Piaget Today (Psychology Revivals)

Barbel Inhelder, Denys de Caprona, Angela Cornu-Wells

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134594887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1987, the contributors bring their different orientations to the study of child development and genetic epistemology to show the continuing value of Piaget's theory and its fruitfulness in providing insights which permit the advancement of science. This volume contains the proceedings of the VIIth Advanced Course of the "Fondation Archives Jean Piaget", held at the University of Geneva in 1985. The lectures and discussions included in this volume will help the reader to understand Piaget in the context of twentieth-century science and philosophy and to consider the present and future of the theory, as it was seen at the time of original publication.

1
Structures and Functions

Guy Cellérier
University of Geneva

Epistemological and Psychological Constructivism

Traditionally, epistemology is a branch of philosophy. Piaget’s central project was to make it an experimental science founded on biology. In this project, psychology is both a link between the structures of the organism and those studied by epistemology, and it permits the experimental study of the psychological realisation of epistemological structures in the mind. Thus, the problems that determine Piaget’s research programme are epistemological ones, and he rightly insists on the fact that his work cannot be reduced to “a research in pure psychology”. His genetic psychology appears as a “by-product” (to quote the terms of an award he received from the American Association of Psychology), because it belongs to the experimental part of the project—it is a means and not an end in itself.

This does not mean that psychology is a minor aspect of his project: one of his earliest hypotheses was that psychological states, such as feelings of normative or logical necessity, correspond to states of equilibrium between parts and whole in a structure. So from the very start, the elaboration of a psychological theory that explains how the “normative permanence” of epistemological structures may emerge from the empirical flow of mental states [devenir mental] was a central part of the project. Thus, the theory of the equilibration of parts of thought into structural wholes was a longstanding project. He returned to it on many occasions, the last one being in his book on The equilibration of cognitive structures (Piaget, 1985), which is part of a research project in which he returns to psychological problems and searches perhaps for a more closely psychological realisation of epistemological structures, such as a “logic of meaningful implications”, for instance. His article on “Structures and procedures”, written with Barbel Inhelder (Inhelder & Piaget, 1980) is related to this research, as is Inhelder’s own research project on “Strategies and Procedures”. So genetic psychology may well be a by-product, but it is not a minor one, either in the results it produced, or in the importance and interest it had in Piaget’s own mind.

If we now ask in which direction Piaget’s constructivism is going or should go today, my answer is that we may well follow his own diagnosis, i.e. his own modest conclusion that the equilibration of cognitive structures is still “an open problem”. This is the theme I will develop, by proposing some steps towards a more Darwinian theory of the equilibration of schemes. Much of what follows is the development of an earlier conference for the “Cours des Archives Jean Piaget” on genes and schemes (Cellerier, 1984), and I must again acknowledge my debt to Minsky and Papert’s initial version of the society theory of mind and to Minsky’s various intermediate and final versions of the same theory (Minsky, 1986) for the inspiration to pursue a functional theory of schemes.

There is a fundamental homology between the Darwinian theory of the evolution of genes (phylogenesis) and Piaget’s theory of the equilibration of schemes (psychogenesis), because both address the same question: how can a system with limited knowledge and limited computational capacities evolve strategies for overcoming these limitations, i.e. how can it acquire more knowledge and more cost-efficient computational strategies to solve the external problems of its adaptation to an environment (a problem universe), and reflexively or self-referentially and recursively solve the internal problem of overcoming its epistemic and computational limitations, including those that its very evolution generates. The repeated solution of these two “majoration” problems produces a (psycho- or phylo-) genesis of the system.

The central question of phylogenesis is: how does a new equilibration of genes concur to the reproductive efficiency of the organism that carries it, and to the productivity of the genetic system that generates it. Both are locally evaluated but not distinguished by the differential reproduction of the organism. The same question must be asked of schemes: how does a new equilibration of schemes concur to the solution of the external adaptation problems of the cognitive system and to its future productivity.

I will suggest that schemes, like genes, compete for control of the activity and evolution of the system in which they cohabit and participate, and that differential reproduction of genes and Piaget’s notion of acquisition (and therefore conservation) of schemes, structures, etc. are two realisations of the same function: the differential conservation of knowledge in a memory that reflects the relative (differential) success of these entities in solving the two majoration problems, i.e. in controlling the adaptive activity and evolution of the system. This means that knowledge appears, evolves genetic “descendants” in the system, and also disappears from it, and these continuous changes constitute the system’s evolution.

