Making Sense of Piaget

Christine Atkinson, C. Atkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415402279
• eBook ISBN: 9781135659875
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book was first published in 1983. This book is intended to introduce students of child development to the underlying philosophical orientation of Piaget's theory. Without some grasp of this the theory cannot properly be understood. The book does not presuppose a previous knowledge of philosophy but aims to introduce the central issues in simple terms which will help the reader to see what is at issue.

Chapter 1
The biological theory

Preview

This chapter will introduce the central concepts of Piaget's theory. It will also show how the theory can be initially characterised as a transformational theory having its roots in both biological and philosophical presuppositions about the nature of mind and knowledge. In particular, it will explain the Kantian notion of the basic categories of thought and show how Piaget believes that these categories including quality, quantity, space-time relationships, means-end relationships and values are laid down during the sensori-motor stage.

Transformation through Equilibration

Essentially Piaget's explanation of development postulates a series of stages or levels of the organism's functioning in the environment where each preceding stage is a necessary condition for the subsequent stage. In one of his earliest works Piaget says (Piaget, 1952, p.1):

Verbal or cogitative intelligence is based on practical or sensori-motor intelligence which in turn depends on acquired and recombined habits and associations. These presuppose furthermore, the system of reflexes whose connection with the organism's anatomical and morphological structure is apparent. A certain continuity exists, therefore, between intelligence and the purely biological processes of morphogenesis and adaption to the environment.

Piaget is claiming then that development proceeds according to a series of transformations of one stage into another. He distinguishes four very broad stages of development: the sensori-motor stage, the pre-operational stage, the stage of concrete operations and the stage of abstract reasoning. Within each of these stages there are several substages. Each substage is an elaboration of a previous stage. There is then an apparent continuity between the stages of biological functioning within the environment and the later stages of cognitive functioning. If each stage is a transformation of the previous one then although the later stages might appear to be totally different from the earliest stages nevertheless there is a continuum, a chain of changes. One should, in principle, be able to trace back the sequence of development through the successive changes that have occurred, to its origins in biological functioning.

The possibility of late cognitive functioning can be seen to grow out of previous organic or biological functioning through this sequence of transformations. This leaves open the possibility that all the characteristics of the later stages might be different from any of the characteristics of the earliest stages. We can show this by the following simple diagram:

There is no break in the continuity between Stage 1 and Stage 3 but Stage 3 shares none of the characteristics of Stage 1. On this view, then, although cognitive functioning can be seen to grow out of biological functioning it need not share any of its characteristics.

The child's earliest psychological means of interacting with the environment are sensori-motor acts such as sucking, grasping, or looking at things. Neither perceptual nor intellectual activity can arise until the child has passed through a stage of sensori-motor activity that is functionally a precursor to the later activity. The operational schemes of systems of action that the child develops at this stage are the precursor of the later intellectual scheme, not simply in the sense that they come before, but in the sense that they prefigure the later intellectual structures. The later structures are derived from action in the environment. Consequently they must, according to Piaget's view, be adapted to this environment, they must fit it since action, to succeed, must fit the environment and the intellectual structures are derived from successful action. There cannot then be that divorce between reality and our conceptual schemes, so commonly suggested by empiricist philosophers.

Development begins as soon as the stereotyped reflexes begin to undergo changes as a result of the organism's need to cope with aspects of the environment to which the reflexes are not ideally suited. It grows out of this lack of fit between the primitive reflexes with which the newly born is endowed and the environment within which he finds himself. It grows out of the organism's attempt to adapt itself to its environment. This process of adaptation is for Piaget part of the definition of living organic life as opposed to non-living inorganic matter. Inorganic matter is acted on by the environment. Rocks and stones may have their position and shape altered by winds and rivers, they may be crushed or buried, heated or frozen. But they do not contribute anything to these processes. They are passive, simply acted upon. The organism, on the other hand, will alter itself in order to avoid annihilation or discomfort.

The adaptation of the organism to the environment comprises two sub-processes, that of assimilation and accommodation. The organism assimilates some novel aspect of the environment to its already existing knowledge or capabilities and then modifies itself, that is, accommodates itself to cope with the new situation better. Assimilation then is logically (although not temporally) prior to accommodation.

The function of 'assimilation' is to modify (integrate) the element incorporated through interaction with the environment and thereby to conserve the structure of the operative schemes. To assimilate the child restructures the relevant environmental data so that it becomes coherent with his existing schemes, that is, so that the data fit in with what he already knows. This assimilation is the function that assures that experience will have significance.

