Piaget Or the Advance of Knowledge

An Overview and Glossary

Jacques Montangero, Danielle Maurice-Naville

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134804375
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This unusual volume presents an overview of Jean Piaget's work in psychology--from his earliest writings to posthumous publications. It also contains a glossary of the essential explanatory concepts found in this work. The focus is on Piaget's psychological studies and on the underlying epistemological theses. The book may be consulted in various ways depending on whether one is looking for an introduction to Piaget's theory, details about a particular concept, a survey of his body of work, or a historical perspective. Readers who are relatively unfamiliar with Piaget's ideas and seek access to them through this book will not necessarily proceed in the same way as those who are acquainted with Piaget's work and wish to refresh, synthesize, or complete their knowledge.

The volume is divided into two major sections with several subdivisions as follows:
* The Chronological Overview presents Piaget's early ideas and the most important sources of his inspiration, and reviews his research work dividing it into four main periods plus a transitional one.
* The Glossary covers a number of explanatory concepts which are essential to Piaget's theory.

Part I

Chronological Overview: Jean Piaget’s Psychological Work

The role of a scientific theory is not to provide the solution to problems that are so general that they become irrefutable by experimentation, but on the contrary to open up new paths along which we are sooner or later confronted with new, productive obstacles.

—J. Piaget, Le mécanisme du développement mental et les lois du groupement des opérations (1941/5), p. 63.

WHY SHOULD ONE BE INTERESTED IN PIAGET’S GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY?

Getting acquainted with the work of great figures of science, who, through their dynamism, have brought new ideas to their field of study, is an extremely enriching experience for anyone who wishes to make progress in a scientific field or simply to broaden his or her mind. For these reasons, Piaget’s work should be read by psychologists, philosophers of science, educationists, logicians interested in natural thinking, and by many other specialists or students. Jean Piaget is undoubtedly one of the most important theoreticians and experimentalists in the psychology of knowledge and in developmental psychology (not to mention his contributions to epistemology and to biology).

His prolific work, written between the 1920s and his death in 1980, constitutes an important page in the human sciences of the 20th century. Some may think that it would be better to turn this page once and for all, as we prepare to enter the third millenium, and in view of the criticism that has been directed at Piaget. We do not have room, in this book, to discuss this criticism of his work. We would merely like to say that much of it arises either from insufficient knowledge of Piaget’s ideas, or from conflicting ideology. An author who is convinced that knowledge is basically social in nature, or who believes that knowledge structures are innate, naturally cannot accept a theory that tends to validate the point of view that neither social factors nor innate abilities play a major role.

We do not wish to imply that Piaget’s work is above criticism. The fact that he constantly preferred to add ideas, new formulations, or facts to his previous work rather than clarify or carry out a synthesis of the contents raises a number of questions. When all is said and done, however, knowledge of Jean Piaget’s theory and of his experimental contributions is a kind of intellectual competence desirable in facing new challenges in psychological science. Scientific work falls, in fact, into two categories: There are, on one hand, models with a great many applications and, on the other hand, heuristic theories. The former have broad explanatory power and are easily generalized to new problems—until the day comes when they are replaced by others. Heuristic theories are more difficult to apply to facts, but they stimulate reflection and research. Piaget’s work belongs to this second category of fertile, productive theories.

