The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget

John H. Flavell

• Editorial: Barakaldo Books
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839743672
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

JEAN PIAGET—best known as developmental psychologist but also philosopher, logician, and educator—is one of the most remarkable figures in contemporary behavioral science. For more than forty years he and his associates have been constructing, in bits and pieces across an enormous bibliography, a broad and highly original theory of intellectual and perceptual development. Like Freudian theory, with which one is tempted to compare it in certain respects, Piaget's theoretical system is a detailed and complicated one, not renderable in a few mathematical or verbal statements. Unlike Freudian theory, however, the system in its totality has not been widely assimilated by others. The major purpose of this book is to present an integrated overview of Piaget's achievements, an overview sufficiently detailed to do justice to the complexity of his theory and the variety of his experimental contributions. This introductory chapter is intended to explain why a book on Piaget is desirable—or at least why it was written—and to summarize the plan or organization which the book will follow. In order to put these matters in context and to set the stage for a detailed description of Piaget's system, it may be useful to examine briefly the man himself—the chronology of his life and achievements.

Part One—THE THEORY

CHAPTER ONE—The Nature of the System

A NUMBER of facts about Piaget’s work lie not so much in the system as about and around it. Information of this kind, of which only a part can be termed metatheory in the strict sense, is primarily orientative: it helps to place the system in the context of other systems, both similar and different. This chapter offers such peripheral and perspective-giving information.

First and most basic will be a discussion of Piaget’s scientific aims: precisely what he has attempted to study and what he has not attempted to study. A description of Piaget’s methodology—or methodologies—follows this. Since some of his experimental methods have come under critical attack, it will be especially important to describe these with some care. The third and final section is more difficult to define. It will include what might be called a “personality profile” of Piaget’s theoretical writings—a description of idiosyncrasies of the system, of characteristics of the work and its written presentation which make it uniquely a Piaget production.

In discussing these things—scientific aims, methodologies, and idiosyncrasies of the system—a lot of important theoretical and experimental content will be sketched much too briefly and superficially for complete understanding; most of this content will, however, be taken up again in detail in subsequent chapters. This chapter means to convey a preliminary and global image of the system, rather than a detailed mapping.

SCIENTIFIC AIMS

It is possible to give a rough definition of Piaget’s principal scientific concerns in a single sentence: he is primarily interested in the theoretical and experimental investigation of the qualitative development of intellectual structures. The pertinent words and phrases of this definition need examination and qualification.

Intelligence

A persistent and overriding interest in the area of intelligence is a salient feature distinguishing Piaget’s work from that of most child psychologists. To be sure, he has been and is interested in other areas, most notably perception, but also moral attitudes and other value systems (Piaget, 1932, 1934c; Inhelder and Piaget, 1958) and even motivation (1952c). As for perception, much of its value as an object of study for Piaget lies in the fact that it can be compared and contrasted with intelligence. Values and attitudes are seen as cognitive systems imbued in the later stages of development with the same formal organization as more unambiguously intellectual achievements (1954c). As Chapter 2 will show, motivation is treated almost exclusively in terms of motivation to intellectual adaptation. Moreover, the motives seen as most important are thought to be intrinsic to intellectual functioning itself and can at least approximately be conveyed by such terms as exploratory drive, drive to mastery, etc.; conventional bodily needs as motivators, the perennial favorites of learning theory, are given short shrift in Piaget’s system. Finally, his interests in education, logic, and epistemology are almost exclusively intelligence-oriented.

Development

Piaget is also and just as fundamentally a developmental psychologist in the great tradition of Hall, Stern, Baldwin, the Bühlers, Binet, Werner, and the rest. He firmly believes that the study of ontogenetic change is a valuable undertaking in its own right. Even more, he is convinced that adult human behavior cannot be fully understood without a developmental perspective and deplores what he sees to be an unfortunate contemporary hiatus between child psychologists and those who study only adults (1957b, pp. 18-19). The addition of the genetic dimension, as he calls it, does more than simply give historical status to adult cognition; it makes possible, he believes, at least tentative solutions to age-old epistemological problems, especially those concerned with the ontogenetic precursors of certain important classes of cognitions.

We need to make clear precisely what Piaget’s developmental approach—the study of the genetic dimension—does and does not involve. It does involve the careful description and theoretical analysis of successive ontogenetic states in a given culture. Thus behavior change from less to more advanced functioning is the primary datum. Further, it involves painstaking comparisons among these successive states; the dominant characteristics of a given state are described in terms of states preceding and states following. It is characteristically not concerned with any systematic exploration of other independent variables which may temporally accelerate or retard the appearance of the behavior studied. In this almost exclusive preoccupation with age changes per se, Piaget is poles apart from many contemporary child psychologists (see Chapters 11 and 12).

Structure, Function and Content

A third important feature of Piaget’s system is a particular bent towards studying the structure of developing intelligence, as opposed to its function and content. Piaget has made distinctions among these three, and especially between the first two, in a number of places (1928a, 1931a, 1931c, 1952c).

