Quotes About Piaget

Piaget's third way (i.e., alternative to empiricism and nativism) is that knowledge develops through the child's actions on the world. In addition, knowledge is always tied to a particular framework (see Chapter 3, this volume), a paradigm case of which are the structures that emerge as any knowing subject interacts with the world.

As a biologist, Piaget considered cognitive development to be part of a much more general tendency of living systems to grow, change, improve and maintain themselves.

It is no coincidence that he referred to Kant as "the father of us all" (Piaget, 1965/1971, p. 220).

Piaget, J. (1985). The equilibration of cognitive structures: The central problem of intellectual development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published in 1975)

According to Piaget, the central idea of empiricism is that "the function of cognitive mechanisms is to submit to reality, copying its features as closely as possible, so that they may produce a reproduction which differs as little as possible from external reality" (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969/1976, p. 24).

Piaget, J. (2001). Studies in reflecting abstraction. Hove: Psychology Press. (Original work published in 1977)

Piaget, J., & Garcia, R. (1989). Psychogenesis and the history of science. New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published in 1983)

Piaget, J. (1995). Sociological studies. London: Routledge. (Original work published in 1977)

According to Piaget, infants' reactions to the bottle or other stimuli cannot be explained by external stimulus-response relations because the stimuli have a meaning for the infants to begin with; without this meaning, it would not be possible to explain why these stimuli become relevant or how the associations could be confirmed or strengthened (OI, p. 127).

Boom, J. (2004). Individualism and collectivism: A dynamic systems interpretation of Piaget's interactionism. In J. I. Carpendale & U. Müller (Eds.), Social interaction and the development of knowledge: Critical evaluation of Piaget's contribution (pp. 67–85). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chapman, M. (1988). Constructive evolution: Origins and development of Piaget's thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, M. (1992). Equilibration and the dialectics of organization. In H. Beilin & P. B. Pufall (Eds.), Piaget's theory: Prospects and possibilities (pp. 39–59). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Unlike Kant, for whom normative categories are a priori and fully formed in their use, for Piaget any framework has a formation in time through its serial use; that is, human development is the successive replacement of frameworks, from simple to complex (Smith, 2006, 2009).

For Piaget, the differentiation and coordination of sensorimotor schemes leads to the construction of increasingly complex relations between objects in the world (OI, p. 211).

The completion of sensorimotor development leads to a Copernican revolution (Piaget, 1970/1972a, p. 21; see Smith, 1987) in the sense that, for the infant, his own action is no longer the whole of reality and instead now becomes "one object among others in a space containing them all; and actions are related together through being coordinated by a subject who begins to be aware of himself as the source of actions" (Piaget, 1970/1972a, pp.

Piaget (1961/1966, pp. 152–153) made the same commitments as Kant: Normative properties are required for knowing reality, and so, following Kant, such properties are not learned (Piaget, 1964, p. 176) nor are they innate (Piaget, 1936/1953, pp. 1–2).

This raises the question of the role of Kantianism in Piaget's thinking. In the many discussions about this problem with one of us, Piaget denied any influence "except, maybe, a very indirect one…something like what Boring would have called the Zeitgeist and we all know that the Zeitgeist is everywhere, that is nowhere" (personal communication). We know of another example, however, where Piaget tends to cover his tracks carefully (see Piaget, 1982).

Piaget's account of equilibration is not only crucial for understanding his approach, it also sets his theory apart from most other theories concerning cognitive development.

Piaget, J. (1971). Insights and illusions of philosophy. New York: World Publishing Company. (Original work published in 1965)

In psychology, we cannot dispense with the need for an appeal to lived experience, and it is clear that Piaget's schema does not respond to the experience of the subject.