Piaget, Evolution, and Development

Jonas Langer, Melanie Killen

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 1998
• eBook ISBN: 9781135690984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Based on the 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society, this book represents cutting-edge work on the mechanisms of cognitive, social, and cultural development. The authors-anthropologists, biologists, historians of science, paleontologists, and psychologists-believe that a rebirth is in progress relating to the study of these mental developments. This volume seeks to illuminate this rebirth.

The varied findings and approaches reported reveal that contemporary comparative research on mental development is in a phase of differentiation and integration. Far from being global and fused, this comparative study is a flowering field of diverse disciplinary approaches, empirical phenomena, scholarly topics, and theoretical perspectives. It focuses on the comparative phylogeny, ontogeny, and history of mentation-most notably on the comparative onset and offset ages, velocity, extent, sequencing, organization of thought, symbol, and value development. The world's leading authorities on the subject discuss the implications of the study of evolution for our models of the ontogenetic origins, development, and history of mentation, as well as determine the constraints that evolution imposes on mental development.

Bringing the current interest in primate cognition to bear on studies of cognitive development in humans, this book will be of interest cognitive developmentalists, primatologists and comparitive psychologists.

CHAPTER 1
THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

Jonas Langer
University of California, Berkeley

Melanie Killen
University of Maryland, College Park

In the great majority of animals there are traces of psychical qualities or attitudes, which qualities are more markedly differentiated in the case of human beings. For just as we pointed out resemblances in the physical organs, so in a number of animals we observe gentleness or fierceness, mildness or cross temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirit or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something equivalent to sagacity. Some of these qualities in man, as compared with the corresponding qualities in animals, differ only quantitatively: that is to say, a man has more or less of this quality, and an animal has more or less of some other; other qualities in man are represented by analogous and not identical qualities: for instance, just as in man we find knowledge, wisdom, and sagacity, so in certain animals there exists some other natural potentiality akin to these. The truth of this statement will be the more clearly apprehended if we have regard to the phenomena of childhood: for in children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal; so that one is quite justified in saying that, as regards man and animals, certain psychical qualities are identical with one another, whilst others resemble, and others are analogous to, each other.

—Aristotle. Historia Animalium. Book VIII, Chapter I.

The comparative approach to the evolution of mental development has a long and rich history reaching back to antiquity. Contemporary comparative approaches represented in this volume have their more proximate roots in the systematization Hobhouse (1901) pioneered at the turn of the century. Following Darwin’s lead (see Gruber, 1974, on Darwin’s efforts), Hobhouse compared the phylogeny and ontogeny of mental development.

Hobhouse systematized all mentation into six progressively evolving forms of activity that comprehend the direction of mental development in both phylogenesis and ontogenesis. The most primitive is stimulus-controlled reflex reactions. Three intermediate forms are progressively dependent on interaction: from trial-and-error learning (e.g., a paramecium may acquire habitual responses) to assimilatory behavioral adjustment (e.g., Lloyd Morgan’s [1896] discovery that chicks learn to discriminate bitter from agreeable food) to practical judgments about concrete relations (e.g., Kohler’s [1926] discovery that chimpanzees construct and use tools as means to obtain desired goals). The two most advanced forms are progressively independent of interaction: conceptual thought freed from perception by which knowledge, tradition and culture are learned and used; followed by analysis by rational systems of logicomathematical operations.

Not all species develop all six means of mentation. According to Hobhouse, only humans do: only humans develop conceptual thought and logical analysis. Only human cognition goes beyond the information given by interactive experience.

Comparing the extent to which species develop was central to Hobhouse’s phylogenetic systematization and to subsequent efforts. It continues to be a key, formal feature of evolutionary analyses of mental development as is evident across the wide-ranging spectrum of behavioral research and theoretical perspectives represented in this volume. Indeed, it is a key consideration in every chapter but the last.

Determining the comparative extent of mental development is prerequisite to investigating the causes. One approach (represented in chapters 10 and 11, and considered in chapter 6), cultural history as cause of humans’ uniquely extended mental development, was expressed early on by Vygotsky (1935/1978):

It is my belief, based upon a dialectical materialist approach to the analysis of human history, that human behavior differs qualitatively from animal behavior to the extent that the adaptability and historical development of humans differ from the adaptability and development of animals. The psychological development of humans is part of the general historical development of our species and must be so understood. (p. 60)

Vygotsky grants humans “adaptability and historical development” while limiting all other species to “adaptability and development.” As already found in Freud’s (1915/1958) formulation, human historical development is embodied in its cultural heritage. Cultural heritage is a proximate cause of human’s qualitative mental progress beyond that of other species. It is also our curse, according to Freud and other Romantic theorists, leading to human’s unique development of neurosis.