In speaking of content, he refers to raw, uninterpreted behavioral data themselves. Thus, when one of Piaget’s subjects asserts that one object sinks because it is heavy and another sinks because it is light (1930a), or behaves as though time were a function of the distance an object travelled but not of its velocity (1946a), we witness behavioral content. So also are the substantive, external aspects of earlier sensory-motor behavior, such as the child’s capacity to make detours, to estimate distances visually, etc. (1954a).

By function, on the other hand, Piaget refers to those broad characteristics of intelligent activity which hold true for all ages and which virtually define the very essence of intelligent behavior. As will be seen in Chapter 2, intelligent activity is always an active, organized process of assimilating the new to the old and of accommodating the old to the new. Intellectual content will vary enormously from age to age in ontogenetic development, yet the general functional properties of the adaptational process remain the same.

Interposed between function and content, Piaget postulates the existence of cognitive structures. Structure, like content and unlike function, does indeed change with age, and these developmental changes constitute the major object of study for Piaget. What are structures in Piaget’s system? They are the organizational properties of intelligence, organizations created through functioning and inferable from the behavioral contents whose nature they determine. As such, Piaget speaks of them as mediators interposed between the invariant functions on the one hand and the variegated behavioral contents on the other (1928a).

In the above example of objects sinking in water for two opposed reasons, certain structural properties can be said to mediate or be responsible for this content. First, the child is phenomenistic in the sense that his cognitive structure is so organized that the surface appearances of things are overattended to; his thought is dominated by the environmental properties which strike him first and most vividly—in this case the lightness or heaviness of the object. Second, he fails to relate in a logical way successive cognitive impressions; thus, heaviness and lightness are successively invoked as explanatory principles with no thought to the contradiction involved, as though the need to reconcile opposing impressions were not a characteristic of his cognitive structure. These are structural properties in the sense that they determine precisely what will and will not result when a given cognizing organism attempts to adapt to a given set of external events. To use a simple and somewhat imprecise capsule definition, function is concerned with the manner in which any organism makes cognitive progress; content refers to the external behavior which tells us that functioning has occurred; and structure refers to the inferred organizational properties which explain why this content rather than some other content has emerged.

The different structural characteristics posited for the various developmental levels are in large part the subject matter of the following chapters and are not specified here. Suffice it to say that Piaget’s career can be divided into two rough eras with respect to the way structures are described. During the first twenty years or so, structures were defined primarily in verbal, intuitional terms. The structural properties of behavior towards sinking objects, in the example given above, were described in such terms, e.g., expressions like phenomenistic, lack of need to reconcile opposing impressions, etc. There are a large number of concepts of this type, especially in the earlier work: egocentrism, syncretism, juxtaposition, reversibility, predicative thinking, realism, animism, artificialism, dynamism, precausality, transductive reasoning. Beginning with the introduction of the group of displacements in the early 1930’s (1954a) and of the grouping a few years later (1937b, 1942a), structural characteristics tend more and more to be framed in terms of logical algebra and equilibrium theory. This tendency to substitute mathematical for verbal terminology is not to be taken as a rejection of earlier interpretations in favor of new and different ones. Rather, it is an attempt to discover (or even invent, whenever necessary) mathematical structures which express the essence of these verbally given organizational properties. For example, and to anticipate a bit, a child of eight who possesses the grouping structure will, by implication from the structure, show reversibility of thought, a relative lack of egocentrism, a capacity for synthesizing rather than simply juxtaposing data, and a number of other characteristics.

Finally, it should be said that Piaget’s concern with structure as opposed to content and function is by no means absolute. It can hardly be said that he has ignored function and content. As regards function, one of the distinguishing characteristics of his theory has been an attempt to isolate the abstract properties of intelligence-in-action which hold for all sentient organisms. These properties—organization and the two components of adaptation mentioned above, assimilation and accommodation—are called functional invariants (1952c, p. 4). As Chapter 2 shows, an examination of these functional invariants is crucial in any discussion of structural change. Similarly, the content of developmental acquisitions is taken to be important otherwise than simply as evidence for structural properties. To take one example, Piaget has made suggestions for the teaching of elementary mathematics on the basis of content aspects of the development of number in children (1956). And the content aspects of Piaget’s studies tend in themselves to be interesting to the average reader; they would scarcely be less than interesting to Piaget himself.

Qualitative Stages

The fourth and final key word in the definition of Piaget’s aims is qualitative. He is interested in the qualitative characteristics of development. His concern with structure versus content betrays this, since structural changes are in their essence qualitative in nature. In Piaget’s system, the panorama of changing structures in the course of development is conceptually partitioned into stages whose qualitative similarities and differences serve as conceptual landmarks in trying to grasp the process. Piaget and Inhelder have tried to specify some of the criterial aspects of the stage concept (Piaget, 1955d; Tanner and Inhelder, 1956).

THE REALITY OF STAGES

In order to posit a succession of developmental stages for a given behavior domain, they argue, the behavioral changes in the domain must first of all be susceptible of such a breakdown. That is, if behavior simply becomes better and better in a completely continuous way with no readily discernible qualitative changes in the process, if earlier behavior...