The function of 'accommodation' is to modify (differentiate) and elaborate the child's schemas so that they will be consistent with the character of the external environment. Accommodation thus integrates new information from the environment into the child's existing schemas so that they are modified but not destroyed. Short-term local development is a process by which assimilation and accommodation are equilibrated. Local disequilibrium occurs whenever one or the other is dominant.

The mechanism of transformation from one stage to the next is the process of equilibration, that is, bringing into balance the functional relationships within the child's action system which are always in disequilibrium, but more so, in early life. That is, the child is endowed with self-regulating biological systems that are directed towards establishing increasing equilibrium. Development is the progressive approximation to an ideal equilibrium state that may never be fully achieved. This is the stable state of permanent equilibrium of the stage of formal thought.

The equilibrial level achieved by the child at any moment may be disrupted by an environmental perturbation whenever he:

1. biologically or psychologically recognises that something is disturbing him and
2. lacks the means necessary to deal with the perturbation.

Organismic Model of Man

Piaget's theory, then, assumes as a starting point that human beings are organised totalities capable of initiating action. This sets him against empiricist theories such as behaviourism which sees man as a passive mechanism responding in predictable ways to the environment or rationalist theories such as Chomsky's linguistic theory which views man as a kind of computer with inbuilt patterns of processing.

The model or picture that one chooses as one's starting point in a theory of human development will orient the rest of the theory in specific ways. By choosing to view man as an organism, Piaget is favouring a biological orientation as opposed to, say, a mechanistic orientation, Organisms are not simply passive recipients of inputs from the environment but nor are they, even at the purely biological level of functioning, entirely preprogrammed. And he is emphasising the active role of the subject in his own development. Knowledge is constructed by the subject rather than discovered or acquired through passive experience, socialisation or teaching.

Organisms spontaneously initiate their own actions and so play an active role in their own development. They are organised totalities of organs and of systems of action which act in a goal-directed way to interact with and adapt themselves to their environment. Genetically they are endowed with, first of all, the necessary physiological structure and the capacity for initial interaction with the environment in the form of the initial reflexes and secondly with the functional capacities necessary to ensure their own development. Development begins as soon as the characteristics of the environment impinge on the child in a way that leads to modification of those inherited initial reflexes.

Development is a process of interaction between the organism and the environment but it focuses on the individual's self-generating rather than upon the environment's socialising influence in the developmental process. It assumes that the person is affected by social (or physical) stimulation only to the extent that he first actively assimilates the stimulation to his schemes. Thus the child does not even clearly distinguish between the physical and the social environment until the fifth sensori-motor stage. During the symbolic operational stage the child increasingly discovers that there is a world external to himself which has physical and social properties that affect him. However he still interprets (transforms) these physical and social properties in accordance with his own schemes; he uses language idiosyncratically at least until the concrete substage and he constructs personally meaningful 'theories' of society even at the formal substage. The environment then is the scene of development and provides the 'nourishment' for the child's development.

It is to be expected that the age at which the child reaches the cognitive substages varies with the child's experiences. It is also plausible that advanced substages may not develop at all in individuals in societies that do not provide the necessary experiences for their development. For example, Greenfield (1966) reports that some unschooled rural Wolof children in Senegal do not develop the concept of quantity conservation whereas all schooled rural children acquire it. Sinilarly, Kohlberg (1971), in his developmental studies of moral thinking discovered that the two highest stages of moral thought were absent in preliterate or semi-literate village cultures. What the theory insists is invariable is the sequence of the stages and the necessity for each individual to go through each of the stages. The theory does not permit the possibility that the stages might appear in a different or reverse order, or that a child might 'skip' a stage.

Piaget distinguishes between the form and content of knowledge. The forms are progressively constructed by a person's own actions. Since man's actions develop, the forms he constructs also develop. The content, however, is influenced by the particular interactions the person has with his environment. The forms are determined by the stage of action to which the person has developed; while the content varies with the physical and social environment. Piaget stresses continuity in his definition of alteration. Each new stage is a transformation of the previous stage. So in this sense, while there is change, there is also conservation. The structured core of the previous stage is conserved. This is what Piaget means when he refers to 'filiations' between stages. When a new stage is achieved the fundamental structural properties of the previous stage are conserved and are re-elaborated on a new plane. The knowledge that the child constructs at the initial, sensori-motor stage he reconstructs into new, richer and more comprehensive configurations at each subsequent stage. The developmental process is an autogenetic internal process of self-differentiation and hierarchic integration. The person is a self-regulatory organisation of functional structures that continuously renew and transform themselves by their own actions upon (interaction with) the environment. These actions lead to a developmental reorganisation (equilibration) of the person's structures, which subserve these actions, at a new functional level or more stable stage of adaptation.

