts, and on the hills outside of Rio. will proceed at markedly
divergent rates and reach different intellectual levels because of their

dissimilar stimulation and environments. Piaget is not at all opposed to
enrichment of the total environment—indeed, he recommends just that in his
essays on teaching, which together could form a bible for proponents of the
open classroom. What he inveighs against are attempts to teach a particular
task more rapidly or to give undue emphasis to one skein of intellectual
development, such as painting skill or language learning, rather than on the
mental structures of the child as a whole. Since development involves
structured wholes, which integrate diverse components, speeding up the
development of one or two components will only interfere with the process of
equilibration, not result in more rapid growth. Furthermore, as Piaget has
often remarked, cats reach the fourth stage of object permanence much more
quickly than do human infants; they also remain at that stage for the rest of
their lives.16
Piaget and Levi-Strauss, then, both appear to believe that organisms
(and societies) have an “inner wisdom,” an intrinsic rhythm or equilibrium
which is best left undisturbed; this point of view, to some extent reflecting
residence in older and more established societies, is difficult for those who
live in unstable, rapidly changing milieux to comprehend. Inasmuch as change

is slower and more difficult to bring about in the former societies, those who
criticize the structuralists for pessimism and rigidity are wrong as far as
Switzerland is concerned, but more relevant in societies in which the rate of
change has been accelerated. And, as Piaget himself is fond of pointing out to
students who would identify his structuralism with a distinct political
position, he has devoted his intellectual career to opposing, with equal fervor,
American behaviorism and Soviet reflexology, the highly similar

psychological approaches of two countries who have been at ideological odds
for a quarter of a century.17
Even if Piaget and Levi-Strauss have faint tendencies toward a static
view of society, they most certainly have an active view of scientific progress.
Roth men follow new research in the social and natural sciences with keen,
almost fanatic interest and continually attempt to relate their own work to
biological and mathematical findings, applying techniques from these
disciplines to their anthropological and psychological discoveries. While they

have often made judicious use of such discoveries, both have a certain
tendency to accept uncritically findings from “harder disciplines.” Thus, the

writings of Piaget and
Levi-Strauss are occasionally top-heavy with references to (and the
jargon of) information theory, topology, algebra, modern logic, such recent
postulates in physics as indeterminacy and complementarity principles, such
contemporary interests of biologists as the genetic code and the chemistry of
the nervous system. Naturally one cannot expect social scientists, even such
brilliant generalists as Piaget and Levi-Strauss, to have mastered the
subtleties of all fields of knowledge; yet the impossibility of being a

Renaissance bricoleur gives them no license to treat tentative findings from
other fields as if they were established facts, or to take a term with precise
technical meaning and give it a broad metaphorical application in another
domain. It appears fair to say that both leading structuralists are a bit too
infatuated with seemingly “hard-nosed” methods and results, and that their
presentations would sometimes benefit from a simple, unadorned description
of their findings, bereft of references to recondite mathematical structures or

spectacular biological discoveries.
One criticism of Piaget and Levi-Strauss which has not yet been much
voiced, but which will probably surface in coming years, concerns the great
emphasis both men place on the primacy of intellect.18 While this emphasis is
quite understandable—considering the Cartesian tradition to which they
belong, the general interest in intellect characteristic of this century, the
inevitable reaction against the affect-laden approaches of Pierre Janet,

Malinowski, and Freud, as well as the economic determinism of Marx —the
recent focus upon reason, or upon a rational approach to the emotional and
intuitive life, may be on the wane. Signs of a freshly risen counterculture, or
new “consciousness,” are becoming more frequent; one encounters evidence

that many young adults and students are rebelling against the overly
intellectualistic and academic interests of their elders, retreating in some
cases into a life of sensibility where experience is cultivated for its own sake,
and analysis is decried as unnecessary, disconcerting, or downright

pernicious. To the extent that this trend accelerates, one may anticipate
dislike of the Piaget-Levi-Strauss approach on two planes: those who totally
reject the analytic approach will consider these writers as irrelevant as all
other theoreticians; those who are still wedded to analysis, but want to
understand the contemporary scene, will turn to social scientists more
attuned to the affective aspects of life and experience—to men like the
psychoanalyst Erik Erikson and the existentialist Rollo May, who focus on the
identities and anxieties of contemporary youth; or to such anthropologists as
Erving Coffman and Harold Garfinkel, who study the casual behavioral
patterns and everyday rituals of communities ranging from establishment
corporations to hippie communes.
2. APPLICATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
A phenomenon somewhere between an antistructuralist revolt and the

intellectual vogue for structuralism perhaps heralds an imminent trend away
from structuralism. I refer to the adoption of structuralism by the mass media
in France during the middle sixties. “We are all structuralists,” the intellectual
and popular magazines declared as they gave two-sentence wrap-ups of the
movement and then attempted to apply structural analysis to all available
phenomena: James Bond movies, 180 comics in a French daily, meals at le
drugstore, informal encounters at the Eiffel Tower. The absurdity of the
situation is well illustrated in Sanche de Gramont’s quip about a structural

analysis of the French flag: “It will show that it is made of three vertical fields
of color of identical width which follow one another, according to their
normalization function, in the sequence red, white, and blue.” Levi-Strauss,

horrified by this trend of “structuralism-fiction,” has declared bluntly:
In the sense in which it is understood today by French opinion, I am not a

structuralist. I am very much afraid that in France there is a total lack of
self-criticism, an excessive sensibility to fashion, and a deep intellectual
instability. The best way to explain the current infatuation with
structuralism is that French intellectuals and the cultured French public
need new playthings every ten or fifteen years.19
While such excesses are amusing where they are not scandalous, they
should not obscure the fact that humanists and social scientists working
outside their respective specialties have put structuralist principles to
interesting use. The most notable studies have been in the literary realm,20
where Roman Jakobson has undertaken studies of folk tales, poems, and the
principles of poetry, Harold Ehrmann has explained structures in Corneille’s

play Cinna, and Levi-Strauss and Jakobson have collaborated on a detailed
analysis of Baudelaire’s Les Chats. These efforts have sought to account in an

exhaustive way for the plan of the artistic work, the balances and undulations

between motifs, sounds, rhythms, and ideas, and the varying treatments of
crucial elements, the directionality and final synthesis in the work. The
strength of the best analyses, including those of Levi-Strauss, is that they
resist summary: indeed, those structural analyses of works of art which are
most suspect are those in which the conclusions are listed in a line or two or
in a simple formula or chart. Such précis are only relevant at so general a level
that they do not differentiate between particulars and thus leave no room for
making judgments and evaluations of individual works.
The foremost practitioner of structuralism in the literary realm is
Roland Barthes, a widely respected French critic, who has formulated a
theory of structural analysis in literature and has applied his techniques to a
variety of literary documents, among them the works of Racine and the
histories of Michelet and Machiavelli. Barthes has sought the application of
structural methods to realms outside of literature, and his effort is worth
describing here, provided that its playful and provisional character is

