Re: [xmca] Piaget's Periods

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

David --

Could you spell out the Leontiev position here such that it lines up with
Piaget?  I always have a lot of trouble understanding ANL, never mind
Piaget, and I am having trouble following the parallels and divergences
here.

mike

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 6:04 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> I think Martin's insight--that the Piaget that is being excoriated in
> Chapter Two of T&S is really the way most of us (including
> Leontiev) understand Vygotsky--is completely right, and more than mildly
> brilliant. I also like the idea that the Stern being dressed down in Chapter
> Three of T&S is really the next incarnation, Piaget II. After all, "Die
> Kindersprache", which is the volume that Vygotsky is attacking, is written
> along much the same lines as Piaget's books on sensorimotor intelligence: it
> consists of William and Clara Stern's observation of their three children.
>
> But I have some reservations. First of all, as Carol points out, Piaget
> II is, at least by his own account, really not a psychologist at all, but
> only using ontogenesis as one form of evidence in something he calls
> "genetic epistemology", an attempt to show how the child replicates and
> fails to replicate the categories found in Kant and even in Plato (see, for
> example, Kohlberg's Piaget-inspired work on the child as Platonic
> philosopher). I have always taken this assertion on the part of Piaget (and
> Elkind) with a block of salt, the way I take Saussure's assertion that
> "semiotics" is after much bigger game than mere linguistics (and Freud's
> idea that his insights into a particularly narrow and uninteresting
> form human sexual behavior gives him the right to pronounce on anthropology,
> art history, and life after death). But Carol takes it seriously, so I guess
> I need to as well. And if Piaget II is a "genetic epistemologist" and not a
> psychologist
>  then his idea that the ontogeny of knowledge simply recapitulates its
> phylogeny is meant to be a schematic epistemology and not a history.
>
> Secondly, I think that there is ANOTHER irony late in Chapter Two of T&S.
> The way we serve Piaget and Vygotsky to unsuspecting undergrads on tests in
> Korea goes something like this: for Piaget, the child is a lonely explorer,
> but with Vygotsky he never walks alone. Yet philosophically, it is (First
> Period) Piaget who denies the idea of an objective, material, verifiable
> reality behind the social categories; it is Piaget I who insists that the
> categories come to the child through socialization and through socialization
> alone, not through the lonely explorations and superimpositions of
> "the-space-that-can-be-sucked", "the-space-that-can-be-touched" and
> "the-space-that-can-be-moved-about". It is Vygotsky, and Lenin, who insist
> that reality has tangible, palpable, material and not merely social
> objective significance to the child; development is, among other things, a
> constant process of checking one's categories against social and also
> perceptual
>  experience, a position that is far closer to Piaget II. (Carol: I am not
> really sure to what extent Piaget II can be called Kantian; when he says
> that logical categories do not really have a beginning, isn't he making a
> statement about evolutionary gradualism rather than apriorism?)
>
> Thirdly, I think it's useful to keep in mind that Piaget doesn't really
> change his mind the way Vygotsky does. With Vygotsky, you have a period
> where he labels everything a "reaction", even the "esthetic reaction"
> (Educational Psychology, The Psychology of Art) and then, starting about
> 1928, he never uses the word again. You have a period where he serves you
> mediation with absolutely everything. And then, starting about 1932, he
> hardly uses the idea at all. And you have the explicit statement, right
> there at the end of the preface, that he had to tear everything up and start
> over at least twice in the course of his work.
>
> That doesn't happen in Piaget.  One of the thing that really annoys
> Vygotsky about the Sterns is that there is very little DEVELOPMENT over
> twenty years of their work: he finds that if anything "Die Kindersprache" is
> even more personalist and non-developmental than their earlier work "Person
> und Sache". What would he have said about Piaget's work, which is in many
> ways even less?
>
> Piaget starts using "assimilation" as his basic principle of development in
> "Language and Thought", and it's still there half a century
> later. Vygotsky's position on the relation between learning and development
> changes from a basically reactological inability to see any distinction at
> all to a very subtle articulation of the two in Chapter 6 of T&S, but Piaget
> starts by saying that only development can "explain" learning and ends up
> that way too.
>
> Although Piaget I claims, in "Language and Thought in the Child" that he
> only wants to stick to the facts and that the theoretical explanations will
> arise cladistically from the data at the end of "Judgment and Reasoning in
> the Child", he also gave an interview in the sixties in which he pointed out
> that a lot of the basic conclusions, even in his late work, can be found in
> the philosophical novel he published when he was undergoing a religious
> crisis as a teenager ("Recherche").
>
> Rene van der Veer says (and Karmiloff-Smith confirms) that Piaget's usual
> response to criticism, and to countervailing evidence, was simply not to
> listen to it, and that this, rather than any anger or lese-majeste, explains
> his refusal to respond to Vygotsky's critiques, of which, protestations of
> ignorance to the contrary notwithstanding, Piaget MUST have been at least
> vaguely aware (even Piaget's eventual response to Vygotsky suggests a very
> partial and superficial reading of only parts of Chapters Two and Six--there
> is NO mention of the experimentum crucis on his work in Chapter Seven).
>
> So I think there is a sense in which Piaget, unlike Vygotsky, has no
> periods at all. Only stages.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
> --- On Thu, 2/10/11, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
>
>
> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Piaget's Periods
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Thursday, February 10, 2011, 1:37 PM
>
>
> 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.
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