Piaget and Knowing

Beryl.A. Geber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135660710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The twin problem of helping students synthesise separate aspects of psychology and, as research workers, familiarising each other with our own thinking - prompted the series of seminars on which this volume is based. This book, like its associated seminars, represents not only the interests of the authors but also the needs of students, both undergraduate and graduate, for whom it has been prepared. The seminars were held in the Psychology Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This book aims to present an integration of some of the research problems that are current by showing how each is concerned with the problem of knowing and understanding and how together they throw light on some of the issues raised by Piaget.

Part one
Cognition and Epistemology

Piaget raises the question of the relations of epis-tenology to the ontogeny of intelligence: he suggests that by understanding the growth of intelligence within the developing individual we will reflect the processes which occur in the development of epistemological systems. His particular dialectical constructivist approach to knowing is however only one way in which the process can be construed. The empiricist tradition for instance embodies the notion that fact and reality are 'out there', waiting to be found and examined by tools which are independent of the examiner. The object and the subject can be separately described. This empiricist tradition is an attractive one for science and certainly continues to inform a great deal of research, but it has implications which are different from those of Piaget's constructivist structuralism. And certainly the empirical tradition differs from one whose basis is subjective exploration, the psychoanalytic. For psychoanalysis, the influence of which is implicit in a wide range of psychological explanation, reality is subjective and resides within the perceiver. Searching the external world for that which is 'real' does not necessarily reveal answers.

Psychology has been divided between these opposing views of the source of knowledge and of the associated models of man. The paper by Roger Holmes which constitutes this section of the book examines the conflict between empiricism and psychoanalysis and proposes a resolution of this conflict in terms of Piaget's theoretical system. Holmes describes the apparent basis for conflict between the systems and demonstrates the fallacious basis for this conflict. It is concerned with the derivation of knowledge and illustrates the use to which Piaget's theory can be put beyond the description of individual development.

Chapter 1
Empiricism and Psychoanalysis: A Piagetian resolution

Roger Holmes

Psychoanalysts and experimental psychologists are not always mutually at ease. They may not read each other's paper, attend each other's conferences, or even try to see the other's point of view. In this paper I shall argue that such a situation is no simple consequence of specialised concern - those with common interests coming together to discuss - but the result of something more important. For each side feels, not just that the other side rejects it (though of course it does to some extent) but also that such rejection is in some way desirable; desirable - for the other could be a threat.

In this paper I shall attempt first to point out the nature of this conflict; second, to account for its occlusion, and last to show how an acceptance of Piaget's approach could modify this divisive state of things. Piaget, it will be argued, can show how all of us - empiricists and psychoanalysts alike - can come to terms with what the other has to say.

First, the nature of the conflict between the two approaches. This may, perhaps, be illustrated in terms of the 'present' and the 'past'. Any statement made at any time can be seen in two different ways: we can either see it as reflecting what is actually 'there' or, on the other hand, as showing us how someone feels. The first of these, what someone sees - the contribution from the outside world - will be called the 'present'; the second, what someone 'feels' - a contribution from the inside - the 'past'. The pure case of the 'present' would be something visually wholly unambiguous, like Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, the pure case of the 'past' would be a dream.

Now the conflict between psychoanalysis and the rest can be summed up by saying that, whereas the empiricist concerns himself with the 'present', that which reflects not the observer but the observed, the psychoanalyst concerns himself with the 'past' - not with the observed but with the observer.

Perhaps as good a point as any to talk about the beginning of empiricism is the invention of Galileo's telescope. Anyone, provided that they were adequately sighted, looking down the telescope would see Jupiter's moons. So successful was this telescope, indeed, that the only way an observer could preserve his 'past' virginity was to refuse to look down it at all. The empiricist learned his lesson. Wherever possible he has preferred data that speak with their own voice, particularly those immediate data known as sensory 'facts'. Somewhat lower in the empiricist's scheme of things come those constructions known as 'theories', because theories are more open to personal choice; quite excluded has been the rampant subjectivity of wanton "phantasy'.

Very different is the psychoanalyst. He is not interested in what is actually 'there'. Indeed, if everyone saw what was actually 'there', the psychoanalyst would not be in business at all. He is interested in the past, the idiosyncratic history we all have had. And he is interested in the past in the particular way - not just as a subject of public discourse, but as a locus of a particular, 'private' cause. 'Private' in that it reflects not the behaviour but the feelings of those concerned feelings that hold their own validity. The experienced motive, the wish, what will here loosely be called 'the Will' - even if unconscious - is held to be the key.

So there's our conflict: on the one hand the 'public present', on the other, the 'private past'. The conflict does not end there, it expands with its very elaboration. With every advance in their respective disciplines, the two orders are driven further and further apart. For the empiricist, any 'cause' (that is, identifiable, lawful antecedent) is not only many-sided but also something apart, alien and distant from that which he explains. The fear of the empiricist is always that he should be accused of that twentieth-century form of scientific heresy 'circularity' - explaining something by recourse to itself. This is just what the psychoanalyst does for him causality is inward and unique: he appeals to a limited set of forces that lie 'within'. For him the relevant cause is in the motive of the person concerned, a motive defined in the experience of that very person - that which is to be explained enfolding its own point of origin. The stress on the unconscious nature of psychoanalytic causation has obscured the circularity of this position and given the notion of psychoanalytic cause a spurious independence. That psychoanalysts prefer unconscious motives is neither here nor there - for even if unconscious they remain the feelings of the person that is to be explained, feelings that, it is hoped, psychotherapy will bring to his awareness. Far more truly unconscious are the empiricist's own causes - no one can possibly have a clue as to how the injection of certain drugs can, say, make him feel differently.

It will be the thesis of this paper that this self-perpetuating division between the 'public present' and the 'private past' is illegitimate, that it impoverishes our notion of what is 'there'.

Neither side, when they come down to it - whatever their philosophical sophistications - subscribe to the view that 'reality' can only be a reality as stated or observed by someone. Reality is taken to be 'there' by empiricist and psychoanalyst alike. Not 'as seen by someone', just 'there'. The result is that both sides believe that there can be a final separation of the knower from the known. Thus each can remain distinct - the one personal and intimate, the other impersonal and blind.

This duality brings great advantages. For since they are distinct, one can declare irrelevant what cannot be absorbed. One can write off the subjective (or the objective) as of no concern. The two can be considered, quite literally, different 'universes of discourse', that do not impinge. And is not this course justified? Without a separate 'self' would we exist at all? And without a separate 'outside', would we not be totally alone?

Certainly our partisans - both empiricist and psychoanalyst alike - would seem to think so. They both agree that they themselves and the outside world are both 'really there' in some ontologically primary sort of way. Not only do they assert it, but, having done so they then declare as 'pathological' anyone who does not agree. In this they have good precedent: the notion of the 'pathological' (or the 'deviant', the 'heretical', or the 'revisionist') has been the necessary escape clause for every self-sufficient moral, political or epistemological system there ever was.

This time however it is doing rather better. The notion of the 'pathological', with its concomitant assumption of unquestioned 'health', performs the unlikely feat of making it possible for two conflicting approaches to exist at once. And is, in consequence, welcomed by them both.

The psychoanalyst welcomes it with open arms. As much as any empiricist, the psychoanalyst takes the notion of the external reality for granted - it is the touchstone of mental health, no less. He does so for two reasons - it gives him a professional identity, and it preserves his explanatory assumptions intact. It gives him a professional identity since he is one of the ones who specialise in these 'pathological cases'. The 'pathological' is his concern. And just as well too, for if his subject-matter were not special, he would find himself alongside other psychologists - and so in danger of being absorbed.

