JEAN PIAGET

by Margaret A. Boden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 1979

Starting with a condensed but quite fair summary of Piaget's stages of cognitive development, Margaret Boden offers a critique of this still vigorous Modern Master that is well-argued, stimulating, and appreciative--even when pointing to errors big and little. Like Freud and other innovators, Piaget can be faulted for developing a grand scheme that assumes too much, that explains too much. In Piaget's case, human thought and knowledge are assumed to derive from the principles of ""genetic epistemology."" This is Piaget's theory of the dynamic interaction of the individual with the environment, which depends on biologically given mental structures. Thinking evolves through the individual's ability to transform mental structures via assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration; and, for Piaget, the successive stages--the sensorimotor explorations of the baby, the pre-operational mode of the toddler, the concrete operations of the schoolchild, the attainment of formal logic in the adolescent--are not only genetically determined; they have mathematical analogues. Boden points to Piagetian excesses in positing that evolution leads to the development of formal logic, or in assuming the heritability of adaptive change. Other psychologists as well as Boden have taken Piaget to task for not allowing alternate explanations for the classic causality or conservation experiments and for his inability to explain how it is that a child is able to move from a lower to a higher stage of reasoning. Boden, reader in philosophy and psychology at Sussex University (England), comes into her own in a fascinating chapter on artificial intelligence. She believes that the sophisticated computational programs such systems use provide a qualitative as well as a quantitative feedback which enriches the essentially quantitative cybernetic model Piaget espouses--and which may ultimately provide insights into human thought. This particular entry in the Modern Masters series is not, then, for beginners, but it provides a fine gloss on the ""rich store of psychological insights and theoretical speculations"" which Boden properly attributes to Piaget.

Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION