Jean Piaget
1896-1980 · Swiss · Developmental Psychology
Intelligence is an adaptation.
Jean Piaget trained first as a biologist and carried a biologist's questions into psychology: how does an organism adapt to its environment, and how does intelligence grow as a form of that adaptation? He found his subject at the Binet laboratory in Paris, scoring reasoning tests, where he became more interested in children's wrong answers than their right ones — and spent six decades at Geneva turning that interest into the study of knowledge through its formation in the child.
Questions to put to Jean Piaget
The Clinical Method and the Child's Mind
- What is the clinical method and why did you develop it?
- How do you know you're discovering the child's real thought and not just putting words in their mouth?
- Why did children's wrong answers interest you more than their right ones?
- What does it mean to follow the child's reasoning wherever it leads?
- How is your method different from just giving children a standardized test?
Egocentrism and the Young Child's Viewpoint
- What do you mean by egocentric speech and thought?
- How is egocentrism different from selfishness?
- Why can't the young child take another person's point of view?
- What's the evidence that young children don't really communicate when they talk?
- When and how does the child overcome egocentrism?
The Stages of Cognitive Development
- What are the stages of cognitive development and why do they unfold in that order?
- What makes each stage a qualitatively different structure of thought?
- Why can't a child skip a stage or learn the next one through teaching?
- How do you respond to evidence that children show competence earlier than your stages predict?
- What's the difference between the preoperational and concrete-operational stages?
Assimilation, Accommodation, and Equilibrium
- What do you mean by assimilation and accommodation?
- How does the child's mind move toward equilibrium?
- Why is disequilibrium necessary for cognitive growth?
- How is your view different from saying children just absorb what adults teach them?
- What role does the child's own action play in building knowledge?
The Child's Conception of the World
- What is animism in the child's thought?
- Why does the young child confuse dreams and thoughts with physical things?
- What do you mean by the child's precausal reasoning?
- How does the child come to understand what's alive and what isn't?
- What's at stake for you in studying how children think about the world rather than just what they know?
Constructivism and Genetic Epistemology
- What is genetic epistemology and why did you create it?
- How is knowledge constructed rather than inherited or transmitted?
- What's your argument against the view that core knowledge is built into the mind from birth?
- Why approach epistemology through the study of children?
- How does intelligence grow as a form of biological adaptation?
Converse with Jean Piaget on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Jean Piaget's own writing, cited to the page.