He can preserve his explanatory assumptions intact since it allows him to lose interest in that which would, to say the least of it, put a severe strain upon his system of explanation. For how could psychoanalysis - that which stresses the inner, private past - ever account for the apparent non-existence of that private past? How can those who specialise in distortion - and explain distortion in terms of ever earlier distortion - escape the closed explanatory world that the notion of 'distortion' implies? They do not escape or even see the need to do so, for they feel no trap. That people grow up and achieve objectivity is not seen as a problem, as of course it should be. Psychoanalysis resorts to the empirically self-evident to save it from its greatest theoretical difficulty of all - how it can, in its awn terms account for its later non-existence.

The empiricist can certainly account for that. By definition - his whole system of explanation is based on the assumption that the 'public present' can override the 'private past'. Not only this, but the empiricist will then go ahead and proscribe - as 'unreliable' or 'subjective' - any awareness that does not have this conclusive force. Only facts can count.

But facts are self-defining - or rather defined by the very fact that they can be observed. And this is their great weakness. For that which is accepted without question cannot be absorbed into any wider context. 'Facts' in consequence are epistemologically alone, quite as much as the psychoanalyst's 'will'. For how can they be integrated with non-facts? - for instance, theories? How, furthermore, can they be integrated with a prioris of a different kind? Not just the 'will', just mentioned, but also, for instance numbers. That two plus two equals four is declared equally absolute and secure, but granted this, what then is the relationship between facts and numbers? Both of these are seen as quite distinct, and, being distinct, need not be related. That which is self-evident need have no past.

And thus it is the world is divided into a trinity of primitive existences - facts, feelings and tautologies (the old distinction of the Vienna Circle) each solitary in its inviolable sphere.

But what happens when the observer does not oblige? When someone looks down the telescope and does not see Jupiter's moons? When someone insists that two plus two equals five? This, of course, is where the psychoanalyst comes in and since people always have a motive, whatever its causal status may be, the psychoanalyst can always find something to say. But what can the empiricist do? He cannot resort, as can the psychoanalyst, to the inner experiential wish - his whole approach stresses the message and not the listener, the enduring 'public' not the vagrant 'past'.

What he can do is - just like the psychoanalyst bring in the idea of 'health' to save the day. Just as the psychoanalysts can use the 'obviousness' of that which does not interest him - the public present to preserve the inviolability of his private past, so too can the empiricist, in a very similar way, invoke the private past Cor something very like it) to preserve the inviolability of his public present. Thanks to the convenient notion of 'pathology', those who do not see are written off as witnesses; their testimony is used as reflecting what they 'are' and not what is 'there'. The suspected observer, being 'pathological', becomes an object of study in a special way. Something must be wrong with him: subject becomes object and the empiricist violates one of the prime articles of his scientific approach and renders that approach invulnerable.

And so something must be done - and that something is none less than the abandonment of our idea both of the public present and also of that which gives the public present its human aid and comfort, our idea of 'health'. We must abandon that there is but one 'present' that all 'right-minded' men subscribe to. That people should agree at all must be seen as the problem to be resolved, not the base line on which to build.

This suggested re-phrasing of the problem of the known is drastic indeed, far more drastic than appears at first sight. It can be shown that it not only presents us as a problem that which erstwhile justified itself - the public present - it does something a good deal more unnerving than that - it sets us the task of accounting for how we ever come to agree on anything at all: how we ever come to the awareness that areas of circumstances can be called 'the same'.

And that in turn has consequences - namely, how we ever can define.

This last consequence is perhaps the most far-reaching of them all. Begging the question - taking definition for granted - is the price we pay for intelligibility. And not just intelligibility in the ordinary sense, but any identity, any yardstick whatsoever. An approach that destroys our public and then our private present, would reduce us to self-defeating relativity - a relativity where, in the last event, neither we ourselves, nor 'truth' in any independent form, could ever be. And by the same token - for 'we' ourselves would not exist as we feel we do (the distinction we make, for instance, between subjectivity and objectivity - 'I will' and 'I can't help' - being now but problem area, not ground on which to build) and 'truth', even scientific truth, arrived at after discipline and research, would be but conclusions that we - as all else in causal flux would be bound to reach, and so would have the same status as any other conclusions whatsoever. The Nobel prizewinner and the gormless idiot who does not want to know being but brothers beneath the causal skin.

