The Child's Conception of Time

Jean Piaget

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135658755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book was first published in 1969.

Part 1
Elementary Operations: Time and Motion

The aim of this section is to set the development of the concept of time in the kinetic context outside which it can have no meaning. We are far too readily tempted to speak of intuitive ideas of time, as if time, or for that matter space, could be perceived and conceived apart from the entities or the events that fill it. Much as space is often conceived as an empty box into which bodies are fitted, so time is conceived as a moving film consisting of stills that follow one another in quick succession.

But space is not just a simple 'container'. It is the totality of the relationships between the bodies we perceive or imagine, or rather, the totality of the relationships we use to endow these bodies with a structure. Space is, in fact, the logic of the apparent world or at least one of the two essential aspects (the other being time) of the logic of things: the process of fitting its parts into a meaningful whole (colligation) is analogous to the colligations and series that classes and relations introduce among concepts, and its metric system is that of numbers and numerical operations. Because it is a form of logic, space is above all a system of concrete operations, inseparable from the experiences to which they give rise and which they transform. But as the mind gradually learns to perform these operations outside their factual context, the operations may become 'formal' and it is at this level, at which geometry becomes pure logic, that space appears as a container or a 'form' independent of its content.

Now, exactly the same thing happens with time, the more so as time and space form an inseparable whole. As we shall see again and again throughout this book: no matter whether we are dealing with physical displacements or motions in space, or with those inner motions that memory recalls or anticipates, we shall find that time plays the same part in regard to them, as space does in respect of stationary objects. More precisely, space suffices for the co-ordination of simultaneous positions, but as soon as displacements are introduced, they bring in their train distinct, and therefore successive, spatial states whose coordination is nothing other than time itself. Space is a still of time, while time is space in motion—the two taken together constitute the totality of the ordered relationships characterizing objects and their displacements.

But though, in the case of space, we can ignore time to construct geometrical relationships (to do so we need merely postulate a fictitious simultaneity and describe motions as pure displacements at infinite velocity or as displacements independent of their velocity), when it comes to time, we cannot abstract the spatial and kinetic relationships, i.e. we cannot ignore velocity. It is only once it has already been constructed, that time can be conceived as an independent system, and even then, only when small velocities are involved. In the course of its construction, time remains a simple dimension inseparable from space and part and parcel of that total co-ordination which enables us to correlate the kinetic transformations of the universe.

If this is the case, the study of the genesis of the concept of time must prove highly instructive. If time is really the coordination of motions in the sense that space is the logic of objects, we must expect to discover the existence of operational time, involving relations of succession and duration based on analogous operations in logic. Operational time will be distinct from intuitive time, which is limited to successions and durations given by direct perception. Operational time itself may be qualitative or quantitative, depending on whether the operations involved are analogous to those involved in classes and logical relations, or whether a numerical unit comes into play.

Which then are the elementary operations that lead us to simultaneity and succession as well as to durations of different order? The answer will be attempted in the first section of this book, where we shall analyse the reaction of children at various stages of mental development to a simple experimental situation: the flow of liquid by successive stages from one container to another. Two simple motions are involved: a drop of level and a rise of level. The time operations involved are: (1) fitting the various levels into the series A + B + C, etc. by means of 'before' and 'after' relationships (sedation is impossible if the relations are 'simultaneous'); and (2) fitting together the respective intervals (terms) AB, AC, etc. (AB is of shorter duration than AC, etc. and A₁ and B₁ or A₂ and B₂ are synchronous).

If temporal relations resulted from direct intuitions or from intellectual abstractions independent of their content, it is clear that these problems would not face the child with any fresh difficulties—after all, the events take place before its very eyes. But if time, as we suggest, is the operational co-ordination of the motions themselves, then the relations between simultaneity, succession and duration must first be constructed, one by one. It is the general nature of this construction that we shall examine in the first two chapters.

Chapter One
The Sequence of Events

In our attempt to determine the role of time in human experience generally, and that of children in particular, we invariably discover that temporal ideas are linked to memories, to complex causal processes, or to clearly defined motions. One might suppose that memory involves the direct intuition of time; that Bergson's pure memory and intuitive ideas of duration constitute an absolute reference system on which every psychological analysis of the concept of time must be based. But memory is a reconstruction of the past, a 'narrative' as P. Janet has put it, and this applies at the higher and verbal planes no less than at the sensory-motor level. As such it necessarily involves causality. Thus when one memory seems earlier than another, the former is deemed to be causally anterior to the event recalled by the latter. If, for example, I recall that, ten days ago, I put on my tie before giving my morning lectures, this is not because these two memories are indelibly engraved on my mind in a precise order of succession; it is because I am certain that the first of the two acts is a necessary preparation for the second. The order of succession of two independent events is purely fortuitous, in the sense that Cournot defines chance as the mutual interference of two distinct causal series. It is not, therefore, because it eludes causality but simply because it is involved in chance, i.e. in a tangle of causal series, that a given sequence of events is so difficult to remember; we can only recall it by reference to inner causes or to indirect connections, i.e. to other causal series. Even in our memory, time is therefore involved with causality: it is the structure of our own history but only to the extent that we construct or reconstruct it.

To determine time, we must therefore appeal to causal operations, i.e. establish a chain between causes and effects by explaining the latter in terms of the former. Time is inherent in causality. It is to explicative operations what logical order is to implicative operations.

That is why we decided to begin our analysis of the child's conception of time with an examination of the way in which children link two events into a simple causal chain, for instance the motion of falling objects:¹ the child is presented with photographs of the falling body at various phases of its descent chosen at random and asked to put these into the right order. Now this technique, which we shall be discussing in some detail in the next chapter, has enabled us to demonstrate an apparently paradoxical fact, namely the operational, non-intuitive way in which children grasp time sequences—in effect, the reconstruction of an irreversible succession of events presuppose a reversibility of thought, i.e. the performance of operations that make it possible to run through each sequence in both directions. In particular, we observe that up to the age of seven or eight, the child, having adopted any sort of sequence (which in general is the one first presented to him) has great difficulties in changing his mind when presented with a better one (84 per cent of our six-year-old subjects but only 15 per cent of the eight-year-olds). Clearly, therefore, before the age of seven or eight, children are not yet capable of reasoning about several possibilities at the same time. In other words, they lack the power of operational reversibility needed for the selection of various possible orders, whereas eight-year-olds can make use of that power and thus reconstruct the true and irreversible order of events.²

If time is linked to causality and to the irreversible course of even...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• PART I ELEMENTARY OPERATIONS: TIME AND MOTION
• PART II PHYSICAL TIME
• PART III AGE AND INNER TIME
• Conclusions