acknowledged.
Barthes begins by introducing two aspects of any linguistic-structural
analysis: the system (the parts of speech; the paradigmatic elements) and the
syntagm (the arrangement of these elements in a syntactic sequence). He then
suggests that the realms of clothing, food, furniture, and architecture can be
thought of as analogous to linguistic code:21
1) Components of the system of clothing are the sets of pieces
designed to be worn on the same part of the body, whose
variation changes the meaning of the clothing—a winter hat,
a bonnet, a racing cap. The syntagm of the clothing is the
juxtaposition at the same moment of different parts of the
system—e.g., a skirt, a blouse, and a jacket.
2) The parts of the food system are sets of foodstuffs from which one
chooses a dish: i.e., for an entree one may have roast or fowl;
the syntagm is the actual sequence of dishes during a meal,
or the menu. (Both syntagm and system are highlighted in a
restaurant, whereas only the syntagm figures in the typical
home meal.)
3) The parts of the furniture system are the stylistic varieties of a

single piece of furniture (for example, kinds of beds) ; the
syntagm is the juxtaposition of different pieces of furniture
in the same area—as a set consisting of a bed, table, chair,
and lamp.
4) The parts of the architectural system are the possible variations in

style of a single element in a building: the types of roof,
balcony, wall; the syntagm is the sequence and arrangement
of these parts within an edifice.
While this exercise is only tentative, it might well lead to productive

findings. For example, Levi-Strauss has found remarkable regularities in the
components of different kinds of meals and the function of elements in
each,22 while Alfred Kroeber has demonstrated repetitive cycles in the

changes in fashion over the years. Neither of these analyses was dependent
upon Barthes’ scheme, but to the extent that such a framework facilitates
discernment of the elements and their arrangement or the parallels across
furniture, architecture, food, and clothing, it will have proved a useful adjunct
to cultural analysis.
Barthes is also a contributor to structuralist theory and has made the
interesting proposal that the sciences as well as the humanities are wedded to
the language employed by practitioners. Typically, the writer of novels or
poems is viewed as using language in a special way, with each word
contributing to the overall effect, whereas the scientist has freedom to use
any number of equivalent languages to make his point. Barthes, however,
views language as a system which can be put to a variety of uses, and claims
that none has a logical or practical claim over the others. Thus, the choice of
scientific “jargon,” with its tables, equations, and logical propositions, is a
determination as loaded, consequential, and irreversible as the decision to
write in iambic pentameter. Such a critique has implications for structural
analyses of the Piagetian variety, for it suggests that in reducing thought to

the logical calculus, Piaget is making strong assumptions about the generality
of this “language.” At the very least, Barthes challenges the easy assumption
made by many scientists that the language they use is irrelevant: he reminds
us that each code has its own powers, limitations, and implications.23
Certain schools of literature and art have also been viewed as notably
attuned to structuralist principles. For example, Samuel Beckett has been
touted as a structuralist writer because his characters unfold as victims of a
preordained fate which they can neither control nor know— "I am made of
the words, the words of others,” says a character in one of his plays, which
would seem to reflect the structuralist credo that codes within the culture
make a central, perhaps determining, contribution to knowledge and self-

definition. In postulating such affinities between structuralism and art, it is
important to note whether the artist is actually employing structuralist
techniques or is merely expressing some ideas common in structuralist
writing.24 While concern with the unconscious models which underlie

mundane experience does not seem a prominent part of the present art scene,
emphasis on the potency and immutability of forces outside oneself does
seem a recurrent theme in much contemporary art.
Still, some of the more explicitly formulated procedures for modern

musical composition—notably, twelve-tone composition—do appear to have
strong affinities with structural techniques. The composer introduces a tone
row (the basic constituent units) and then imposes various transformations
which can be defined formally, applied exhaustively, and ordered in various
sequences. This technique is quintessential])' structural and confirms Levi-

Strauss’s belief in the strong links that exist between music and other
structural codes. Of course, in the case of both the artwork and the cultural

code, the structuralist principles involved need not be explicitly appreciated
by the perceiver; at best, there is some match between his cognitive
structures and the structure of the work, which it is peculiarly the analyst’s
task to elucidate. And Levi-Strauss cautions that a structure explicitly placed

into a work by an artist does not have the same status as one which is a
product of the unconscious processes of the mind.
Though both Levi-Strauss and Piaget are aware of all such recent
applications of structuralism, and may well constantly ponder the
implications of the movement they have launched, their public statements

deal only with the scholarly goals they have perennially pursued. Where
various commentators have speculated on the possibility of new cognitive
structures, Piaget and Levi-Strauss stress the weight of evidence indicating

that man’s cognitive capacities are, at least in the short run, relatively fixed.
As committed rationalists, descendants of Descartes and the Enlightenment,
both men judiciously evaluate the evidence which bears on their positions
and have little sympathy for those whose analytic interpretations are guided
by their personal wishes and aspirations. No doubt they have their own
scenarios for the future salvation or damnation of man; but they resist
commenting on them publicly. Their dominant fears, if any, may well revolve
about the possibility of a reaction to the current emphasis on mind, m which
spokesmen for knowledge and moderation will be swept aside in favor of
leaders who will exploit the more affective and emotional aspects of their
fellow men.
While the political implications of structuralism would seem much less

potent than either its most vocal critics or most fervent supporters would
have us believe, it seems likely that, like other influential social-scientific
theories, structuralism will eventually have an impact on the social and

cultural aspects of the society. Recognizing the risk involved in such
prognostication, I will here speculate on a few possible consequences of the
absorption of structuralism into contemporary civilization.
Applications of structuralism within the scholarly community are
perhaps easier to anticipate, because some have already emerged and
because structuralism, by its nature, is a rather cerebral school. Study of the

relations between various disciplines should receive a strong impetus from
structuralism, given its doctrine that there are certain basic mental
configurations which can be discerned across a range of diverse content.
Indeed, the isolation of disciplines from one another is already under attack,
and the acceptance of structuralism will probably hasten the demise of this
practice. Efforts to find substantive relationships among diverse fields, such
as those dealing with the organism as a biological entity, the world as a

physical object, and man as a logical and aesthetic creature, will likely be
fostered as well.

