[xmca] Piaget's periods

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

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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