Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist, although he preferred the term genetic epistemologist, reflecting his belief that the development of knowledge is based on a biologically determined timetable. He is considered the major figure in developmental psychology in the twentieth century, famous for working out a sequence of stages of cognitive development. His understanding that intellectual development proceeds in an orderly fashion through a sequence of identifiable stages, in a way similar to physical growth, revolutionized our view of the child's mind.

Biography: early life

He was born in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. His father, Arthur, was a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. He was a precocious child and his long scientific career began in 1907 at the age of ten with the publication of a short paper on his observations of an albino sparrow. His purpose in publishing this observation was to show the curator of the Neuchâtel Museum of Natural Sciences that he was active in the field so that he might be given permission to work at the museum out of regular hours.

Throughout his school years he developed his interest in biology, particularly mollusks, publishing several papers in professional journals. He became well-known among European zoologists, to the point of being offered a position as curator of a mollusk exhibition, which he had to turn down in order to complete high school.

During these adolescent years Piaget experienced two intellectual "crises." The first, as he put it, was "the problem of religion." His mother, a devout Protestant, enrolled him in a course of religious instruction. There he noticed the difficulty of reconciling certain religious dogmas with biology, and the frailty of the proofs of God's existence, although at that time he in no way denied the existence of God. He found in his father's library a work by August Sabatier entitled Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion Based on Psychology and History, which delighted him with the notion of "evolution of dogmas" and sparked in him a passion for philosophy. The second "crisis" occurred when his godfather introduced him to the "creative evolution" of Henri Bergson. This was the first time Piaget had heard philosophy discussed by anyone not a theologian. It was both an emotional and intellectual shock: "I recall one evening of profound revelation. The identification of God with life itself was an idea that stirred me almost to ecstasy because it now enabled me to see in biology the explanation of all things and of the mind itself" (Evans, p.111). Thus, Piaget came to see the epistemological problem (the problem of knowing) in a new light, and decided to dedicate his life to the biological explanation of knowledge.

He received a Ph.D. in natural science from the University of Neuchâtel in 1918. During this time, he published two philosophical essays entitled "La Mission de l'Idée" (The Mission of the Idea) and "Recherche" {The Quest}, which showed the direction of his thought, although he dismissed them as merely adolescent thinking. At this time, however, he recognized the need for something other than philosophy in his quest, namely psychology. He studed briefly at the University of Zürich under prominent psychologists including Karl Jung, and his interest in psychoanalysis can be dated to this period.

He then moved from Switzerland to France where he continued his studies of psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and was fortunate to meet Theodore Simon and work with him at the school for boys established by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test. Here he found that children's wrong answers to problems revealed hitherto unknown aspects of their reasoning. Thus began his experimental research into children's thinking. The following is an example of this type of questioning (Gruber and Vonèche, p.xxi), which led Piaget to formulate a period of childhood egocentrism:

Adult: Does the moon move or not?
Child (age 7): When we go, it goes.
Adult: What makes it move?
Child: We do.
Adult: How?
Child: When we walk. It goes by itself.

At this point Piaget formed his plan: first he would study children's thinking and intelligence as they emerged in the first few years of life; then he would construct a theory of structures of intelligence; and finally he would be able to formulate a psychological and biological epistemology. In 1921, he returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, and in 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, and they had three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent, whose development he studied from infancy. Over the next six decades he succeeded in accomplishing his plan.

The stages of cognitive development

Piaget became a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva from 1929 to 1975 and is best known for organizing cognitive development into a series of stages – the levels of development corresponding to infancy, early childhood, later childhood, and adolescence. These four stages are called the Sensorimotor stage, which occurs from birth to age two, (children experience through their senses), the Preoperational stage, which occurs from ages two to seven (motor skills are acquired), the Concrete Operational stage, which occurs from ages seven to eleven (children think logically about concrete events), and the Formal Operational stage, which occurs after age eleven (abstract reasoning is developed here). Advancement through these levels occurs through the interaction of biological factors and experience, through a mechanism he called "equilibration." He believed that children (and indeed adults) are continually generating theories about the external world (which are kept or dismissed depending on whether we see them working in practice).

Piaget's view of the child's mind

Piaget's research was focussed on the goal of discovering how knowledge develops. He viewed children as little philosophers and scientists building their own individual theories of knowledge based on logical structures that develop over time and through experience. Thus, children of different ages view the world in entirely different ways from adults.