The structural and developmental approaches are already having an
impact on the education of young children. New approaches encourage the
presentation of material at the child’s particular developmental level (or
slightly above it) rather than in one invariable form, and call for recognition
of the child’s tendencies to structure and comprehend material in
characteristic ways. Teaching of particular content areas and “school
subjects” is also being replaced by attempts to convey the common

framework underlying diverse fields and examples.
The advent of this new methodology will also influence the course of
future research. Biologists and physiologists may attempt to locate the
structures (or their analogies) which Levi-Strauss and Piaget believe to exist
in the nervous system. New mathematical and logical conceptions which
more faithfully reflect the true range of human capacities, rather than
idealization of those capacities, should be forthcoming. Translation between

languages, both ordinary and formal, may proceed along novel lines, as
linguists and computer engineers attempt translations on the level of

cognitive structures rather than word-for-word or phrase-for-phrase.
Some less profound, and less palatable, applications can probably be
expected. Once it becomes widely believed that the basic structures of
thought have been discovered, those involved in influencing public attitudes

will likely attempt to exploit these fundamental intellectual proclivities.
Similarly, the documentation of different intellectual levels may be used by
some as an excuse for denigrating those individuals or groups which appear
moored at a less-developed level.
Yet, on balance, I would expect the influence of structuralism to be a
liberating and unifying one. Once the point is conveyed that the diverse
content of various cultures masks underlying similarities, apparent

differences between peoples and groups may seem less vast. Structuralist
pronouncements concerning the nature of thought will be widely
disseminated and may provide individuals with better insights about their
own thought processes and those of other persons. The study of methods of
structural analysis will also contribute to a generally fuller understanding of
phenomena—provided a tendency to debunk, through “laying bare” the

essentials, is resisted.
One final point, even more speculative, merits mention. It is possible
that individuals, once they have assimilated the structuralist analysis of the
limitations of thought, will be content to “rest on their laurels” or to turn to
nonintellectual pursuits. On the other hand, it is just as likely that knowledge
of such “limitations,” and the very fact of being conscious of one’s own
thought processes, will ultimately spur both individuals and cultures to
undreamed-of intellectual heights—even, perhaps, lead to improvement in

the genetic pool. Paradoxically, Piaget’s own establishment of the limits of

thought could be contravened by the creative tendency in human evolution
which he has been among the first to consider.
3. STRUCTURALISM AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
In speculating about future changes in man and in his mind, we reach
beyond the bounds of structuralism’s current achievement and look to its

future. We must be careful here, I believe, not to confuse two independent
trends. As an intellectual vogue, structuralism seems clearly on the decline in
French-speaking countries, and probably will experience shortly the same

fate in Anglo-Saxon lands. As a new force in the social sciences, however,
structuralism—despite the various promising indications discussed in the
preceding section—has yet to achieve its full impact. While many younger
scholars are “in tune” with its principles and implications, most scholars and
teachers of an earlier generation either actively oppose the movement, ignore
it, or at the very least are strongly ambivalent about it. The social sciences
have yet to embrace structuralism wholeheartedly. Yet my own feeling is that,
whatever its fate as a popular fad, whatever its implications for the larger
society, structuralism will not be ignored or rejected by the psychological and
anthropological sciences. Rather, it will become part of the conventional
wisdom in these fields, and, indeed, will be gradually assimilated into the
theoretical foundations of the overall scientific enterprise.
Certainly this is Piaget's belief. Since the founding of his Center for
Genetic Epistemology,25 he has collaborated in increasing measure with

individuals from various sciences, and in particular with logicians,
mathematicians, biologists and physicists, in an effort to determine the kind
of mental structures utilized in work in each of these fields. “Genetic
epistemology” has a dual meaning, since it refers not only to the origin of
scientific thought in the young child but also to its evolution over the course
of history. Exploring this uncharted domain, Piaget has made the intriguing
discovery that in some respects the evolution of scientific thought has
followed the evolution of thought in the child:26 thus in physics, belief in

animistic or artificialist explanations of how the world works preceded the
positing of invisible elements of matter which interact with one another
because of physical forces. On the other hand, cultural history does not
always recapitulate individual psychology; in the case of geometrical thinking,
for example, the young child begins with a topological view of spatial
ordering, next moves on to a projective view, and only at adolescence

comprehends Euclidean space. Historically, however, the Greeks constructed
Euclidean geometry, projective geometry was a product of the nineteenth
century, while topological geometry is only a development of recent decades.
Through the concept of genetic epistemology, Piaget hopes to be able to
unite the various sciences with one another in an integrated whole. He

envisages this union in terms of a circle, with logic and mathematics at one

point, on its circumference, chemistry, physics, and biology next, sociology
situated opposite to logic, with linguistics, psychology, and economy
completing the circle; epistemology occupies the center of the circle. Piaget
stresses the important role played by psychology in the circle of sciences:
I cannot prevent myself from feeling a little proud of the master position
held by psychology in the system of sciences. On the one hand, psychology
depends on all the sciences . . . but the apprehension of reality is only
possible through activities of the organism with respect to the object in
question, and psychology alone permits the study of these activities and
their development.27
In his recent writings he has addressed an increasingly interdisciplinary
audience, elaborating his vision of a unified though differentiated science

built upon the doctrines of structuralism. To the humanistic strain in
philosophy which embraces wisdom (which is not subject to disproof) he
opposes the scientific tradition (which employs experimental controls) ; he
also twits those who claim membership in the structuralist movement

without adhering to its principles as set forth by Piaget.
Yet, if there is a discipline to which Piaget feels closest, it is biology.
After more than forty years of benign truancy, Piaget returned to his first love
and wrote a theoretical essay which he appears to regard as his most
important general work—Biology and Knowledge.28 In this book Piaget tries

to establish the biological nature of all knowledge and action, ranging from
the primitive conditioning possible in a flatworm to the rarefied stage of
formal operations of which only adolescent and adult human beings of the
modern age are capable. All forms of knowledge, he argues, are illustration of
the same functional mechanisms: assimilation, accommodation, and
equilibration; it is the species membership which determines the extent to
which knowledge can unfold in each organism. Piaget’s goal is to demonstrate
that the principles which govern biological evolution and embryological
development are also operative in the functioning of man’s most precious
possession—his cognitive capacities.
As befits a fledgling elder statesman, Levi-Strauss has similarly paid
much attention in recent years to the relationship between ethnography and

other forms of science. He has gone back to those scientists and philosophers
of a synoptic bent—to Rousseau, Vico, Bergson—and has also made forays of
his own into philosophy, literary criticism, and musical analysis. Though he
may identify more with humanistic studies, while Piaget feels closer to the
natural sciences, it appears that he, too, feels a special tie to the methods and
findings of biology.
On February 19, 1968, at 10:30 in the evening, viewers of the First

