Quotes About Piaget

In fact, within Piaget's developmental epistemology, sensorimotor intelligence development takes up a systematic place: It is the centerpiece that bridges biological and psychological development.

For Piaget, psychological life begins with the use of hereditary reflexes (OI, pp. 39, 223). Reflexes are general action patterns such as sucking, looking, and touching (Piaget, 1975/1985, p. 69). Each reflex constitutes an "organized totality" (OI, p. 38) that comprises perceptions, coordinated movements, and a need; it is not just a "summation of movements" (OI, p. 38).

In J. I. Carpendale & U. Müller (Eds.), Social interaction and the development of knowledge: Critical evaluation of Piaget's contribution (pp. 67–85).

In his early work, he focused on verbal exchanges in order to understand the logical, rational thought of the child. However, when he later studied the development of intelligence in infants, he realized that to fully understand the origins of the operations of verbal thought one has to first examine the manipulation and experimentation with objects (Piaget, 1952).

In the preface of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1787/1933, B XVI) refers in the same way to the Copernican Revolution. He points out that for explaining the possibility of scientific knowledge about (physical) objects we have to reflect on central cognitive functions (intuition and categories). According to Piaget, however, the reversal of the attentional focus of the mind does not happen just once but several times – namely at every level transition.

To my way of thinking, knowing an object does not mean copying it – it means acting upon it" (Piaget, 1970, p. 15; cf. Piaget & Inhelder, 1966/1971, pp. 385–386).

Piaget termed this action logic sensorimotor intelligence, and the three volumes on infancy "form one entity dedicated to the beginnings of intelligence, that is to say, to the various manifestations of sensorimotor intelligence and to the most elementary forms of expression" (OI, p. ix).

1. Strictly speaking, the general way of functioning is not hereditary because it is already operative at the level of the genes (Piaget, 1970/1972a, p. 57). Rather, it is a functional a priori that reflects the continuity of life.

Many aspects of Piaget's theory of infant development have been severely criticized. I briefly cover three lines of criticism: (a) Piaget did not properly explain the process of interiorization and the emergence of symbolic representations, (b) Piaget largely ignored the importance of social interaction for the development of knowledge, and (c) Piaget severely underestimated infants' abilities.

However, the construction of the social world does not receive the same level of attention in Piaget's work on infancy as the construction of the physical world.

Piaget also did not provide a detailed analysis of how communicative interaction leads to symbolic representation.

The central goals of Piaget's theory were to describe and explain the fecundity and rigor of thought (Piaget, 1936/1952, pp. 417–419; see Chapman, 1988, p. 144). Fecundity refers to the continuous construction of novel forms of thought in the course of development. Rigor refers to the reversibility (i.e., systemic coordination) and deductive necessity of thought (see Chapter 3, this volume).

In contrast to empiricist theories, in which knowledge is derived from perception, Piaget emphasized the role of action and operations (transformation) in the construction of knowledge.

The major thrust of the criticism leveled against Piaget's theory of infant development comes from the neonativist enterprise that argues that core knowledge and the abilities to represent and reason about physical reality (e.g., objects, causality, space) are innate (see Bremner, 2001; Cohen & Cashon, 2006, for reviews).

The issue is not whether Piaget's observations and experiments can be replicated; the issue is whether Piaget's method of assessing infant competencies (i.e., his reliance on sensorimotor action such as manual search) systematically underestimated infants' competencies.

contemporary neonativism is rooted in an epistemological framework entirely different from Piaget's epistemological framework.

In Piaget's developmental epistemology, sensorimotor intelligence serves as a bridge between biological functioning and rational thought.

The reflexes of interest to Piaget are distinguished from simple reflexes (e.g., sneezing reflex) in that they change as a result of experience and thus have a history (OI, p. 40).

Because Piaget used mathematical models to describe the organization of thought, this change in emphasis is reflected in his use of different mathematical formalizations.

From the 1940s to 1970s, Piaget used algebraic or set theoretical concepts to describe this organization of operations, which he called "groupings

Piaget's view of infants as active agents that confer increasingly complex meanings on the things interacted with has yet to be fully assimilated in developmental psychology and in philosophy.6

This law of equilibrium, Piaget repeats, is not something external, imposed upon intellectual change from without; it is not a transcendent, Platonic principle. On the contrary, much like Kant's notion of the moral law, which is not internal to the individual, the law of equilibration is an immanent principle in experience (Piaget, 1977/1995, pp. 94, 154, 190, 216, 227, 243). Such a concept of the immanent versus the

Jackson, I. (1987). On situating Piaget's subject: A triangulation based on Kant, structuralism, and biology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 17, 471–486.

Kant argued that our intuition (i.e., sensibility) and understanding use a priori (i.e., independent of all experience) forms and categories, which are the condition of the possibility for experiencing objectivity. Piaget subscribed to the ordering and organizing function of the mind, but he believed that the forms and categories are not a priori but undergo development as a result of the subject's interaction with the world (OI, pp. 376–395).