Jean Piaget Quotes

theory or have remained unaffected by them. It is true that a fact can sometimes appear to resemble an “accident,” as in the case of the apple that fell near Newton, but the accident only became a “fact” because Newton asked certain questions.

to avoid the difficulties of teleological language, adaptation must be described as an equilibrium between the action of the organism on the environment and vice versa.

Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean either on biology or on logic (or on sociology, but this in turn leads to the same alternatives).

We shall simply say then that every action involves an energetic or affective aspect and a structural or cognitive aspect, which, in fact, unites the different points of view already mentioned.

Nel, after throwing a stone onto a sloping bank watching the stone rolling said, 'Look at the stone. It's afraid of the grass

A response is thus a particular case of interaction between the external world and the subject, but unlike physiological interactions, which are of a material nature and involve an internal change in the bodies which are present, the responses studied by psychology are of a functional nature and are achieved at greater and greater distances in space (perception, etc.) and in time (memory, etc.) besides following more and more complex paths (reversals, detours, etc.).

A fact is first an answer to a question. If Sartre had consulted psychologists before judging them in the light of his own genius, he would have learned that they do not wait on the accident but begin by setting themselves problems.

Piaget is also concerned with attempts of Maine de Biran, Bergson, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to construct a philosophical psychology as opposed to a scientific empirical psychology. He believes that the difference between philosophical psychology and scientific psychology lies neither in the fact that the former concerns itself with “essences” (Husserl), with “irrationality” (Sartre), nor in its use of introspection. He sees the difference as being one rather of method: philosophical psychology neglects objective verification and grounds itself in subjectivity, although claiming to arrive at objective knowledge through intuition.

"But if all behaviour, without exception, thus implies an energetics or an "economy", forming its affective aspect, the interaction with the environment which it instigates likewise requires a form or structure to determine the various possible circuits between subject and object."

Now to picture the mechanism of this process of construction and not merely its progressive extension, we must note that each level is characterized by a new co-ordination of the elements provided — already existing in the form of wholes, though of a lower order — by the processes of the previous level. The sensori-motor schema, the characteristic unit of the system of pre-symbolic intelligence, thus assimilates perceptual schemata and the schemata relating to learned action (these schemata of perception and habit being of the same lower order, since the first concerns the present state of the object and the second only elementary changes of state). The symbolic schema assimilates sensori-motor schemata with differentiation of function; imitative accommodation is extended into imaginal significants and assimilation determines the significates. The intuitive schema is both a co-ordination and a differentiation of imaginal schemata. The concrete operational schema is a grouping of intuitive schemata, which are promoted, by the very fact of their being grouped, to the rank of reversible operations. Finally, the formal schema is simply a system of second-degree operations, and therefore a grouping operating on concrete groupings. Each of the transitions from one of these levels to the next is therefore characterized both by a new co-ordination and by a differentiation of the systems constituting the unit of the preceding level. Now these successive differentiations, in their turn, throw light on the undifferentiated nature of the initial mechanisms, and thus we can conceive both of a genealogy of operational groupings as progressive differentiations, and of an explanation of the pre-operational levels as a failure to differentiate the processes involved. Thus, as we have seen (Chap. 4), sensori-motor intelligence arrives at a kind of empirical grouping of bodily movements, characterized psychologically by actions capable of reversals and detours, and geometrically by wh

"According to Claparède, feelings appoint a goal for behaviour, while intelligence merely provides the means (the "technique"). But there exists an awareness of ends as well as of means, and this continually modifies the goals of action. In so far as feeling directs behaviour by attributing a value to its ends, we must confine ourselves to saying that it supplies the energy necessary for action, while knowledge impresses a structure on it. Thus arises the solution proposed by the so-called Gestalt psychology: behaviour involves a "total field" embracing subject and objects, and the dynamics of this field constitutes feeling (Lewin), while its structure depends on perception, effector-functions, and intelligence."

Piaget’s work shows that our concepts of logic, space, time, number, quantity, etc., are not given readymade as Kant thought, but undergo a process of development.

Psychology, in fact, repre-
sents the juncture of two opposite directions of are still insufficient. In the science of human be- scientific thought that are dialectically comple-
mentary. It follows that the system of sciences
cannot be arranged in a linear order, as many
people beginning with Auguste Comte have at-
tempted to arrange them.

So we must start from this dual nature of intelligence as something both biological and logical.

Knowledge is not predetermined by heredity; it is not predetermined in the things around us - in knowing things around him the subject always adds to them.