18 Jan 08 – Piaget – Non-Mechanistic Theorist

18 January 2008

On this day in 1971, the Jean Piaget Society was incorporated in Pennsylvania, marking the official founding of the organization. 

Piaget was a fairly unique theorist, as far as developmentalists go.  He distrusted purely linear and continuous conceptions of development, wherein individuals were believed to follow specific, ordered stages and to gradually progress through these stages.  Instead, he saw people as developing holistic structures that occurred discontinuously, much like moments of epiphany – it all just comes together at once. 

Borrowing from Kantian a priori knowledge concepts, these discontinuous changes did not originate in prior experience.  Instead, they were essentially genetically endowed; there for us to use upon birth.  As such, Piaget saw himself as a scientist engaged in the study of “genetic epistemology,” which has to do with both the formation and the meaning of knowledge.  That is, Piaget was not only interested in how knowledge was formed, he was also interested in what that knowledge meant to people.

Still more unlike other developmentalists (i.e.., Freud, Kohlberg, Erikson, etc.), Piaget preferred the study of normality.  In other words, other developmentalists spent a great deal of time invested in the study of abnormality and applying these concepts to the understanding of normal development.  Piaget focused, instead, on normal development.  He based his studies, then, on careful observation of normal children as they developed in naturalistic settings.

For Piaget, personality was a construction of patterns among related actions.  Much like Heraclitus’ (the pre-Socratic philosopher’s) perspective on the fundamental nature of objects, Piaget felt that the basic nature of reality (including human reality) was change, movement, and development.  From Piaget’s perspective, for example, infants learn by copying the early automatic movements they make in cribs (e.g., reaching), which is essentially reflexive.  They observe themselves in action, first, and they sense what they are doing in their motions.  Hence, they must first act and then learn from this action what they can or cannot do over our life’s ever changing course.  They can, then, take into cognitive awareness the patterned action by abstracting their play in the crib.  As they grow older, they can also copy the behavior of others by observing and forming an image of their behavior. 

The development of knowledge, then, occurs through generalization of “schemes” (what is common among several different and analogous situations) from one action situation to another.  It is important to note that Piaget did not consider schemes to be identical to a “concept” of understanding.  Concepts are broader, taking into consideration both what is common and what is different about not only actions but also all sorts of things.  A scheme is what’s common among different actions carried out at different times.  Because life is similar for everyone, the schemes we all make up share common meanings.  It is such shared schemes that make the learning of language possible.

Alternatively, Piaget conceived of “schemata” as interlacing parts of the much broader structure – a gestalt, if you will.  The schemata, then, is a look at behavior globally rather than reductively.  The whole-part is not just the sum of its parts.  Instead, the parts interlace and are in constantly shifting relations both internally and externally with other parts to form a whole-pattern.  In the formation of patterns, it is the relations among elements that count.  Hence, the structure must have a reliably distinct form (or pattern) which is capable of being abstracted and reorganized again and again.  These are not fixed entities, however.  Instead, Piaget referred to them as “systematic” processes, meaning by systematic the regularly interacting or independent groups of items forming a unified whole.

As can be surmised, then, from this last analysis of Piaget’s theory, his entire formulation was based on a relational perspective of meaning and knowledge development.  Piaget’s theory was, in fact, relational in its entirety, not neatly fitting into empirical scientific proof (which has led to some dispute over Piaget’s empirical grounding).  Instead, his theory was conceptualized based on careful observation and intuitive abstraction.  Furthermore, due to the relational nature of the theory, it meant that discontinuous change occurred not only in each individual, from stage to stage, but also across contexts, where relationships changed.  This was the reason that Piaget made space for such concepts as assimilation (the taking-in of the surrounding environment on the basis of an existing scheme or the more complex whole-structures they make up) and accommodation (the remodification of behavior as a result of experience).  The failure to accommodate new behaviors to experience resulted in lack of progression in development.  Such formulations often defy empirical proof because they are not easily quantifiable.

Given this, Piaget was incredibly unique as a developmentalist.  He was unique, most especially, in his non-mechanistic perspective that focused on discontinuous change and which was based on a fundamentally relational grounding. 

Fuel for thought, I guess… head to my website GivingPsychologyAway.net for more fuel for thought regarding psychology.