Program in France were treated to a rare spectacle:29 Claude Levi-Strauss
and Roman Jakobson engaged in a discussion with two biologists, Francois
Jacob and Philippe L’Heritier, on the subject of “Living and Speaking.” These
men had assembled because of their common belief that the biological

sciences and the communications sciences were moving closer together.
Perhaps the most intriguing suggestion to emerge from the lengthy colloquy
was Jakobson’s speculation that the rules governing the use of DNA reflect, in
a deep sense, the same rules which govern language use.30 Genetic
information is inscribed in chromosomes through innumerable variations of
four units or elements which are in themselves meaningless (adenine,

guanine, purine, and pyrimidine) . All the information needed about the
development and functioning of life processes is simply “read off” from the
chromosomes, where the relevant message has been inscribed in the genetic
code. Just as in language, meaning inheres in the arrangement of meaningless
elements; there is organization at each level of the organism: languages as
well as organisms are subject to definable evolutionary principles—in
Jakobson’s words, “the same architecture, the same principles of construction,

a totally hierarchical principle." The code is an alphabet with discrete words,
and even markers for the beginning and ending of "utterances.” It is perhaps
inevitable that language, itself a product of natural evolution, should embody

this same principle of genetic construction.
The biologists did not uncritically embrace Jakobson’s analogy, pointing

out, for example, that language permits the inheritance of acquired
characteristics—i.e., the passing on of new knowledge to subsequent
generations—whereas in genetics, for all but a few biologists (such as Piaget)
, such an idea remains total anathema. Jakobson conceded differences
between biology and language, indicating that the realm of biology includes
noncommunicative aspects. Yet the recurrent theme was one developed by
Levi-Strauss: that the notion of communication can be extended not only
throughout the social sciences (communication of words, messages, and

economic goods) but also throughout the biological realm. Language serves
both as the instrument and as the model for other forms of cultural
communication, and as an example and model for biological communication.

In both realms, one encounters programs of action, goals, and meaning—the
latter being viewed as a structural homologue between two codes. Levi-
Strauss concluded the discussion by noting that, in the biological sciences,
you can have a structure resembling language which implies neither
consciousness nor a subject. This gives hope for a unification of science,
without the unpalatable prospect of dependence on the vagaries of

phenomena] experience; though one’s subjective impressions may sometimes
be necessary as a point of departure in scientific investigation, they must

ultimately be supplanted by an objective and explanatory analysis.
While Piaget finds his central link among the sciences in the logical
capacities manifested in concrete and formal operations, Levi-Strauss looks to
the mechanisms of language for a common core. Though this adoption of a

different model may appear to weaken the chance for a meaningful synthesis,
recent work in linguistics indicates that the gap between logic and language
may be illusory. In the years following the revolutions inspired by Saussure

and Jakobson, a second revolution of equal breadth and significance has come
about, owing to the work of Noam Chomsky.31 Chomsky, a linguist at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has put forth a novel

conceptualization of the nature of language, detailed models of the
grammatical and phonological systems, and principled reasons for rejecting
earlier formulations about the comprehension and production of speech.
Although a detailed account of Chomsky’s linguistics is not possible
here, the implications of his theories for studies of the mind should be
discussed at least briefly, particularly in view of Chomsky’s increasing
preoccupation with the relationship between language and mind. Taking a
lead from Descartes and his followers, Chomsky has argued that linguistic
capacity is a distinctively human function,32 which reflects the natural logic
or rationality of the mind, a creative capacity immanent in the brain and not
dependent in any significant way on experience of the environment. Chomsky
is very sympathetic to the notion of innate ideas, the Cartesian and Leibnizian
belief that man comes equipped with specifically delineated hypotheses about
what the world and the environment will be like. In the case of language, for
instance, the human brain is thought to possess a series of universal rules that
characterize all languages: the child’s task in learning language is not to

imitate those he hears about him but rather to eliminate from his set of rules
and hypotheses those language systems which do not correspond to the

one(s) he hears; with relatively little effort he will be able to speak accurately
and creatively, producing novel utterances in whichever languages are
spoken in his presence. The most powerful evidence supporting Chomsky’s
controversial position is the incredible speed with which normal children can
pick up one or more languages, at ;in age when other cognitive capacities are
still quite immature; and the fact, as well, that children sometimes make
syntactical distinctions which are not found in their own language, but appear
in alien languages which they could not possibly have heard. Chomsky thinks
these phenomena can only occur in an organism possessing such extensive
inborn structures in his head that the learning of language becomes as
unproblematic as a duck’s following his mother or a squirrel’s burial of nuts.
Needless to say, such boldly stated claims have aroused virulent
opposition among many psychologists and linguists, who have customarily

viewed language learning as a painstaking process involving the combination
of simple units—basic sounds and words—and reflecting the reinforcing and
nonreinforcing properties of the environment. Chomsky has been even more

disdainful concerning the behaviorist position than his fellow structuralists,
claiming that it is either intolerably vague—what is a stimulus? a response? a
reinforcer?—or simply wrong—no theory of imitation can account for the
systematic mistakes made by a child in language learning: “little mouses”; “I

goes downtown”; “Where the cup is?” He, in turn, has been challenged to give
evidence for the existence of “linguistic universals” and for the close
relationship he describes between language and logic. Chomsky has in fact

proposed certain linguistic universals, both formal and substantive, but proof
of these would be extremely difficult, for any new language discovered
without these properties would vitiate the claim. As for the imputed link
between logic and language, on which a synthesis between the views of Piaget
and Levi-Strauss may depend, Chomsky has suggested some general guiding
principles, and put forth interesting interpretations of a few psychological
experiments. No real demonstration of this hypothesis, however, is in the

immediate offing.
Many individuals, including the three concerned, have sensed affinities

between the programs of Levi-Strauss, Piaget, and Chomsky. Each of these
scholars focuses particularly on Man, seeing him as a constructive organism,
with generative capacities, who nonetheless is preordained to follow certain

paths in his intellectual development and achievement because of the
structure of his own brain and the regulating forces in the human
environment. To be sure, there are significant divergences. Piaget and Levi-

Strauss differ, as we have already seen, in their assessment of the relative
roles of action and perception, in their respective emphases on structure and
development, in their formulations regarding language and logic. (Some links,
as in Jakobson’s analysis of language development and my own modal

hypotheses, have already been proposed.) Chomsky assumes an intermediate
position in that, like Levi-Strauss, he emphasizes the determining role of
language, and the possibility of innate knowledge of codes, while in his
interest in basic mechanisms of reason, belief in the generativity of behavior
and thought, and search for formal models of unconscious processes, he is
more reminiscent of Piaget.
Piaget criticizes Chomsky for his belief in innate ideas and his spurning
of the developmental perspective, though he allows that a purely linguistic

analysis might proceed agenetically. Levi-Strauss is comfortable with
Chomsky’s transformational approach to linguistic analysis, which is
anticipated in his own writings, but has little patience with the latter’s
implicit picture of man as a creature of infinite capacity for original thought.