Vygotsky’s account of both the extent and cause of humans’ mental development seems circular. It posits historical cultural heritage as the cause of humans’ qualitative mental extension while, at the same time, positing that humans’ qualitative mental extension is the cause of our cultural history. Apparently Vygotsky (1934/1962) tried to overcome this circular account of humans’ extended mental progress by appealing to the distinction between the development of everyday, informal individual knowledge in ontogeny and the development of formal, cultural knowledge in history. Everyday knowledge develops spontaneously in ontogeny from the bottom up: from individuals’ concrete familiar experience up toward abstract cultural concepts, such as scientific equations and legal principles. Formal knowledge does not develop spontaneously in ontogeny. Instead, it is taught from the top down: from culture’s historical heritage of abstract generalizations down to individuals’ everyday concrete knowledge. The dialectical interaction of these two antithetical ontogenetic and historical trajectories, Vygotsky speculated, synthesizes into humans’ uniquely extended mental development.

The role of cultural history was anticipated in Baldwin’s (1915) more comprehensive developmental model. Baldwin undertook the first major shift in and elaboration on the systematic comparative developmental approach initiated by Hobhouse. Although concurring in the importance of comparing phylogenetic and ontogenetic development, Baldwin also compared the ontogenesis and ethnogenesis (cultural history) of human mentation. By expanding the comparative developmental approach to include ethnogenesis, Baldwin prepared the way for its fullest elaboration so far, undertaken by Werner (1926/1948).

Baldwin’s augmented comparative approach enabled him to found the discipline of genetic epistemology, brought to fruition by Piaget (1950/1973, 1950/1974). Piaget grounded genetic epistemology in experimental and historical research on the comparative origins, development, and structures of knowledge in the ontogeny and cultural history of ideas, respectively. In this, Piaget followed Baldwin’s original conception—to study how thought or experience constructs reality by comparing the progressive stages of mentation that develop in ontogenesis and ethnogenesis. Baldwin’s aim was to create a natural history of interpretation. While agreeing, Piaget sought to also make the study of genetic epistemology amenable to experimental as well as critical investigation.

Baldwin’s comparative thesis was that the development of objective external organization of thought and values in ethnogenesis parallels its subjective internal development in ontogenesis. Moreover, he extended aspects of what has come to be known as the Baldwin Effect in biological evolution (Baldwin, 1896) to account for historical evolution. Accordingly, he hypothesized that ontogenesis gives ethnogenesis “its vital impulse and its progressive ‘uplift’.” Baldwin (1915, p. 34), unlike Vygotsky, attributed causal priority to ontogeny in extending human mental development beyond that of other species and to our cultural history of ideas. It is the comparative developmental perspective adopted by Piaget (1971) and those crediting ontogeny with primary causal roles in the evolution of mental development and cultural history (i.e., chapters 2, 3, 8 and 12, and considered in chapters 5 and 6).

Baldwin’s natural history of interpretation comprised three progressive mental stages in the development of both human ontogenesis and ethnogenesis: the prelogical, logical, and hyperlogical. Ontogenesis begins with a stage of intuitive and quasidiscursive or quasililnguistic behavior. Thereby, children develop prelogical, pragmatic, and presentational knowledge. Their knowledge is egocentric, “a meaning of immediate presence and intuition” (Baldwin, 1915, p. 26). Children begin by accepting “the reality of the datum” of experience. They do not distinguish between subjective and objective experience. The intermediate, logical stage involves imaginative activity taking discursive or linguistic forms. Imaginative interpretations of experience are assumptions, proposals and hypotheses that “have the force of possibility and probability” such that “reality is embodied in all sorts of ‘as if‘constructions” (Baldwin, 1915, pp. 26–27). These constructions are tested by verification procedures to assess their validity. The results are logical processes of judgment, reasoning, and implication determining what is accepted as reality. Finally, at the highest interpretative stage, action becomes esthetic contemplation that “erects into postulates its ends, values, and goods” (Baldwin, 1915, p. 29). At this hyperlogical stage, “Consciousness achieves a freeing from logic as before she worked to secure the freeing of logic” (Baldwin, 1915, p. 28).

Baldwin (1915) hypothesized that mental ontogenesis feeds forward to and provides the initial impetus for the parallel development of three stages in ethnogenesis. Accordingly, the initial forms of the three stages of ethnogenesis are amplifications of the three stages of ontogenesis. Once established, the stages of ethnogenesis begin to feed back to the stages of ontogenesis. This hypothesis of reciprocal amplification between prior individual mental development and subsequent cultural history implies that both are progressively evolving open systems (cf. chapters 2 and 3).

Ethnogenesis, in Baldwin’s view, is the progressive construction of objective societal embodiments of subjective individual interpretations into laws, rites, customs, theories, and so forth. Ethnogenesis, like ontogenesis, begins with a prelogical stage in which the group’s interpretative behavior is mystical and takes mythical and religious forms. At the intermediate, the logical stage, it is speculative and takes scientific and critical forms. Finally, at the hyperlogical stage societal interpreta...

Table of contents

• The Jean Piaget Symposium Series
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MENTAL DEVELOPMENT
• PART I COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• PART II SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
• PART III CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX