Judgement and Reasoning in the Child

Jean Piaget

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134617852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Over a period of six decades, Jean Piaget conducted a program of naturalistic research that has profoundly affected our understanding of child development.

CHAPTER I
GRAMMAR AND LOGIC

CONJUNCTIONS EXPRESSING CAUSAL, LOGICAL, AND DISCORDANT RELATIONS, AS USED BY CHILDREN BETWEEN THE AGES OF THREE AND NINE.¹

WE have endeavoured to show in an earlier work that thought in the child is ego-centric, i.e. that the child thinks for himself without troubling to make himself understood nor to place himself at the other person’s point of view. We tried, above all, to show that these ego-centric habits have a considerable effect upon the structure of thought itself. Thus it is chiefly because he feels no need to socialize his thought that the child is so little concerned, or at any rate so very much less concerned than we are, to convince his hearers or to prove his point.

If this be the case, we must expect childish reasoning to differ very considerably from ours, to be less deductive and above all less rigorous. For what is logic but the art of proof ? To reason logically is so to link one’s propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one’s own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other. Logical reasoning is always a demonstration. If, therefore, the child remains for a long time ignorant of the need for demonstration, this is bound to have an effect upon his manner of reasoning. As we have already pointed out (L.T.,¹ Chap. III, § 5), the child is not really aware of the necessity of arranging his sentences in logical order.

But how are we to enquire into the nature of logical relations in children, while retaining our hold upon reasoning as revealed in direct psychological observation, and yet avoid making use of the necessarily artificial framework of the logicians ?

We may begin by a method, tentative but natural, which consists in seeing how the child behaves when confronted with those conjunctions which denote causality or logical relations (because, for, therefore, etc.) and with those expressing antithetical relations (in spite of, even though, although, etc.). In this connexion two courses seem to be indicated. The first consists in inducing the child, by means of appropriate experiments, to make use of these conjunctions, to make him understand or invent, for example, sentences in which the required conjunctions are used. The second consists in noting in the child’s spontaneous talk all the sentences in which the said conjunction is used. For instance, in studying the conjunctions of causality as used between the ages of 6 and 7 we shall have to note down every ‘because,’ every ‘since,’ and every ‘why’ occurring in the corresponding questions.

In one of the chapters of our last volume we made a certain contribution to this question by analysing, not the conjunctions of causality in the child, but the questions corresponding to these conjunctions (the ‘whys’). The analysis of these ‘whys’ yielded as a first important result the fact that before the age of 7 there seems to be no pronounced desire for logical justification. What the ‘whys’ bear witness to is a need to explain and justify material phenomena, human actions, the rules of school and society, etc., far rather than a wish to justify judgments, i.e. a wish to deduce or demonstrate anything. The present chapter is partly intended to confirm the following conclusion: if the absence or rarity of “whys of logical justification” really has the significance which we have attributed to it, we must expect to find in childish idiom on the one hand a correspondingly rare occurrence of the “because of logical justification,” and on the other a persistent difficulty on the part of the child in finding the correct justification for simple propositions which he is asked to demonstrate. This is what we shall try to establish.

Now, if such are the habits of childish thought, childish idiom ought to display a discontinuous and chaotic character in contrast to the deductive style of the adult, logical relations being omitted or taken for granted. In a word, there will be ‘juxtaposition’ and not relating of propositions. The study of juxtaposition will therefore constitute the second object of this chapter.

The phenomenon of juxtaposition is very frequent in child thought. A well-known and particularly striking example has been signalled in the case of children’s drawings, and has been referred to as ‘synthetic incapacity.’¹ M. Luquet has pointed out that one of the most universal characteristics of these children’s drawings is the inability shown by their authors to portray the relations existing between the different parts of the model. The thing is not there as a whole, the details only are given, and then, for lack of synthetic relations, they are simply juxtaposed. Thus an eye will be placed next to a head, an arm next to a leg, and so on.

This synthetic incapacity covers more ground than one would think, for it is really the mark of the whole of childish thought up to a certain age. We have already observed it (L.T., Chap. III) in connexion with understanding between children. We have tried to show that occasions abound when, instead of expressing the relation between two propositions by the word ‘because’ (as had been done in the corresponding adult communication) or in any other way, the child was content to juxtapose these propositions without any further ado, whether or no he had been conscious of any causal connexion between them. Now, in three-quarters of such cases, the child who was spoken to did not realize that such a connexion was in question, and could therefore see nothing more than two statements which were independent of each other.