We must thus focus, as Darwin did, on two complementary aspects of the mechanisms that produce this evolution: how new forms are generated to solve problems on the present dimensions of adaptation and how to pose and solve new problems that open new dimensions of adaptation. This part of the evolutionary mechanisms constitutes the generator of candidate solutions. In phylogenetic evolution, new forms are generated by a (random) combinatorial search on at least two levels: the first is on the basic level of the universal genetic code primitives (mutation); the second level, evolving from the first, is a combinatorial search on combinations of solutions that have been generated at the first level and “stored” in the genetic pool (Mendelian combination of chromosomes and post-Mendelian recombination of genes). We may distinguish two similar levels in psychogenetic evolution: that of “universal procedural primitives” that permit the construction of sensorimotor coordination, i.e. of schemes, and that of the combination or coordination of schemes. We shall endeavour to show that the cognitive system’s generation strategy consists of evolving itself into an increasingly anti-chance generator, whose procedure is increasingly preguided by accumulated knowledge and methods and by higher-level combinations thereof.

The second part of the mechanism of evolution is of course selection, a deceptively simple concept (like variation, as we have just seen). For “majorative” evolutions to occur, it is not enough that new forms be constantly generated; they must be submitted to what we call differential conservation. This means they must be evaluated with respect to their double majorative value, and either “positively” or “negatively reinforced” as a consequence of this evaluation. The effect of this reinforcement must be to make them more or less (or not at all) accessible for the generation of forms, or, in other words, to give them greater or lesser access to the control of the activity of the generator. Thus, selection assigns credit (and blame) to both new and old forms for their contribution to adaptation and adaptivity and this credit consists of differential (greater or smaller) access to the present and future control of the solution generator.

Thus, lowering the frequency of a gene, or “negatively reinforcing” or inhibiting a scheme, has the same effect: that of lowering their access to the control of the problem-solving activity of their respective systems. This is the reason why we may say that schemes, like genes, compete for control, and that control is the ultimate evaluative currency of majorative evolutionary systems.

Furthermore, the biological mechanisms of generation (variation) and selection constantly act on both new and old solutions. This means that there are no such things as “permanent memories” in a gene pool. An old “permanent” gene is constantly mutating (at a low frequency); this means that for its present form to be “permanent”, it must be constantly positively selected from its mutant variants. But this, in turn, means that it must stay locally optimal in a variety of evolving gene pools, and that its permanence is a consequence of its being constantly tested and reinforced through the results of its activity.

The important consequence of the preceding remarks is that the accessibility structure of the genetic memory is thus made to reflect the adaptive value of its constituents, in that the priority of accessibility of a gene is a function of its priority of reproductivity value, and that this accessibility structure of memory is constantly updated and evolving with the evolution of the genetic system itself. Impermanent memories are thus intrinsic to evolving systems.

We suggest that the apparent self-erasing property of psychological memory (whether it was designed as, or is a side-effect of, neural storage that was exploited by the genes during the evolution of the brain) serves the same function for selection, albeit through very different mechanisms. We know very little about neurophysiological storage and retrieval, and therefore about whether schemes are forgotten because they are erased by random fluctuations in the hardware, or (improbably) specific garbage collection and overwriting or erasing procedures, or misfilings that occur during accessibility reorganisations, or simply owing to their relative inaccessibility, etc., or a mixture of these phenomena and others not imagined. However, a scheme that is not accessible in time to produce a solution to a problem is effectively forgotten at this functional level of description. The fact that the formation of a scheme needs repeated exercise, and that its conservation over the longer time spans of psychogenesis would seem to entail periodic reactivation, suggests that the exercise of the scheme serves internally to re-evaluate it periodically through its results, and to modify its accessibility level, thereby both updating its value and reorganising locally the accessibility structure of memory, i.e. the relative priorities of access of the schemes with which it competes or cooperates for control. It also suggests that the problem of collecting memory cells for re-use is not solved, but circumvented, by giving the cognitive system ample memory space, and instead of post-erasing obsolete schemes, being strongly pre-selective about what to store: candidate schemes have perhaps to run the gauntlet of medium-term memory and repeated spontaneous rehearsal, during which they must prove their efficiency at cooperating with the variety of existing “permanent” schemes that called on them, until they can take their place among them, by being “filed” in the knowledge net, in locations “associated” with the callers—we notice that here the classical “associations” become accessibility relations.

