Re: [xmca] Piaget's Periods

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

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. 20-44.__________________________________________
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