Jean Piaget

"What is most impressive about this book is its intelligence, its sophistication, and its charm. . . . This book presents Piaget's work and his person better than anything else that I know about."—David Elkind, Tufts University"The tone is one of constant movement from the most ordinary to the most abstruse. There are 14 conversations with 'le Patron,' some in 1969, some in 1975, and several more with co-workers in various fields. . . . In Mr. Bringuier's book, in a pleasant informal way, we see a sophisticated non-scientist exploring Piaget's domain with the master. Some of Piaget's best-known findings about children as explained along the way, but Mr. Bringuier has ways of bringing out the relation of this psychological work to the whole of Piaget's enterprise, and we get a good sense of the man and his work."—Howard E. Gruber, New York Times Book Review

A milestone of child psychology, The Child's Conception of the World explores the ways in which the reasoning powers of young children differ from those of adults. What conceptions of the world does the child naturally form at the different stages of its development? To what extent does the child distinguish the external world from an internal or subjective world and what limits does he or she draw between the self and objective reality? These questions make up the first problem, the child's notion of reality. A second fundamental problem is the significance of explanations put forward by the child. What use does he or she make of the notions of cause and law? Is the form of explanation presented by the child a new type? These and like questions form the second problem, the child's notion of causality. Jacques Voneche, Director of the Piaget Archives in Geneva, Switzerland, provides a preface to this classic in which he reveals the provanance of The Child's Conception of the World within the context of Piaget's other work and the then-burgeoning field of developmental psychology.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Our encounters with the physical world are filled with miraculous puzzles-wind appears from somewhere, heavy objects (like oil tankers) float on oceans, yet smaller objects go to the bottom of our water-filled buckets. As adults, instead of confronting a whole world, we are reduced to driving from one parking garage to another. The Child's Conception of Physical Causality, part of the very beginning of the ground-breaking work of the Swiss naturalist Jean Piaget, is filled with creative experimental ideas for probing the most sophisticated ways of thinking in children. The strength of Piaget's research is evident in this collection of empirical data, systematically organized by tasks that illuminate how things work. Piaget's data are remarkably rich. In his new introduction, Jaan Valsiner observes that Piaget had no grand theoretical aims, yet the book's simple power cannot be ignored. Piaget's great contribution to developmental psychology was his "clinical method"-a tactic that integrated relevant aspects of naturalistic experiment, interview, and observation. Through this systematic inquiry, we gain insight into children's thinking. Reading Piaget will encourage the contemporary reader to think about the unity of psychological phenomena and their theoretical underpinnings. His wealth of creative experimental ideas probes into the most sophisticated ways of thinking in children. Technologies change, yet the creative curiosity of children remains basically unhindered by the consumer society. Piaget's data preserve the reality of the original phenomena. As such, this work will provide a wealth of information for developmental psychologists and those involved in the field of experimental science.

Originally published in English in 1976, the book draws on and extends our knowledge of the process of learning. The subject of the study is the general stage in a child’s development that comes between his successful performance of an activity without knowing how he did it – that is, what he had to do in order to succeed – and the times when he becomes aware of what went into that action. The book reports the results of experiments conducted at the Centre of Genetic Epistemology. Children, ranging in age between four and adolescence, were asked to perform such tasks as walking on all fours, playing tiddlywinks, building a ramp for a toy car. They were then asked to explain how they had performed the task, and in some cases, to instruct the interviewer. Their answers show a number of surprising inaccuracies in the child’s ability to grasp the nature of what he has done. Taking a broad view of his results, Piaget shows that they reveal several stages in the gradual development of the child’s conceptualization of his actions. In analysing each stage, Piaget argues that the child’s concept of his own action cannot be considered a simple matter of ‘enlightenment’, but must actively be reconstructed from his experience. This view has always been at the core of Piaget’s work, and a new area of the child’s mental world is here given definitive treatment.

Als Piaget 1980 im Alter von 84 Jahren starb, hinterließ er ein monumentales Werk, allerdings keine systematische Gesamtdarstellung seiner Theorie - mit einer Ausnahme: 1970 schrieb Piaget für ein Handbuch der Kinderpsychologie eine solche Gesamtdarstellung, ideal für Studentinnen und Studenten der Psychologie, Pädagogik und Sozialarbeit und für alle, die sich einen Einblick in sein Werk verschaffen wollen. Ohne Jean Piagets Untersuchungen über die Entwicklung des menschlichen Denkens und der Intelligenz beim Kind ist die moderne Entwicklungspsychologie nicht zu denken, ebenso wenig die pädagogische Theoriebildung und Praxis der letzten Jahrzehnte. Seine bahnbrechenden Forschungsergebnisse über die Entwicklung menschlichen Erkennens haben darüber hinaus das Selbstverständnis des modernen Menschen auf neue Grundlagen gestellt. Im Mittelpunkt dieser systematischen Darstellung seines Werkes stehen die Vorgänge wechselseitiger Anpassung zwischen dem erkennenden Subjekt und seiner Umwelt, mit deren Hilfe das Kind sich seine Wirklichkeit erst aneignet.