For his part, Chomsky, while conceding the impressive efforts of Piaget and
Levi-Strauss to pin down mental structures, apparently has reservations
about the modes of proof they adopt. More committed to operational

definition, to the logical specification of each step in an argument, he is
uneasy with the absence of crucial tests for many of the two older men’s
conclusions. These various disagreements are in a sense intramural, however;

the doubts Chomsky raises about Piaget and Levi-Strauss are reminiscent of
the ones which more traditionally oriented scholars have introduced against
Chomsky’s own work. Except within the camp of the structuralists, Chomsky,
Levi-Strauss, and Piaget may be regarded as engaged in similar activities and

in fundamental agreement on central issues. Indeed, Chomsky’s assertions
that language reflects the unique logic of the human mind and that ordinary
language use is permeated by creativeness may portend the imminence of a

meaningful synthesis of the major structural approaches to cognition.33
Any forthcoming, let alone any final, synthesis concerning Mind will
naturally draw upon a range of theories and findings, including some from
individuals who have never heard of structuralism or who have only disdain
for it.34 To mention but a few current investigations which seem particularly
promising: the attempts of ethologists and of psychoanalysts to comprehend
the instinctual and affective aspects of human nature; models of cognition
devised by those working in computer simulation; findings concerning animal
learning, particularly the recent attempts to teach chimpanzees to employ a
variant of human language, using either sign language or reading; studies of
symbol use or problem-solving in men or animals who have suffered various
kinds of brain damage. The latter group of investigations are of potentially

great interest for structuralists, who, while committed for the most part to a
“dry” method, express belief in the existence of structures and structural
mechanisms inside the human brain and nervous system. To be sure, failure
to gain direct physiological or neurological support for structuralists’ claims

should by no means be taken as evidence that their formulations are wrong.
Psychology, anthropology, and linguistics operate on a plane apart from the

biochemical and neurological sciences, and it may be that functions
discovered by structuralists are so linked to the interaction of neural
mechanisms that any attempt at localization is doomed to fail. All the same,
the structuralist case would be enormously bolstered if direct brain
correlates for the perception of distinctive features, the principles of
operational thought, or the knowledge of linguistic rules could be
demonstrated. Indications that linguistic, logical, and intermodal capacities
apparently break down along specifiable lines among brain-damaged

individuals is an encouraging sign for those who would look to the brain for
evidence about mind. Similarly, recent discoveries of receptors which
respond to particularistic aspects of sensory stimulation provide support for

the theory of distinctive features, even as findings about the breakdown of
logical reasoning and spatial perception in various forms of brain damage
suggest that logical operations are more than the figment of a structuralist’s
imagination. Not surprisingly, each of the major structuralist thinkers has
found support for his general position in these recent epochal investigations
in the natural sciences.
Before some genius (or madman) ultimately succeeds in fitting together
all the pieces of the puzzle, new positions and findings will emerge and many
tenets will be eliminated as misleading, unproductive, or simply wrong. It is
my own view, one I have tried to argue in this book, that the contributions of
the structuralists, in particular Piaget’s reorientation to psychology and Levi-
Strauss’s revolution in social anthropology, will be prominent in such a

synthesis. Progress in the sciences involves a Dionysian as well as an
Apollonian phase. Controversy and uncertainty are as necessary as calmness
and consensus to the evolution of thought. There must be individuals who

will generate new hypotheses, shake up a complacent or misguided scholarly
enterprise, redirect future studies: there must be others, always a numerical
majority, who will patiently and critically evaluate the evidence for the
Dionysian hypotheses, retaining those which can be supported, reformulating

or discarding those which are disproved or impossible to examine in a
systematic manner. Clearly, Piaget and Levi-Strauss—and Jakobson and
Chomsky as well—are closer to the Dionysian pole of science, and this may be
one reason why they are more interesting, exciting, and controversial than
many other equally gifted scientists, who work on more narrow or
established problems, shun rhetoric and disputes, are devoted to careful data
collection and rigorous analysis of each assumption: such Apollonian spirits
are prone to disregard an interesting idea because it lacks support rather
than to toss it into the water and see whether it will swim.
In view of the revolutionary zeal of the leading structuralists, it is ironic
that, as noted earlier, the message of the school has been viewed as
reactionary by certain critics and students. That the identification between
structuralism and conservatism is at least a doubtful one, is demonstrated by
the political militancy of the youngest of the leading structuralists, Chomsky,
as well as the positions taken in the past by other individuals identified with
the structuralist movement. My own view is that structuralism as the central
intellectual force in France may well have seen its day, not because of its
weaknesses, but because no school—be it psychoanalysis, existentialism, or
structuralism—is likely to hold the public’s interest indefinitely. Certainly
there are areas which the structuralists have neglected—for example,
affective development or the dynamics of apocalyptic change; but these
omissions have indirectly reflected the particular interests of the principal

structuralists, rather than constituting an endemic defect of the method. I feel
that the imbalances discerned by certain critics can be compensated for in
future work, while the critiques of those opposed to any sort of dispassionate
or objective analysis cannot be answered in any case.
Even if conservative from some viewpoints, the structuralist school has,

within the academic community, been strong on Dionysian spirits and
Dionysian spirit; for this reason, it has created much controversy and
excitement. When the smoke of battle has cleared, it will be necessary to

examine it from a more Apollonian perspective and assess whether its
performance is as impressive as its promise. Levi-Strauss has remarked that
“the human sciences will be structural or they will not be.” I believe that this
statement is correct, though perhaps not in the precise sense Levi-Strauss
intended. The contributions of structuralism are genuine and will be
absorbed into the continually expanding scientific canon. In particular, the
recognition that underlying surface phenomena are structures and types of

organization which can explain relationships among disparate forms; the
complementary nature of the developmental and structural approaches; the
search for an explanation of behavior and institutions which is consistent

with biological organization, capable of expression in logical form, and
oriented toward crucial questions in the social sciences; the creation of
methods which facilitate the discovery of structure and which can be
practiced by trained investigators, are all contributions which should have a

secure and important place in the social sciences of the future. Yet to be
determined is which of the analytic units proposed by the various
structuralist investigators will prove the most useful and powerful tool for
subsequent analysis and synthesis.
Structuralism as a distinct and controversial school may well disappear,

of course, as succeeding generations come to assimilate its basic tenets. For in
my view, structuralism is simply the most imaginative and suggestive current
statement of the professional code of any thoughtful and synthetically

oriented scientist: finding the relationships between disparate phenomena,
formulating them in a communicable and testable way, discovering the
overall organization between parts and wholes, moving from mastery of a

particular area of inquiry toward interdisciplinary syntheses which converge
upon the same underlying principles. The crucial contributions of Piaget and
Levi-Strauss have lain in prodding the social sciences toward an acceptance of
methods currently used in the “harder” sciences, and an application of

recently developed logical and mathematical structures to analyses of
thought and behavior. If this claim—that structuralism is simply an updated
version of the scientific credo—stuns both structuralists and
antistructuralists alike, it may be because scientific progress is in part
dependent upon the bold overstatement of positions; as differences have
been magnified in the controversy surrounding structuralism, it has become
difficult to discern its continuities with past (and future) efforts in the human
sciences. Dionysus apart, it is my feeling that new positions and revolutionary
paradigms have characteristically seemed “structuralist” to the old guard and
that they gradually become accepted in part and superseded in part as a

