Constructivism versus nativism: is knowledge built by the child's own action, or given in advance?

Jean Piaget, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Intelligence is constructed, not inherited and not imposed. The child inherits only the functioning — the tendency to assimilate and accommodate, to seek equilibrium — not the structures themselves, which it builds by acting. Against the empiricist, knowledge is not written on the mind by the world; against the nativist, it is not pre-installed. It is made, in stages, through the child's own activity.12345

Sources

  1. But these relations still remain dependent on the action, that is to say, the subject still does not experiment; his accommodation to things remains a simple attempt at repetition, the results reproduced just being more complex than in the preceding stage.
    The Origins of Intelligence in Children
  2. In the fourth place, intelligence can be conceived as consisting in series of attempts or gropings, inspired by needs and the implications that result from them but selected by the external environment (as in biology the mutations are endogenous but their adaptation is due to a selection after the event).
    The Origins of Intelligence in Children
  3. All that remains is to acknowledge that this interaction of things and the intelligence, whose ge netic progress demonstrates existence on the plane of individual acquisitions, is prepared by an earlier interaction of the environ ment and hereditary biological processes, although no positive analysis can yet account for its mechanism.
    The Construction of Reality in the Child
  4. The relationship which unites the organized elements a, b, ¢, etc., with the environmental elements x, y, z, etc., is therefore a relationship of assimilation, that is to say, the functioning of the organism does not destroy it but conserves the cycle of organization and coérdinates the given 6 THE BIOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF INTELLIGENCE data of the environment in such a way as to incorporate them in that cycle.
    The Origins of Intelligence in Children
  5. It is, in effect, difficult to conceive of links between environment and intelligence other than those of atomistic association when, like the empiricists, one neglects intellectual activity for the benefit of the constraint of things.
    The Origins of Intelligence in Children

Where the argument is made

  • The constructivist thesis — that structures of knowledge are neither innate nor transmitted but built by the child acting on the world through assimilation and accommodation

How the argument was received

I hold the constructivist middle against both flanks, and I take the infant research seriously as showing that the starting point is richer than I supposed — but earlier competence is not innate KNOWLEDGE unless one has watched it fail to construct, and much of what is called core knowledge is, to my eye, early construction read as endowment.