Structuring and axiomatizing

pp. 117-149

in: Gilles-Gaston Granger, Formal thought and the sciences of man, Berlin, Springer, 1983

Abstract

The treatment of quality as it has just been presented can be considered as a paradigm of the construction of concepts. The treatment rests on the building of explicitly structured abstract models. Now, if one examines this work of formal thought under a more general aspect, one is led to outline the traits of its technology, and to look for the direction of its movement which seems to lead structuration toward axiomatics. This is a movement too often misunderstood as the result of a misplaced, hyperbolic and vain effort to reduce human facts to a pure play of thought. In this chapter I hope to show first, with the aid of a technological study of models, the complementary character of the two undertakings in question: the structuring of the phenomenon and the axiomatization of structures. We should then be in a position to state precisely the epistemological significance of axiomatic systems in the sciences of man. It is a significance profoundly different from that which they have in geometry, although a prejudicial misunderstanding can arise and develop in this regard. After attempting to dissipate this ambiguity in the notion of axiomatic systems, I shall then examine more closely one of the attempts to apply the axiomatic method to the elaboration of a determinate concept for the sciences of man: that of "rational" behavior.