generation reared upon them begins to articulate its own ideas.
Notes
1The epigraph is taken from S. de Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies,” in C L-S, p.17.
2 Among accounts of the student uprising in France are R. Aron, The Elusive Revolution (New York:
Praeger, 1969); A. Touraine, The May Movement: Reform and Revolution (New York:
Random House, 1971); Epistemon,Ces idees qui ont ebranle la France(Paris, Fayard,
1968).
3 Lacan and Foucault are not well known in this country, but have enthusiastic followings in France.
Lacan, a maverick psychoanalyst whose oral presentations are as magnetic as were
Wittgenstein’s,has one major work in translation, The Language of the Self (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968).Foucault, a historian or “archaeologist” of the social
sciences, is best known for his works Madness and Civilization(New York: Pantheon,
1965) and The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970). He rejects the label
"structuralist,”but has nonetheless been labeled in this way by most commentators.
4 Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s interpretation of the events which he helped precipitate can be found in the
book Obsolete Communism (with Cohn-Bendit) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969).
5 This negative evaluation is found in an anonymous account of the events of May:Epistemon, Ces idees
qui ont ebranle la France (Paris: Fayard, 1968).

6 For symposia on the work of Piaget, see R. Ripple and V. Rockcastle (eds.), Piaget Rediscovered
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964); W. Kessen and C. Kuhlmann (eds.), "Thought in
the Young Child,” Monograph Soc. Res. Ch. Develp., Vol. 27 (1962).
7 Bruner’s criticisms of Piaget are voiced in his book Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York: Wiley,
1966). Bever and Mehler’s research was reported in "The Study of Competence in
Cognitive Psychology,” International Journal of Psychology, Vol. Ill (1968), 273-80.
8 The discussion of scientific movements in terms of new paradigms is based on the work of the
historian of science T. Kuhn. See his Structure of Scientific Revolutions(Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1962).
9 For a neo-behaviorist attempt to translate Piaget into stimuli and responses, see D. Berlynes’
thoughtful book Structure and Direction in Thinking(New York: Wiley, 1965). Discussion
of the irreconcilability of the behaviorist and Piagetian perspectives can be found in H.
Furth, Piaget and Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968).
10 Some of the more responsible critiques of Levi-Strauss’s work include D. Maybury-Lewis, “Science
or Bricolage?” in C L-S, 150-63; R. Zimmerman, “Levi-Strauss and the Primitive,” also in C
L-S, pp. 216-34; E. Leach,Levi-Strauss (London: Fontana, 1970); M. Douglas, "The
Meaning of Myth,with Special Reference to La Geste d’Asdiwal,” in E. Leach (ed.), The
Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (London: Tavistock, 1967). Those critics who
generate more heat than light are better left uncited.
11 Comprehensive introductions to ethnoscience are found in A. K. Romney and R. D. Andrade (eds.),

“Transcultural Studies in Cognition,” American Anthropologist,Vol. 66 (1964), No. 3, part
2, and in S. Tyler (ed.), Cognitive Anthropology (New York: Holt, 1969).
12 Intelligent critical analyses of structuralism are found in such collections as R. Bastide, Senset usage
du terme 'structure' dans les sciences liuinaines (The Hague:Mouton, 1962); J. Tanner and
B. Inhelder (eds.) Discussions in Child Development (New York: International Univ.Press
1956-60); P. Ricoeur, ‘‘Structure et hermeneutique,” L’Esprit, Vol. 322 (November 1963),
pp. 598-627. It is perhaps significant that the more probing critiques of structuralism
have come from Continental scholars, who seem more attuned to what Piaget, Levi-
Strauss, and their compeers are trying to do. All too often, Anglo-Saxon commentators
appear to me to have missed the point. For a similar view, see B. Scholte,"Epistemic
Paradigms: Some Problems in Cultural Research in Social Anthropological History and
Theory,” in CL-S, pp. 108-22.
13 Sartre’s book has not yet been translated into English. See Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1960).
14 Levi-Strauss’s principal response to Sartre appears in SM, Chapter 9. Also note his denial of the
political bias of structuralism in S. de Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies,” in C. L-
S, p. 19, and in G. Charbonnier (ed.), Entretiens avec Claude Levi-Strauss(Paris: Plon,
1961), p. 16.
15 Piaget’s remarks on teaching can be found in an address, to a group of educators, included in R.

Ripple and V. Rockcastle(eds.), Piaget Rediscovered (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,
1964) and in an interview in Psychology Today (May 1970), pp. 25-32.
16 On the object concept in cats, see H. Gruber et al.,“The Development of Object Permanence in the
Cat,” Developmental Psychology, Vol. 4 (1971), 9-15.
17 For Piaget’s remarks on behaviorism and reflexology,see his review of J. S. Bruner’s Studies in
Cognitive Growth, in Contemporary Psychology, Vol. 12 (1967), 532-3.
18 Signs of the revolt against intellect can be found everywhere, but it is difficult to determine whether
the present period is especially marked by this trend. Some works which would defend
this proposition are S. Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Delta,1967); T. Roszak,
The Making of a Counter-Culture(New York: Doubleday, 1968); C. Reich, The Greening of
America (New York: Random House, 1970). Social-scientific works which focus on the
affective dimensions of experience include E. Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (New
York:Norton, 1968); Rollo May, Love and Will(New York: Norton, 1969); E. Goffman, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor,1970); H.
Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967); E. Hall,
The Silent Language (Greenwich, Conn.:Fawcett, 1959).
19 De Gramont’s account of the structuralist vogue and Levi-Strauss’s petulance toward faddists
appears in "There Are No Superior Societies,’’ in C L-S, pp. 2-21. Seethe other articles in
this book for further examples of the impact of structuralism.
20 Notable efforts to apply structuralist analysis to literature include R. Jakobson and L. Jones,
Shakespeare's Verbal Art in “Th’ Expence of Spirit"; (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), H.