Ana that is where we shall begin - stripped of identity, criteria or 'truth'. All these must be seen as consequence - consequence of that which is necessarily before the known. And how can that be done? Certainly not by studying 'objectivity' on its own terms, for that, too, implies distinctiveness. And all distinctiveness, whether between subject and object, between movement and rest, between necessary logic and random fact, between random fact and underlying law - all this must be seen as consequence. Consequence of that which everyone (when he has finally been defined) achieves alone.

We are indeed reduced to formless 'subjectivity'to taking as base line what will later patronisingly be written off as 'subjectivity'. This does not mean that we can assume any personal identity beforehand that, too, must be derived - but rather that we must plot the emergence of that distinctiveness that allows us to define - to recognise 'the same' - and so finally agree.

And someone has done just that. And that person is Jean Piaget.

We will now have a brief look at Piaget and see how his contribution (or rather, one of his contributions, for he is an infinitely fertile man) can help us with the problems we have so far met - namely the derivation of distinctiveness, or articulation, of 'the same' of the public present that is so manifestly 'there'.

Piaget, as he never tires of telling us, is a 'genetic epistemologist', that is, he is concerned with the relationship between genes and epistemology, and the central point of this relationship, the link between the genes and what is known, has been the equilibrium.

An equilibrium is a state of affairs that reverses the normal course of time. With an equilibrium it is easier to predict the future than to describe the present. Whatever may be the state of agitation of water in a cup - and that state may well tax the most detailed account - one can be assured that, sooner or later it will revert to its predictable, 'equilibrated' calm.

Piaget has seized upon the equilibrium as the necessary precondition for the awareness of similarity. As a biologist he cannot but accept that the organism is 'active' (i.e. exists) at all times; but this poses certain problems. If the organism does exist (i.e. contributes to awareness), how can its contribution be neutralised? The answer is an equilibrium. It is an equilibrium that allows the active organism to achieve the passive awareness of continuity, for with an equilibrium the activity of the organism resolves itself into apparent rest, and from apparent need of explanation. Piaget has tackled the most interesting question of them all: under what circumstances do we see no problem in what - and that - we know.

In tackling this question Piaget has elaborated an exhaustive account of the entire process of intellectual development. In one span he has covered the (sensory) empirical, the theoretical and the tautological (as in number and logic). Almost everything, indeed, except for the psychoanalytic. But that's to come.

Piaget is concerned with the development of intelligence, the way that awareness elaborates itself and so allows of a more sophisticated conditionality - an awareness that so obviously reflects what is 'really there' that it, then, needs no explanation in individual terms.

Take the most elementary awareness of them all the ability to 'identify' - to achieve the awareness of enduring, recognisable stabilities and so to see 'what's there'. This, with Piaget, needs explanation.

Nothing could be more certain to us as adults than that the world is full of 'objects', entities with some measure of invariance that can be referred to as somehow existing in themselves, independent of changes in their surround. Thus, if I see a cup before me, I see a cup - and that is all there is to it Cas the positivists might say). Not so with Piaget. Seeing a cup is an achievement we may not attain until seventeen months or so. Furthermore, seeing a cup has the properties of an equilibrium.

Because we do not see a cup. We see bits of a cup. We see it from below or from above or from some other angle. Each of these viewpoints, though, become for us the 'same whole cup'. Fragmenta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: ON KNOWING
• Part one COGNITION AND EPISTEMOLOGY
• Part two DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES IN UNDERSTANDING
• Part three EXAMINATIONS OF PIAGET'S THEORIES
• Part four INTERACTION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITIONS
• INDEX