There are four main reasons why knowledge of Piaget’s theory is so important. The first is the stimulating aspect mentioned earlier: Most readers of Piaget’s work or of extracts from it do not remain indifferent, but reflect on what he says—even if this reaction is critical—and often come up with ideas for research. The second reason is that Piaget was a precursor; some of the broad perspectives he adopted and most of his explanatory concepts, even though many of them were conceived in the first half of the 20th century, prefigure perspectives and concepts of contemporary psychology. Piagetian psychology was, for example, mentalistic, refusing to stop at the observation of behavior, long before the American cognitivist revolution of the late 1960s. It defined functional units 30 to 40 years before the concepts of frame and schema were conceived. In the 1940s, Piaget used the concept of regulation, which is of capital importance in present-day perspectives of cybernetics and in the study of self-organizing systems. His work has therefore been justly classified as belonging to “cognitive science,” on which the study of knowledge depends today. A third reason for interest in Piaget’s work is that he has produced the most complete theory of intellectual development: It covers the period from the cradle to adulthood and strives to define the links of intelligence and logic with other cognitive functions such as memory, language, and perception. Finally, the enormous quantity of experimental facts concerning the development of children’s knowledge justifies in itself an acquaintance with Piaget’s works. These data result from an indefatigable research activity conducted by talented collaborators over more than half a century.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY : MENTORS, OBJECTIVES, AND THESES OF THE YOUNG PIAGET

Sources of Inspiration

For detailed information about the context in which Piaget’s thinking developed, reference should be made to Ducret’s (1984) work, which describes the sources of inspiration of the concepts presented in the Glossary section of the present book. Reference can also be made to a more condensed presentation of the same (Ducret, 1990) and, on generally more specific points, to Chapman (1988), Droz and Rahmy (1974), Gruber and Vonèche (1977) and Vidal (1989). Here we summarize the most salient influences on the young Piaget’s thinking.

In his autobiography (Piaget, 1952b; 1976), he described how, as an adolescent, he was passionately interested in two fields of enquiry: natural science and the great problems of contemporary biology, and the philosophy of science and of knowledge. These were to lay the foundation for his later work.

From his early interest in the determination and classification of mollusks, Piaget retained throughout his life a taste for acute observation, for the precise classification of data and, more generally, a scientific attitude toward basing hypotheses on facts. In addition, this work in natural science led the gifted young man to be interested in the biological problems of the origin and transformation of living forms, as well as the determination of species. Piaget was greatly influenced on these subjects by French-speaking biologists, whose conception of evolution was basically Lamarckian but who, although recognizing the importance of interaction with the environment, did not refute the Darwinian idea of natural selection. This was the position expressed by Le Dantec (1895, 1897, 1906), a biologist and philosopher. Piaget found concepts in Le Dantec’s works that he later adopted himself, such as the idea of applying the notions of equilibrium and the duality between assimilation and its opposite pole (imitation) to knowledge. Piaget’s interest in natural science and biology guided the young man in his choice of university studies.

Concurrent with his studies in natural science, the 16-year-old Piaget discovered a passionate interest in philosophy. His first contact with this field was through Bergson’s (1896, 1928) books. Bergson’s anti-intellectualism did not convince Piaget, but his idea of creative evolution, which is responsible for biological transformations and leads to the birth and progress of intelligence, left a deep impression on Piaget. Of the other philosophers that Piaget read, we mention Kant and Spencer (although other French-language authors writing at the same period, such as Fouillée, Guyau, and Lalande also contributed to his conceptual development). Piaget drew the idea of rationalism—that is, the idea of the importance of a notional framework that enables us to make sense of experience—from Kant’s writings, but he refuted Kant’s apriorism. In addition, in his studies of children’s knowledge, Piaget adopted Kant’s classification of knowledge into four major categories. In 1855, Spencer (1855, 1862, 1879) suggested applying the evolutionist approach to study the psychology of knowledge. This was to become Piaget’s research program. Other ideas of the British philosopher, such as that of progressive differentiation during evolution or of an immanent force leading to higher forms of equilibrium, can also be found in Piaget’s work.

Two other philosophers had an important influence on Piaget. The first was Arnold Reymond, his master in Neuchâtel, whose influence can be felt in the genesis of the idea of an equilibrium between the part and the whole (we come back to this later in this volume), and who stimulated Piaget’s interest in logic. Later in Paris (from 1919 to 1921), the young man attended Brunschvicg’s (1897, 1912, 1922) lectures; these had a great impact on his general conceptions (such as relations between the mind and reality, and a noninnatist conception of rational frameworks) and on certain specific theses such as the primacy of causality over time, number considered as a synthesis of ordinality and cardinality, the idea that the more primitive forms of thought are characterized by animism and artificialism, and yet again intelligence considered as a coordination of points of view.

Despite this interest in natural science and philosophy and the knowledge he acquired in these fields (especially in the former), Jean Piaget became neither a biologist—apart from one or two thematic works in this field—nor a philosopher. It was psychology, used as an instrument for his theory of knowledge, that occupied most of his adult life. The young Piaget read and attended lectures given by Janet (1889, 1902, 1914–1915), who influenced not only the method but also a small number of concepts adopted by Piaget, such as the ideas of a hierarchy of behaviors and of regulation. Claparède’s interests (1912, 1917) and, through him, the American functionalist school, also had an influence on Piaget’s psychology, which he considered the study of intelligence as an adaptative function. Piaget adopted Claparède’s ideas of the grasp of consciousness and of the importance of implication. In addition, his initiation into clinical psychology and psychoanalysis left their mark on his data-collection method (the clinical method of investigation) and in his interest for the explanatory but unobservable processes of observable behavior.

From the age of 20, the student of natural science was convinced that he must use psychology to validate his theory of knowledge. American psychology provided him with the type of psychology he needed and that he greatly developed: genetic psychology. The term (whose etymon is “genesis” and not “genes”) was coined and its aims (to establish a link between biology and epistemology by studying children in order to shed light on certain aspects of the theory of knowledge) were set forth by Stanley Hall, who in turn was inspired by the concepts of both Spencer and Hegel. The first practical illustration of genetic psychology is the work of a pupil of Stanley Hall: James Mark Baldwin (1894, 1906-1911), whose influence can also be found in Piaget’s work. Not only did the latter adopt the term of genetic psychology, but also the ideas that cognitive development can be divided into three major stages, that the self is gradually constructed out of an initial adualism, and that of circular reaction.

As soon as Jean Piaget began his work in psychology, he became acquainted with the work of other authors in this field. We do not mention these authors here, but concentrate on those who influenced his early years. Not all were psychologists, biologists, or philosophers. In sociology, the discussion between Durkheim’s (1925) and Tarde’s followers on the subject of the notion of totality had deep repercussions on Piaget’s first studies. Couturat’s (1905) logical algebra fascinated him, but he referred to it only in his later work. The problematics of physics in thermodynamics and kinematics inspired Piaget’s conceptions of intellectual development and of the genesis of the notion of time. The mathematical group model and Poincaré’s (1904) conception of spatial knowledge as a “group of displacements” were used by the Swiss author in his mature years.

In summary, young Piaget’s thinking was molded by evolutionist ideas and by a belief in progress—two perspectives typical of the 19th century—but also by philosophical conceptions of the development of knowledge, in particular those of Bergson and Brunschvicg, by the methods and problematics of biology at the beginning of the 20th century, and by certain functionalist currents in psychology. Piaget subscribed resolutely to science without falling into the trap of reductionist scientism; the young man was nourished by a rationalistic tradition and was well informed of the great scientific debates of the time.

Objectives and Theses of the Young Piaget

The mission Piaget set for himself around the age of 16, that of devoting his life to the biological explanation of knowledge, was exciting but rather vague. His field of enquiry and methods would become more specific later. What interested Piaget, and what was the focus of the philosophical debates of the day, was valid knowledge—in other words, scientific knowledge. Two major issues connected with this problematic run throughout Piaget’s work: on the one hand, the problem of the rigor of thinking (rational norms) and, on the other hand, that of the correspondence of the productions of mind with reality, that is, the approximate objectivity of the explanation of the world. In terms of the first problem, we need to understand the coherence of thought and how it distinguishes truth from falsehood. As to the second problem, we need to understand how structures and processes inside the subject can adequately account for phenomena that are outside the mind.

Piaget chose to examine these questions from a diachronic or evolutionist point of view, in terms of the growth of knowledge: How does thought become increasingly coherent and give increasingly adequate explanations of reality? The genetic epistemology to which the young man chose to devote his life proposed to explain how humans go from limited forms of knowledge to higher forms.

An initial key idea in Jean Piaget’s early conceptions was the similarity between biological processes and the psychological ones involved in knowing. As a result, the major problems raised on the biological level are also found, with similar sorts of solutions, on the level of the study of knowledge. The young naturalist was interested in the interaction between the organism and its environment. This interaction defines the characteristics of a species, which is by definition stable, but is also likely to cause organic modifications. On the level of knowledge, Piaget envisaged the problem of the mind’s interaction with the environment and investigated the problems of the stability of logical norms and the evolution of forms of knowledge. On both the organic and psychological levels, interaction can be defined, as Le Dantec proposed, in terms of the assimilation of external data to internal structures and of the modification of internal structures under the pressure of the environment.

Piaget conceived the evolution of both organisms and thought as a construction of forms of increasing complexity. To explain this evolution, he suggested a median way, a tertium between the views of Darwin and Lamarck. To describe cognitive evolution from birth, he also adopted an intermediate position between innatist conceptions where reasoning is explained by properties that are inherent in the human mind, and empiricism, which considers rational norms to be the simple fruit of experience. Late in his life (in 1970), Piaget gave the name constructivism to this median position.

In a philosophical and autobiographical novel entitled Recherche published when he was 22, Jean Piaget set out an idea or thesis that enabled him to link not only biology, but all the human sciences, to the theory of knowledge. He presented this idea as the pivot of his system and as a means to study epistemological problems in a scientific way. Organic, psychological, and social realities are considered to be organizations that must be defined in terms of equilibrium between a whole and its parts. The elements must not be considered individually because they depend, at all levels, on a whole that organizes them. Within an organization, we must take into account the actions of the whole (on itself and on its parts) and of the parts (between themselves and on the whole). The increasing complexity of the forms (biological, psychological, social, etc.) is measured by the degree of equilibrium between the whole and the parts. If the whole dominates, it is to the detriment of the parts and the equilibrium is unsatisfactory. The same is true if the parts dominate. Ideal equilibrium is established when the whole and the parts conserve each other. In summary, life and knowledge can be considered as a hierarchy of forms of equilibrium. In reality, no form reaches a perfect equilibrium and there is always a search for a better equilibrium. The tendency toward equilibrium, in which Piaget refused to see any teleology, is the mechanism underlying the evolution of knowledge.

This idea of progress toward an equilibrium between a whole and its parts was central to Piaget’s first psychological works. Equilibrium continued to be an important notion in his later work, but it was given a new definition. The system conceived by the young Piaget contains the fundamentals of future theoretical developments: Knowledge is considered in terms of organized wholes—in other words, structures; these structures are dynamic, for they are constituted by relations between activities and they are studied from a genetic point of view, defined as progress toward a better equilibrium. The young Piaget’s projected scientific study contains no quantitative aspects: no measures, no calculations, it defines qualitative states of equilibrium and the processes underlying them.

Finally, we would like to mention two other important components of the young Piaget’s theses that characterize his conception of knowledge. The first is his rationalism, in the weak sense of the term. According to the rationalist tradition, it is the mind that makes the world intelligible. To understand knowledge, we must therefore study the knowing subject and define his forms of rational organization. The second component is his pragmatism (or neopragmatism as Piaget preferred to call it): Action has its own logic, and logic has its source in action.

One of Piaget’s mai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: Contents and Advice on How to Consult This Book
• Part I Chronological Overview: Jean Piaget’s Psychological Work
• Part II Glossary of Essential Terms in Jean Piaget’s Psychological Theory
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index