Ehrmann, “Structures of Exchange in Cinna," in“Structuralism,” Yale French Studies,Vol.
37, (1966), pp. 148-68; R. Barthes, Le Degre zero de iecriture (Paris: Editions Gonthier,
1964); R. Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1957); R.Jakobson and C. Levi-Strauss, “Les
Chats de Charles Baudelaire,” L’Homme, Vol. 2 (1962), 5-21.
21 Barthes' half-serious analysis of the structural properties of furniture, food, and clothing appears in
Elements of Semiology (London: Jonathan Cape. 1967); see also Leach’s summary of this
analysis in L-S, pp. 46-8.
22 Levi-Strauss’s discussion of meals and their constituents is found in the closing pages of L’Origine
des manieres de la table (Paris: Plon, 1968), and in his essay “The Culinary Triangle,”
Partisan Review, Vol. 32 (1966), 86-95.
23 Barthes' analysis of different kinds of scientific and literary languages is found in his essay “Sciences
vs. Literature,”reprinted in M. Lane (ed.), Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic
Books, 1970), pp. 410-16.
24 For Levi-Strauss’s view on the relationship between structuralism and art, see the Overture in The
Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row. 1969), pp. 1-32; G.Charbonnier (ed.),
Entretiens avec Claude Levi-Strauss (Paris: Plon-Julliard, 1961), passim: L’Homme nu,
“Finale” (Paris: Plon, 1971).
25 Piaget’s efforts in genetic epistemology have been reported in a number of essays and books, among
them Genetic Epistemology (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), and the
encyclopedia Logique et connaissance scientifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). He is also
editor and chief contributor to the series Etudes d’epistemologie genetique, of which over
two dozen volumes have already appeared.
26 The differences between geometrical thinking as it develops in the child and in the culture are
described in Inhelder and Piaget’s book The Child’s Conception of Space(New York:
Norton, 1967).
27 The recent writings on the circle of sciences include an address, “Psychology, Interdisciplinary
Relations, and the System of Sciences,” delivered at the XVIIIth International Congress of
Psychology, Moscow, 1966. The quotation comes from p. 27. The topic is discussed
further in the polemical work Sagesse et illusion de la philosophic (Paris: Presses Univ. de
France, 1965).
28 Biology and Knowledge: Biologie et connaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
29 The transcript of the television program “Vivre etparler” appeared in Les Lettres Fratifaises,
(February 19, 1968), no. 1221-2.
30 On the relationship between DNA and language, see R.Masters. "Genes, Language and Evolution,"
Semiotica, Vol. 2 (1970), 295-320; and R. Jakobson, “Linguistics inRelation to the Other
Sciences,” in MainTrends in Social Research, in press.
31 Chomsky’s most important writings are Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton,1967); Aspects of
the Theory of Syntax(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965); Language and Mind (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968); Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper and Row,
1966); and (with M. Halle) The Sound Pattern of English(New York: Harper and Row,
1968). Excellent discussions of Chomsky’s ideas about early language acquisition appear
in F. Smith and G. Miller, The Genesis of Language (Cambridge,Mass: MIT Press, 1966). A
good introduction for the uninitiated is J. Lyons, Noam Chomsky (New York: Viking,
1970).
32 Traditional views of language learning, diametrically opposed to Chomsky’s theory, are set forth by
C. Osgood, “A Behavioristic Analysis of Perception and Language as Cognitive
Phenomena," in H. Gruber et al. (eds.), Contemporary Approaches to Cognition
(Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 75-118; and by Chomsky's
archantagonist B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1957). An intelligent critical discussion of Chomsky’s general position can be found in
the essays collected by S. Hook(ed.), Language and Philosophy (New York: New York
University Press, 1969).
33 Piaget's comments on Chomsky and Levi-Strauss are found in his book S, Chapters V and VI;
Chomsky's comments on Levi-Strauss and Piaget are found in his essay Language and
Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968). Levi-Strauss has indicated his
admiration for Piaget's later work and his reservations about the philosophical
implications of Chomsky's work, in a personal communication tome, and in his latest
writings (L’Hommenu, "Finale” [Paris: Plon, 1971]).
34 It is possible to mention here only a few random works by scholars who have undertaken studies of
the mind: I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winton, 1970); P.
Wolff, “The Causes, Controls and Organization of Behavior in the Neonate,”

Psychological. Issues, Vol. VI (1966); W. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge,
Mass.:MIT Press, 1965); J. Bowlby, Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969); H. Simon,
Models of Man (New York: Wiley, 1961); R. Gardner and B. Gardner, “Teaching Sign
Language to a Chimpanzee," Science,Vol. 165 (1969), 664-72; D. Premack, "A Functional
Analysis of Language,” J. Exp. Anal. Behavior, Vol. 14 (1970),107-25; A. R. Luria, The
Higher Cortical Functions in Man (New York: Basic Books, 1966); N.
Geschwind,“Disconnection Syndromes in Animals and Man,” Brain, Vol. 88 (1965), 237-
94,585-644; J. Lettvin, H. Maturana, W. McCulloch, and W. Pitts, "What the Frog’s Eye
Tells the Frog’s Brain,” Proc.Inst. Radio Engnrs., Vol. 47 (1959), 1940-51; 1). Hubei and T.
Wiesel,"The Visual Cortex of the Brain,” Scientific American, Vol. 209 (1963), 54-62; C.
Trevarthen, "Experimental Evidence for a Brain-Stem Contribution to Visual Perception
in Man,”unpublished paper, 1971; M. Critchley, The Parietal Lobes (London: E. J. Arnold,
1953); J. Flynn et al., “Changes in Sensory and Motor Systems During Centrally Elicited
Attack,” Behavior Science,Vol. 16 (1971), 1-19; P. Eimas, "Speech Perception in Infants,"
Science, Vol. 171 (1971), 303-6.
Appendix and Notes

Genesis
CHAPTER 1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; arid darkness was upon
the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light
from the darkness.
5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And
the evening and the morning were the first day.
6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and
let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were
under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it
was so.
8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the
morning were the second day.

9. And God said. Let the waters under the heaven be gathered unto one
place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the
waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed,
and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the
earth: and it was so.
12. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his
kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and
God saw that it was good.
13. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14. And God said. Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to
divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and
for days, anti years:
15. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give
light upon the earth: and it was so.
16. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and
the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon
the earth,
18. And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light
from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
20. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving
creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open
firmament of heaven.
21. And God created great whales, and every living creature that
moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and
every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the
waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
24. And God said. Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his
kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it
was so.

25. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after
their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and
God saw that it was good.
26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,
and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that
creepeth upon the earth.
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him; male and female created he them.
28. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and
multiply, and replenish the earth, awl subdue it: and have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth.
29. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed,
which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit
of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to
every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given
every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very
good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

CHAPTER 2
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and
he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it
he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
4. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they
were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens,
5. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb
of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the
earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
6. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face
of the ground.
7. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul.
8. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in E'den; and there he
put the man whom he had formed.
9. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is
pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the
garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
10. And a river went out of E'den to water the garden; and from thence
it was parted, and became into four heads.
11. The name of the first is Pi'son: that is it which compasseth the whole
land of Hav'i-lah, where there is gold;
12. And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx
stone.
13. And the name of the second river is Gi'hon. the same is it that
compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
14. And the name of the third river is Hid'de-kel: that is it which goeth
toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Eu-phra'tes.
15. And the Lord God took the man. and put him into the garden of
E'den to dress it and to keep it.
16. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the

garden thou mayest freely eat:
17. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat
of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
18. And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I
will make him a help meet for him.
19. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field,
and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would
call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof.
20. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to
every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a help meet for
him.
21. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he
slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.
22. And the rib, which the Lord God Had taken from man, made he a
woman, and brought her unto the man.
23. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh:
she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.
24. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall
cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not
ashamed.

