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Re: [xmca] Piaget's Periods



Thanks, David, for pointing to the database of Piaget's publications at the Jean Piaget Foundation website. I didn't know about this, and it's a very useful resource.

I think Flavell had already helped me narrow down the time when Piaget moved from period one to period two of his work, and the publication database clinched it. It contains a copy of the 1927 article that I mentioned, based on a presentation Piaget gave in London earlier that year to the British Psychological Society. The database includes a brief commentary, which begins thus:

"this article marks a milestone in the progression of the developmental psychology of Piaget. It bridges the gap between the early work of psychology whose purpose was the thought of children between 4 and 12 years ago, and the second stage of Piagetian research whose main purpose is to study the birth of the sensorimotor intelligence, within two years following the birth of a child.”

I'm willing to conclude that in 1927, perhaps 1926, a year or so after the birth of Jacqueline, his first daughter, Piaget was moving from an account of development as socialization to one of development as adaptation.

This means that when LSV published his critique of Piaget in 1932, the introduction to the Russian translation of Piaget's earlier books, which became chapter 2 of Thought & Language, Piaget had already abandoned the conceptual framework that LSV analyzed, one in which the child is egocentric, even autistic, and must have logic and reason forced on them by adults.

Does that mean the chapter is of no interest today? Far from it, in my opinion. First, the Piaget that LSV critiques in chapter 2 is very close to the way many people have interpreted Vygotsky! Piaget’s emphasis is on socialization as a necessary correction to the child’s egocentrism and irrationality. LSV is often interpreted as offering a theory of development through “enculturation,” where experts in some field of knowledge guide the child to expertise. LSV does us a service here by in effect explaining how he is not a “socialization” theorist. Piaget even wrote, in a review of the state of French psychology published in 1926, “But the great innovation in genetic studies is the appeal made to sociology in explanations of the higher psychological functions” (1926, p. 442). On the face of it that sounds very like LSV, and LSV is interpreted by many as seeing development as a process of enculturation. I have a chapter coming out in a book edited by Tim Koschmann that is titled "Schooling: Domestication or Ontological Construction" because it is a response to a sociocultural theorist who argues that schooling is, and should be, a "domestication" of the child's mind.

That's exactly the position that LSV found in early Piaget, and it's one he rejects completely. It "loses" the concept of development. 

But we do need to recognize that the Piaget critiqued in chapter 2 is not the Piaget of structuralist stages that many of us know and teach. And Piaget didn't change his mind because of LSV's critique; he'd moved on five years earlier. However, and here's an irony, in the second period of his work Piaget was surely guilty of the charge of “intellectualism” which LSV makes in chapter 3 of Thought & Language! Piaget argued that by the time the child enters preschool, the stage of preoperational thought, he or she possesses, albeit on a practical level, what amounts to a newtonian understanding of space and time. 

Chapter 3 is short, and it is focused on Stern, a psychologist who most of us have forgotten. But the problem that LSV addressed in this chapter -- the tendency to "intellectualize" the young child's abilities - has grown enormously in importance since he wrote. Since the cognitive revolution in the 1950s the majority of developmental psychologists have come to believe that even young infants form "theories" about the world that differ from adults’ concepts only in unimportant ways. 

In other words, LSV’s argument in chapter 3 is much more relevant to modern Piagetians than his argument in chapter 2. It is also still very relevant to modern developmental psychologists. And chapter 2 is still relevant to block interpretations that LSV was proposing a theory of "socialization" rather than sociogenesis.

Martin



On Feb 10, 2011, at 4:07 AM, David Kellogg wrote:

> Bakhtin and Medvedev remark, a propos the formalists, that a strong opponent is better than a weak ally, because a strong opponent will make you stronger, but a weak ally is likely to kill you. 
>  
> I think there's a good reason why Vygotsky relentlessly sought Piaget out as an opponent. Only Piaget and Lewin were really strong enough to make Vygotsky stronger. Leontiev almost killed him off entirely (I agree with Kozulin; we are STILL trying to recover from what was essentially a compromise with Piaget, namely Leontiev's idea that the child's object-oriented activity by itself can drive development).
> 
>  
> One of the things that makes periodizing Piaget difficult is that his books were translated into English much later than they were written in French. There is, however, a very useful list of the French originals HERE:
>  
> http://www.fondationjeanpiaget.ch/fjp/site/bibliographie/index_livres_chrono.php
>  
>> From a cultural historical perspective, I think Piaget's first and best period begins with what Vygotsky calls his "three whales" (Language and Thought in the Child, Reason and Judgment in the Child, and the Child's Conception of Reality). It ends with "Moral Judgment in the Child". 
>  
> In 1936, Piaget makes his choice. He completely gives up the idea of using "sociological language" to explain "biological development of knowledge" (by which he means psychological development). Perhaps the reason was that Piaget started having his own children, and he became fascinated with the parallels between his newborn kids and the snails and animals he had started his studies with. So the next books ("Origin of Intelligence in the Child, etc.") are almost entirely concerned with the "sensorimotor" and nonlinguistic sources of logic, and for this reason they are much less challenging and interesting from a cultural historical point of view. 
>  
> In 1945 he comes back to sociological language with "Play, Imitation and Dreams", which is really his book about symbol formation. But his sociology is rather Freudian--I guess the idea that biological sexual drives were at the bottom of symbol formation was too attractive to him as a biologist. The rigid distinction he makes between assimilation and accomodation (again, on the basis of a biological metaphor, that of cellular equilibration) makes him assign almost the whole of play activity to egocentrism--a colossal mistake (and again one that we can find in Leontiev).
>  
> I guess I disagree with Jay Lemke about late Piaget, which I would date to the sixties and seventies: I find "Biology and Knowledge" extremely structuralist, that is, mechanistic. It's not surprising that he went off in the direction of finding memory--and therefore intelligence--in RNA! (See "Memory and Intelligence", co-authored with Sinclair-de Zwart).
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
> --- On Wed, 2/9/11, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
> Subject: [xmca] Piaget's periods
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 11:45 AM
> 
> 
> Harry Beilin has an interesting article in which he distinguishes four periods or phases in Piaget's work. But he doesn't specify very precise dates for these, and I am trying in particular to figure out when the break between the first and the second would have taken place. 
> 
> In the first period Piaget conducted clinical interviews to investigate children's conceptions of the world around them. He emphasized the importance for development of language and social interaction, in what amounted to what some have called a sociological model of development. This research was reported in four books, Language and Thought of the Child (1923), Judgment and Reasoning in the Child (1924), The Child's Conception of the World (1923), and The Child's Conception of Physical Causality (1927). It was for this work that Piaget received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1936: his work was known there by sociologists and the business school, but he virtually unknown in the psychology department (Hsueh, 2004). 
> 
> The second period of work was Piaget's elaboration of an adaptive model of intellectual development, focused on the sensorimotor stage, and based on Piaget's studies of his own three children. 
> 
> The third period was a detailed elaboration of a structuralist model of development. The fourth and final period (in the 1960s) involved the study of figurative thought in the elementary school-age child.
> 
> Working backwards, the fourth period started in the 1960s. The third period dated from the middle to late 1930s. But how can we date the first and second periods? The first period of work must have been conducted roughly from 1921 to at least 1925, the period during which Piaget was research director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. Piaget's children were born in 1925, 1927 and 1931, so the second period must have started somewhere in those years and may have continued until the late 1930s. From 1925 to 1929 Piaget was chair of Psychology, Sociology and Philosophy of Science at Neuchâtel. In 1929 he accepted the position of Director of the International Bureau of Education, and also became Professor of the History of Scientific Thought at the University of Geneva. In addition he was first assistant director and then codirector of the Rousseau Institute. When, during these many changes, did the second period start? The principal texts from this
> period were published in the 1930s: The Origins of Intelligence (1936) and The Construction of Reality in the Child (1937), but of course the work was conducted earlier.
> 
> Now, I've just got my hands on John Flavell's text, and Flavell writes that it was from 1923 to 1929 that Piaget had positions in both Neuchatel and Geneva, and that he was during that time conducting two lines of research, the first on children's responses to changes in weight and volume, the second his infancy work. Flavell cites a paper on the latter topic published in 1927 [La premiére annêe de l’enfant. Brit. J. Psychol, 1927, 18, 97-120]. This suggests to me something of an overlap between the first and second periods, and it also shows that the second had certainly begun before 1927. 
> 
> Does anyone have additional info that throws light on this? Can we narrow down the start of the infancy research still further? (The earliest would be 1923, the latest say 1926). Why all the interest? Well, in part because Berlin writes, “When Piaget learned that Vygotsky was among those critical of the linguistic version of this notion, he wrote (Piaget, 1962a) that had Vygotsky been aware of the later version that substitutes the concept of decentration for egocentricity, he would unlikely have approved. Vygotsky's English-speaking followers, at least, appear to have been anything but sanguine about the change” (p. 192). I want to become sanguine!
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> 
> Beilin, H. (1992). Piaget's enduring contribution to developmental psychology. Developmental Psychology 28: 191–204.
> 
> Hsueh, Y. (2004). "He sees the development of children's concepts upon a background of sociology": Jean Piaget's honorary degree at Harvard University in 1936. History of Psychology, 7(1), pp. 20-44.__________________________________________
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