Closing the Equilibration Loop

This outlines some steps toward a variation and selection theory of the equilibration of schemes. The question arises, however, of why such a theory is necessary. The answer is, of course, that there is no spontaneous generation of information in any cognitive system. This means that any non-preformist theory of knowledge, that is, any theory that does not postulate complete and preadapted knowledge of its problem universe in the cognitive system, must incorporate feedback from the environment in the form of a fundamental trial-and-error loop. This loop is quite explicit in Piaget’s definition of adaptation as an equilibrium between assimilation from which the trials originate, and accommodation that results from the errors. However, as his theoretical focus is epistemological, the main emphasis of his psychological theory is on the acquisition and the structure of knowledge and not on its application and its function. This results in a theory of equilibration where the emphasis is more on the generation of new forms, and less on their selection and differential conservation for their function.

The emphasis on structures and the acquisition of knowledge characterises what I shall call epistemological constructivism. The complementary emphasis on the function of knowledge in its application to problems defines what I propose to call psychological constructivism. The two perspectives are complementary; the latter’s object is merely to develop and generalise the functional aspects of a theory of schemes that are already present in Piaget’s genetic psychology. The reciprocal functional complementarity of acquisition and application of knowledge is already quite explicit in the interactionist thesis of genetic psychology, whereby it is only when previously acquired knowledge effectively interacts with a material or symbolic problem universe during its application to a problem that schemes are accommodated, and that new constructs result from empirical or reflexive abstraction, which, in turn, permit new potential applications and problem formations. Thus acquisition serves application, and vice versa.

What we propose is to close explicitly this majorative “generation and selection” loop at the top level of the equilibration theory of schemes, reflecting at this level the closure that already exists at the lower theoretical levels of the abstraction of concepts and the adaptation of schemes. Introducing the double feedback of external selection by adaptation to the external environment and internal selection by co-adaptation to the other components of the internal epistemic universe at the top level of equilibration induces precisely the kind of top-down “vection” (by local guidance with no preset target) on the construction of knowledge that Piaget has often postulated.

A central theoretical consequence is that the microgenesis of knowledge that may be observed during a problem-solving episode or a sequence of such application episodes becomes the basis of the macrogenetic evolution of knowledge over the longer time spans of psychogenesis. During an application episode a problem is assimilated to existing schemes, which must be accommodated and coordinated to produce a solution. As we suggested previously, this coordination becomes a protoscheme, a candidate for differential conservation and eventual accession to the psychogenetic repertoire of permanent acquisitions of the cognitive system. Thus microgenesis is both a product of macrogenesis, and a producer of potential macrogenetic acquisitions—and application episodes relate microgenesis to macrogenesis by constructing the future of psychogenesis from the coordination of its past with its present.

Thus the integrated accumulation of these micro-modifications, which are the object of psychological constructivism, result in the psychogenetic macro-evolution of knowledge that is the object of Piaget’s structural analysis and epistemological constructivism. It must be noted here that in this perspective, large-scale behavioural restructurations need not result from large-scale reorganisations of knowledge, but may be the effect of a new coordination, or solution construction form (such as “inverse covariation of dimensions suggests compensation”) embodied in a scheme with high-access priority that will thus be tried on many problems. This scheme will merely re-coordinate old knowledge in a different way, producing the fast microgenetic emergence of new notions in a variety of problem universes. These new notions (that combine previous ones) then become candidates for differential conservation. If they succeed, their slow cumulative effect will then result in the large-scale restructuration of knowledge we associate with a stage. Stage transitions may thus again be the effect of the integrated accumulation of micro-modifications.