Juxtaposition is therefore, in a certain sense, the converse of the process which we studied under the name of ‘syncretism.’ Syncretism is the spontaneous tendency on the part of children to take things in by means of a comprehensive act of perception instead of by the detection of details, to find immediately and without analysis analogies between words or objects that have nothing to do with each other, to bring heterogeneous phenomena into relation with each other, to find a reason for every chance event; in a word, it is the tendency to connect everything with everything else. Syncretism is therefore an excess of relating while juxtaposition exhibits a deficiency in the same function. The two seem in complete opposition to each other. In drawing, children give only the detail and neglect the synthesis, but childish perceptions seem to be formed by general schemas rather than by analysis. In thinking, the child is ignorant of logical justification, he juxtaposes propositions instead of connecting them, but he is able to give a reason for everything, to justify every phenomenon and every coincidence. How exactly are these contradictory phenomena related to each other? This is the question to which we must find an answer.

To sum up, the object of this chapter will be 1° to form an introduction to the study of childish reasoning by means of an analysis of the types of relation involved in the conjunctions of causality, of logical connexion, and of discordance; 2° to draw from this study an analysis of the phenomenon of juxtaposition; and 3° to show the relations existing between juxtaposition and syncretism.

I. CONJUNCTIONS OF CAUSALITY AND LOGICAL RELATIONS.

The method we have adopted is extremely simple. In the first place, we are in possession of a number of records of the actual conversation of children of different ages who were under observation for about a month each (see L.T., Chap. I). We have selected from these records the sentences which contain conjunctions, and we have analysed them from the point of view which concerns us at present. In the second place, we have made experiments in the Elementary schools of Geneva, which consist in asking the children to invent or to complete sentences containing the word ‘because’ or other causal conjunctions.

To do this, you begin by asking the child if he knows how to invent sentences with a given word (table, etc.). When he has understood he is asked to invent a phrase containing the word ‘because,’ etc. Sometimes the child is bored, in which case you pass straight on to the second part of the experiment. You tell the subject that you are going to give him an unfinished sentence: “Then you must make up the end yourself, so that it should go nicely with the beginning, so that the sentence should be true, etc.” You then give a list of sentences to complete after the following pattern: “The man fell off his bicycle because …,” and the child must make up an ending. As a rule this game is quite popular to begin with. You can also take the child’s answer as a new starting-point. For instance, if the subject answers, “Because he slipped,” you ask: “And he slipped because …,” and so on, as long as it makes sense. You must at the same time try to avoid boredom or automatism.

In order to study the use of the conjunction ‘because’ we used this method to experiment on about 40 children from 6 to 10 who were examined individually. In addition to this, we carried out a collective enquiry on 200 children from 7 to 9 by writing the sentences to be completed on the black-board. The simultaneous use of collective enquiry and personal examination is a method that has much in its favour in the experiments in question: the first supplies one with statistical data in a short time, and the second enables one to check the results by analysis. In this way we collected about 500 sentences by means of personal interrogatory, and about 2000 by means of collective enquiry.

§ 1. TYPES OF RELATION EXPRESSED BY THE CONJUNCTION ‘BECAUSE.’.—Before describing our results we must begin by distinguishing between the two main types of relations which are denoted by the conjunction ‘because’ [parce que], viz. the relation of cause and effect, or causal relation, and the relation of reason and consequent or the logical relation.

The causal ‘because’ is the mark of a relation of cause and effect between two phenomena or two events. In the sentence which we gave to the child, “The man fell off his bicycle because …,” the ‘because’ calls for a causal relation, since it is a question of connecting an event (a fall) with another event (e.g. “someone got in his way”), and not of connecting one idea with another.

The logical ‘because,’ on the other hand, denotes a relation, not of cause and effect, but of ‘implication,’ of reason and consequent; what the ‘because’ connects here is no longer two observed facts, but two ideas or two judgments. For instance, “Half 9 is not 4, because 4 and 4 make 8.” Or, “That animal is not dead, because (or since) it is still moving.”

Difficulties, from the logical point of view, undoubtedly face us at this juncture, but we shall try to exclude them from these purely genetic studies. When does implication begin and when does the causal relation end? Have not the relations just mentioned the same right to be named causal as those that were given first? Or at any rate, is not the half of a number as much a datum of empirical observation for the child as is a fall from a bicycle? But to take such a standpoint is to forget that in order to explain why half 9 is not 4, we have to appeal to definitions and relations which are not causes, but logical relations, whereas to explain a bicycle accident there is really no need to appeal to anything beyond facts. It is therefore primarily in virtue of the type of explanation which they admit of that these two kinds of explanation differ; the one is (logical) demonstration, the other (causal) explanation.

This criterion, which naturally raises difficulties in its turn, is nevertheless justifiable on psychological and not only on logical grounds. It is cle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter I.—Grammar and Logic
• Chapter II.—Formal Thought and Relational Judgments
• Chapter III.—The Growth of Relativity in Ideas and Notions
• Chapter IV.—How the Child Reasons
• Chapter V.—Summary and Conclusions.
• Appendix.—Note on the Coefficient of Ego-Centrism
• Index