The working relationships among acts constitute the functional structures of the self-regulatory systerr to which these acts belong. A system of actions may be considered as the 'logic' by which actions operate in terms of each other. The differentiation and hierarchic integration that characterise the working relationships that develop among self-regulatory systems of action may therefore be considered to constitute the functional organisation or the 'logic' of the total mental organisation.

The action of the organism is the source of interaction with the environment. The action of the child is the cause of both his own psychological phenomena and the behaviour of the environment. The child's own action is, therefore, also the cause of his own psychological development.

The Basic Categories of Thought

In identifying the individual as the source of the organisation of his own knowledge, Piaget is following Kant. Kant, in reaction to the empiricists who claimed that all concepts were derived from experience and to the rationalists who claimed that all concepts were derived from reason or the mind, argued that there were two sides to knowledge. There was the sensible side which was supplied by perception and which had no inherent organisation or structure. There was also the structured, organisational side to knowledge. Perception provides the objects that thought is about, but the understanding provides the structured ways of thinking about these objects. Kant's major work, 'The Critique of Pure Reason', lists certain concepts which in his view give form and organisation to our thinking. He distinguishes between two kinds of concepts: those that he labels a posteriori and those that he labels a priori. A posteriori concepts are those which are somehow abstracted from our experience. Colour concepts are an example. To call these concepts 'a posteriori' is emphasising the fact that since they are drawn from experience they cannot logically precede it. They come after experience. These a posteriori concepts might be seen as simply reports of experience. To notice that two objects are the same colour and to refer to them thereafter as 'white' does not alter the experience in any way. It merely reflects it.

The a priori concepts, on the other hand, do not merely reflect experience but organise it. In developing and applying a posteriori concepts we have to take care that our concepts conform to and fit our actual experiences. But in applying a priori concepts, we force the experiences to fit the concept. An example of an a priori concept is the concept of cause. Kant follows Hume in maintaining that the notion of natural necessity which seems to be part of our concept of causation is not a notion which could be abstracted from experience. But instead of locating its source in the imagination as Hume does, Kant claims that it is a concept which we use not to describe but to order experience. The two following propositions illustrate the difference between a structuring, a priori concept and an empirical, a posteriori one:

1. Every event has a cause.
2. Every child likes chocolate.

In the case of (b), if a child were discovered who did not like chocolate, we might be surprised but we would be prepared to abandon or modify our original claim to say that, after all, only most children like chocolate. We would modify our statement to better fit our experiences. But in the case of (a) we would not do that. If someone pointed to an event which had no apparent cause, we would not easily give up our claim that every event has a cause but would just look harder for the cause. Even if we never found the cause we would still not abandon our claim but would believe that this particular cause was very elusive. The concept of causation then can be seen as a concept that we do not readily abandon. It is a concept that we use to structure our experience. When experience does not apparently conform to it we assume that our experience is too limited rather than that the concept itself does not fit it.

Kant wanted to distinguish between purely subjective reports of sensations and genuinely objective judgments. There are two features which distinguish objective empirical judgments from perceptual or subjective judgments. The first is that objective empirical judgments refer to objects, not to subjective impressions. The second is that an objective empirical judgment, if it is true, is true for everybody, not just for the person who has the experience. An example of a subjective judgment might be:

'This soup feels too hot to me.'

The corresponding objective empirical judgment would be:

'This soup is hot.'

The difference between the two, according to Kant, is that in the second one, that of the objective empirical judgment, we are implicitly applying one of the a priori concepts.

He says in 'Prolegomena' 302:

If we resolve all our synthetic judgments, in so far as they are objectively valid, then we find that they never consist of mere perceptions ... but that they would be impossible, had there not been added a pure concept of the understanding to the concepts which were abstracted from perception.

What this 'pure concept of the understanding' is can be discovered not by looking at the content of the judgment. That contains only concepts derived from perception. It can be discovered only by looking at the form of the judgment. By 'form' of the judgment Kant means the way in which the objective empirical judgment confers objectivity and generality on the corresponding perceptual judgment.

In the 'soup is hot' example, the difference between saying that the soup seems to me to be hot and saying that the soup is hot is that in the first place we are merely reporting a sensation whereas in the second we are implicitly stating that there is such an object as the soup which has a certain property. The implicit a priori concept in this example is the concept of 'substance-and-accident'.

It is through the application of these a priori concepts which are not derived from perception, that our judgments achieve objectivity. The source of these a priori concepts is the pure understanding.

Precisely what Kant meant by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The biological theory
• 2 Functionalism and biology
• 3 Structuralism and logic
• 4 The equilibrium model
• 5 Objective knowledge
• 6 Explanations of human development
• 7 The beginnings and direction of development
• 8 Conclusions
• References
• Index