In this quasi-Darwinian perspective, then, the question we must ask in psychology about structures and schemes, these “organs” of the mind, is the same as the one we must ask in biology about anatomical structures and their physiology. In biology the question is, what are they for, what is their function with respect to the differential reproduction of the organism? In psychology the question becomes, what is the function of structures and schemes, how do they contribute to the majoration of the cognitive system? This merely elaborates Piaget’s thesis of the continuity between life and thought, in which intelligence continues and expands the adaptation of the organism, and where schemes are the organs or instruments of the organism’s non-material, or functional (we would say informational), exchanges with the environment. It focuses, however, on the second less explicit aspect of adaptation, namely adaptivity. A new scheme must not only be adapted to the external environment, but must also be co-adaptable to the entities of the internal epistemic environment, i.e. to the other schemes with which it must cooperate to form new solutions that could not be attained without it, thus contributing to the adaptivity of the cognitive system.

Structural and Functional Analysis

The central question of psychological constructivism is, as we have seen, that of the function of structures. For each particular acquisition it asks what is its function in the majoration of the products and of the productivity of the cognitive system.

The notion of function itself is not widely accepted in the tradition of science and thus needs to be somewhat elaborated and clarified. We will first relate it to the principal method of constructivism, which I will call structural analysis. The latter is a typically Piagetian synthesis of the methods of conceptual analysis that characterise philosophical epistemology, with those of axiomatic decomposition that characterise formalisation. Furthermore, these methods are transposed and applied to the intuitive notions of the child, and the resulting decomposition is given a temporal dimension, with the underlying hypothesis that what is properly decomposed by the analysis may be what is synthesised by psychogenesis. A typical example is, of course, the decomposition of natural number into its ordinal and cardinal aspects, and of these into their psychogenetic precursors, until the level of actions on concrete objects and collections is reached. Alternative decompositions suggested by epistemology lead to psychological experiments at each level, which may, in turn, suggest novel decompositions. The final analytic arborescence then serves as a hypothesis for a possible psychogenetic synthesis.

To relate this method to what I shall call functional analysis and synthesis, we should first note that structural analysis is based on an implicit functional decomposition that guides it, and without which it would simply not be possible. We could not, for instance, decompose a car into substructures such as “engine, transmission, suspension, brakes, steering” etc. (to quote the standard decomposition format of specialised magazines) if we did not have a (pre)conception of the function of these substructures. Notice in passing that the terms used in the format to label substructures are all functional ones—the function of brakes is braking, they are not called “disk and pad combinations”.

At a more fundamental level of description, we could not even distinguish the molecules of a machine from those of its physical environment if we were not able to distinguish two chemically structurally isomorphic molecules on the basis of their different function, within the machine and outside it. The same is true of organisms, whose molecules are indistinguishable in vivo and in vitro, as the adage goes, since Claude Bernard at least.

The reason that functional analysis has no name in science or philosophy is presumably that it is a method that typically belongs to technology, where it is widely practiced and is called design. Engineers, for instance, distinguish up to sixteen levels of functional decomposition, from the top-level sub-functions of a car—steering, accelerating, braking—to the nuts’ and bolts’ and gears’ level of primitive structural (and functional) components, from the ascending coordination of which emerges the variety of top-level functions we have progressively delegated to machines. Functional decomposition is widely used in biology, where organisms are decomposed into organs with different subfunctions (circulation etc.) down to the macromolecular level of enzymes with their specific catalytic functions. It is, however, frowned upon as redolent of teleology. We may note that the fact that organisms exploit and coordinate physical phenomena to produce higher-level rule-governed phenomena, whose rules such as self-replication are not laws of ph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Discussants
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Structures and Functions
• 2. Current Trends in Cognitive Development Research: Towards a New Synthesis
• 3. Piaget’s Natural Logic
• 4. Operatory Logic
• 5. Logical Reasoning, Development and Learning
• 6. The Value of Logic and the Logic of Values
• 7. The Masculine Authority of the Cognitive
• 8. Sociology of Science and Sociogenesis of Knowledge
• 9. Theory Change in Childhood
• 10. Cognition in its Relationship to Total Development in the First Few Years of Life
• 11. Origins of Intentional Strategic Memory in the Child
• 12. Spatial Reasoning in Small-size and Large-size Environments: In Search of Early Prefigurations of Spatial Cognition in Small-size Environments
• 13. Development as Construction: Nature and Psychological and Social Context of Genetic Constructions
• 14. The Coordination of Values: Current Relevance of the Piagetian Concept of Philosophy
• 15. Laws of Consciousness as Norms of Mental Development
• Closing Debate
• Author Index
• Subject Index