Critics of Piaget's work, however, have noted that the final stage of intellectual development, that of Formal Operations, although beginning around the age of 11, involves abstract inferential thought that is beyond the comprehension of many adults. This final stage of cognitive development is devoid of the emotional and spiritual content that is found in people's thinking. In fact, it more closely describes the processes of a computer or artificial intelligence than a human being. Also, it provides no basis for any satisfactory model of the development of adult thinking, since the stage of Formal Operational thinking surpasses the intellectual development of many adults. Yet, Piaget believed that people continue to construct their knowledge of the world as they experience it.

Influence

During his long academic career which spanned over seven decades Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles. In 1969 he became the first European to be awarded the American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. In 1972 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize, an annual award gven by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to individuals or institutions that have made notable contributions to European culture, society, or social science.

His theory of cognitive development has proved influential throughout developmental psychology, notably on the work of Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, Lawrence Kohlberg, and James Fowler. His influence spread from psychology to philosophy and beyond. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget's work in helping him understanding the transition between modes of thought which characterized his theory of paradigm shifts. The philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas incorporated Piagetian thinking into his work, most notably in The Theory of Communicative Action. Piaget had a considerable impact in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. Seymour Papert used Piaget's work while developing the Logo programming language, and his theories influenced the creation of graphical user interfaces.

Piaget has also had a substantial impact on approaches to education. His discovery of stages in children's thinking changed our view of education from simply imparting knowledge to guiding children in age-appropriate ways as they learn about their world. In Conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society... But for me, education means making creators... You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists." (Bringuier, p.132).

Role of religion in Piaget's thought

The crises of faith in Piaget's adolescence led to a shift from belief in the transcendent God to an immanent God. He discussed this in a publication entitled Two Types of Religious Attitude: Immanence and Transcendence in 1928. Here he favors recognition of divine immanence, in which God is found within the person in the form of conscience, as more evolved than belief in a transcendent, personal God who created the world and set its rules of existence. This move to divine immanence resolved Piaget's dilemma regarding the relationship between faith and science and allowed him to proceed in his quest for a biological explanation of knowledge. However, the loss of the personal God in Piaget's thinking may be the cause of his limited understanding of the purpose of human life, or God's ideal of creation, and so resulted in his failure to grasp the importance of love, human relationships, and spirituality in human development.

Major works and achievements

Single "best read"

• Bringuier, Jean-Claude, Conversations with Jean Piaget, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Major works (English translation)

• Piaget, J. (1928). Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Piaget, J. (1951). Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. London: Heinemann.
• Piaget, J. (1952). Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: International Universities Press.
• Piaget, J. (1954). Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Basic Books.
• Inhelder, B. and J. Piaget (1958). The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books.
• Piaget, J. (1970). Structuralism. New York: Harper & Row.
• Piaget, J. (1971). Biology and Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget's theory. In P. Mussen (ed). Handbook of Child Psychology. 4th edition. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley.
• Piaget, J. (1995). Sociological Studies. London: Routledge.
• Piaget, J. (2000). Commentary on Vygotsky. New Ideas in Psychology, 18, 241-59.
• Piaget, J. (2001). Studies in Reflecting Abstraction. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Appointments

• 1921-25 Research Director, Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva
• 1925-29 Professor of Psychology, Sociology and the Philosophy of Science, University of Neuchâtel
• 1929-39 Professor of the History of Scientific Thought, University of Geneva
• 1929-67 Director, International Bureau of Education, Geneva
• 1932-71 Director, Institute of Educational Sciences, University of Geneva
• 1938-51 Professor of Experimental Psychology and Sociology, University of Lausanne
• 1939-51 Professor of Sociology, University of Geneva
• 1940-71 Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Geneva
• 1952-64 Professor of Genetic Psychology, Sorbonne, Paris
• 1955-80 Director, International Centre for Genetic Epistemology, Geneva
• 1971-80 Emeritus Professor, University of Geneva

External links

• Jean Piaget Archives a private foundation at the University of Geneva.
• Jean Piaget Society Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development (USA).

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bringuier, Jean-Claude, Conversations with Jean Piaget, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Evans, Richard I., Jean Piaget: The Man and His Ideas, Eleanor Duckworth (trans.), New York, NY: Dutton, 1973.
• Gruber, Howard E. and Jacques J. Vonèche (eds), The Essential Piaget, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1995.
• Smith, Leslie, "Jean Piaget". In N. Sheehy, A. Chapman. W. Conroy (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Psychology. London: Routledge, 1997.
• Smith, Leslie, "Jean Piaget". In J. A. Palmer (ed) 50 Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Vander Goot, Mary, Piaget as a Visionary Thinker, Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall Press, 1985.

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Comments

This is an unfinished work in progress.—Jennifer Tanabe 15:20, 20 Sep 2005 (CDT)