CHAPTER 3
Now the serpent was more subtile than any beast of the field which the
Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall
not eat of every tree of the garden?
2. And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the
trees of the garden:
3. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God
hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4. And the serpent said unto the woman. Ye shall not surely die:
5. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall
be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it
was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took
of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and
he did eat.
7. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they
were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves
aprons.
8. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the
cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of
the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
9. And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art
thou?
10. And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid,
because I was naked; and I hid myself.
11. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of
the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12. And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she
gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
13. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast
done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14. And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this,
thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy
belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

15. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between
thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
16. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy
conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be
to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice
of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying,
Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou
eat of it all the days of thy life;
18. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt
eat the herb of the field:
19. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the
ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt
thou return.
20. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother
of all living.
21. Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins,
and clothed them.
22. And the Lord God said. Behold, the man is become as one of us. to
know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the
tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of E'den, to
till the ground from whence he was taken.
24. So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the garden of
E'den cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the
way of the tree of life.

CHAPTER 4
And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I
have gotten a man from the Lord.
2. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep,
but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
3. And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of
the ground an offering unto the Lord.
4. And Abel, he also brought of I lie firstlings of his flock and of the fat
thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering:
5. But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was
very wroth, and his countenance fell.
6. And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy
countenance fallen?
7. If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not
well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt
rule over him.
8. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they
were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
9. And the Lord said unto Cain. Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I
know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
10. And he said. What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood
crieth unto me from the ground.
11. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her
mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;
12. When thou tillest the ground, it shall, not henceforth yield unto thee
her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
13. And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can
bear.
14. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth;
and from thy face shall I be hid: and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the
earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.
15. And the Lord said unto him. Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain,
vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon
Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

16. And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the
land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
17. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he
builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son,
Enoch.
18. And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Me-hu'-jael: and Me-
hu'-jael begat Me-thu'-sa-el: and Me-thu'-sa-el begat La'-mech.
19. And La'-mech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was
Adah, and the name of the other Zil'-lah.
20. And Adah bare Ja'-bal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents,
and of such as have cattle.
21. And his brother’s name was Ju'-bal: he was the father of all such as
handle the harp and organ.
22. And Zil'-lah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer
in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Na'-a-mah.
23. And La'-mech said unto his wives, Adah and Zil'-lah, Hear my voice;
ye wives of La'-mech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my

wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
24. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly La'-mech seventy and
sevenfold.
25. And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his
name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel,
whom Cain slew.
26. And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his
name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.

References
The recent publication of several excellent collections and
bibliographies on structuralism makes superfluous the inclusion of a separate
list of recommended readings here. Readers who want to pursue particular
themes should consult the notes to the pages where the topics are first
introduced. Certain works which are particularly useful are listed directly
below, with the abbreviations by which they are referred to in the Notes.
CCN: J. Piaget et al., The Child's Conception of Number (New York: Norton, 1965).
CCW: J. Piaget, The Child's Conception of the World (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield Adams, 1965).
C L-S: E. N. Hayes and T. Hayes (eds.), Claude Levi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
CR: J. Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1954).
EGLT: B. Inhelder and J. Piaget, The Early Growth of Logic in the Child (New York: Norton, 1964).
ESK: C. Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
GLT: B. Inhelder and J. Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (New
York: Basic Books, 1958).
IS: M. Lane (ed.), Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
JR: J. Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child (Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield Adams, 1964).
L-S: E. Leach, Levi-Strauss (London: Fontana Books, 1970).
LT: J. Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child (Cleveland: Meridian, 1963).
OI: J. Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (New York: Norton, 1963).
S: J. Piaget, Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
SA: C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963).
SM: C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966).
SPS: J. Piaget, Six Psychological Studies (D. Elkind, ed.) (New York: Random House, 1968).
T: C. Levi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
TT: C. Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1964).

About the Author
Howard Gardner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1943. He
graduated from Harvard College in 1965, was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow
at the London School of Economics, and received his Ph.D. in Developmental
Psychology from Harvard in 1971. He is currently engaged in postdoctoral

research at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Boston.

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Part I A New Approach to Social Sciences

2. The French Intellectual Tradition and the Roots of Structuralism: A

Part II The Architects of Structuralism

Part III An Assessment of Structuralism: Problems and Prospects

Appendix & References

About the Author

The Quest for Mind 5

the material indicated:

Philosophical Library, Inc., for material from H. Bergson, An Introduction

Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, William Morrow, New York, 1955.

and the Cooked, Harper and Row, New York, 1969.

Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966.

W. W. Norton and Co., for material from J. B. Watson, Behaviorism, New

York, 1930; J. Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence, New York,1963.

Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, for material from J. Piaget, Structuralism,

translated and edited by Chaninah Maschler, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers,

from Childhood to Adolescence: An Essay on the Construction of Formal

Operational Structures, translated by Anne Parsons and Stanley Milgram,

of Reality in the Child, translated by Margaret Cook, Basic Books, Inc.,

Publishers, New York, 1954.

The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.

Dover Publications, for reproduction of a figure (p 225) from Primitive

Art by F. Boas, Dover Publications, New York, 1955.

E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., for material from Bronislaw Malinowski,

Argonauts of the Western Pacific, New York, 1964. Published by E. P. Dutton

and Co., and used with their permission.

University of Chicago Press and George Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd.,

for material from C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago

The Quest for Mind 7

Tropiques, Atheneum, New York, 1964.

Aphasia and Phonological Universals, Mouton, The Hague, 1968.

material and a diagram adapted from E. Leach, "Levi-Strauss in the Garden of

Strauss: The Quest for Mind,” Vol. 37 (1970), 348-65.

The Human Context(London), for material adapted from “Structure and

Development,’’ 1972, in press.

Huxley Lecture on kinship study, and shortly thereafter, I witnessed Professor

Jean Piaget leading a provocative seminar on the biology of knowledge.

Curiosity brought me to these events, for, though aware of their eminence in

ideas or the remarkable personalities of these two savants which most

affected me I no longer recall, but I was sufficiently motivated to pick up

these efforts to enhance my own understanding of structuralism and to

represents the most significant contemporary innovation in the sciences of

The Quest for Mind 9

importance and promise of the structuralist movement which they have

launched, has prompted me to write this book.

As an audience I have in mind students and laymen interested in issues

investigated by social scientists and in current developments in intellectual

certain problems in a separate section at the end of the book. Scholars

steeped in the writings of structuralism may find my historical introduction

somewhat oversimplified and my descriptions of the work of Piaget and Levi-