Page 144 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

121 The Development of Normative Structures

that I am quietly dropping the materialist assumptions regarding
the motor of social development; the second suspects another
logification of history—and philosophical mystifications instead
of empirical-scientific analysis. As indicated, I consider these to
be misunderstandings.
Let us assume for a moment that developmental patterns for the
normative structures of a certain society can be reconstructed and
corroborated. (I am not talking here of any arbitrarily selected
classification of stages but of developmental logics in Piaget’s
sense, which must satisfy rather improbable conditions. )** Such
rationally reconstructible patterns then represent rules for possible
problemsolving, that is, only formal restrictions and not mech-
anisms that could explain individual problemsolving processes,
not to mention the acquisition of general problemsolving abilities.
The learning mechanisms have to be sought first on the psycho-
logical level. If that succeeds, with the help of cognitive develop-
mental psychology, there is need for additional empirical as-
sumptions that might explain sociologically how individual learn-
ing processes find their way into a society’s collectively accessible
store of knowledge. Individually acquired learning abilities and
information must be latently available in world views before they
can be used in a socially significant way, that is, before they can
be transposed into societal learning processes.
Since the cognitive development of the individual takes place
under social boundary conditions, there is a circular process be-
tween societal and individual learning. To be sure, one could
argue for a primacy of social over individual structures of con-
sciousness on the grounds that the rationality structures embodied
in the family have first to be absorbed by the child in the devel-
opment of his interactive competence (as he passes out of the
preconventional stage). On the other hand, the initial state of
archaic societies—characterized by a conventional kinship orga-
nization, a preconventional stage of law, and an egocentric in-
terpretive system—could itself be changed only by constructive
learning on the part of socialized individuals. It is only in a deriva-
tive sense that societies “‘learn.’’ I shall assume two series of initial
conditions for evolutionary learning processes of society: on the
one hand, unresolved system problems that represent challenges;