Originally published in English in 1971, structuralism was an increasingly important method of analysis in disciplines as diverse as mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Piaget here offers both a definitive introduction to the method and a brilliant critique of the principal structuralist positions. He explains and evaluates the work of the main people at work in the field – Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Talcott Parsons, Noam Chomsky – and concludes that structuralism has a rich and fruitful future ahead of it. An indispensable work for serious students and working scholars in almost every field, the book is also an important addition to Piaget’s life-long study of the relationship of language and thought.

In the course of their researches for Mental Imagery in the Child (1971), the authors came to appreciate that action may be more conducive to the formation and conservation of images than is mere perception. This raised the problem of memory and its relation to intelligence, which they examine in this title, originally published in English in 1973. Through the analysis primarily of the child’s capacity for remembering additive and multiplicative logical structures, and his remembrance of causal and spatial structures, the authors investigate whether memories pursue their own course, regardless of the intelligence or whether, in specified conditions, mnemonic improvements may be due to progress in intelligence. They examine the relationship between the memory’s figurative aspects (from perceptive recognition to the memory-image) and its operational aspects (the schemata of the intelligence), and stress the fundamental significance of the mnemonic level known as the ‘reconstructive memory’. This was a pioneering work at the time, presenting illuminating conclusions drawn from extensive research, together with a number of constructive ideas which opened up a fresh approach to an important area of educational psychology.

Despite dissent in many quarters, Piaget's epistemology and the developmental psychology derived from it remain the most powerful theories in either field. From the beginning, Piaget's fundamental epistemological notion was that all knowledge is rooted in action, and for a long time, he identified action with transformation. What is known is that which remains constant under transformatory action. This book represents a fundamental reformulation of that point of view. Alongside transformatory schemes, Piaget now presents evidence that nontransformatory actions -- comparisons that create morphisms and categories among diverse situations constitute a necessary and complementary instrument of knowledge. This work aims to elucidate that insight experimentally and theoretically and to understand the developmental interaction of comparing and transforming as knowledge is constructed. This first English translation of Piaget's work includes studies of children's understanding of geometric forms, machines, and abstract concepts. It contains a clear statement of his mature position on continuity with biology as well as with the history of ideas.

This book, the last one written by Piaget, presents a new line of empirical studies based on a revised formulation of his theory of the development of logical reasoning. The amended theory overcomes many problems and criticisms of his earlier formulations by providing a fresh explanation for the origin of mental operations and mental organization based on the concept of meaning. It also offers a more elegant vision of the continuity in mental development from birth to adulthood. As the final revision of Piaget's theory -- and one that opens up new areas of inquiry -- this book calls for a reinterpretation of his earlier work -- a task which will occupy scholars for decades to come.

First published in English 1968, in this volume Paul Fraisse begins with history, looking at the evolution of experimental psychology, starting with its origins. He then moves on to the establishment of experimental psychology around the world. In the second chapter he discusses the experimental method. In the third chapter Jean Piaget tackles the questions of explanation and parallelism and their problems within experimental psychology. The final chapter by Maurice Reuchlin goes on to discuss measurement in psychology looking at various scales with their experimental conditions and numerical properties.

First published in English in 1969, the book opens with a chapter by Pierre Oléron on intellectual activities. These fall into three groups: inductive activities (the apprehension of laws, relations and concepts), reasoning and problem solving. It describes typical methods and essential results obtained by relevant experiments. There are two chapters by Jean Piaget and his collaborator Bärbel Inhelder. The first, on mental images, breaks new ground: it describes original experiments carried out by Piaget and associates with children of various ages. Piaget examines the relations between images and motor activity, imitation, drawing and operations. He also classifies images according to their degree of complexity and show why children have inadequate images of some processes. The second chapter is on intellectual operations and Piaget gives a summary of the main findings of a number of his earlier books, on the child’s notions of conservation, classification, seriation, number, measurement, time, speed and chance. In the last chapter, Pierre Gréco discusses learning and intellectual structures. He describes the work of psychologists with rats in mazes and formulating theories of animal learning. Gestalt psychology and various other interpretations are examined and Greco also pays attention to Piaget’s view of ‘structural learning’ based on experience.

Although originally published in France in 1951 this English translation was not published until 1975. The book supplements the authors’ previous publications on the development of thought in the child and is the result of two preoccupations: how thought that is in the process of formation acts to assimilate those aspects of experience that cannot be assimilated deductively – for example, the randomly mixed; and the necessity of discovering how the mental processes work in the totality of spontaneous and experimental searchings that make up what is called the problem of ‘induction’. Induction is a sifting of our experiences to determine what depends on regularity, what on law, and what on chance. The authors examine the formation of the physical aspects of the notion of chance; they study groups of random subjects and of ‘special’ subjects; and they analyse the development of combining operations which contributes to determining the relationship between chance, probability, and the operating mechanisms of the mind.

This book is for anyone who has ever wondered how a child develops language, thought, and knowledge. Before this classic appeared, little was known of the way children think. In 1923, however, Jean Piaget, the most important developmental psychologist of the twentieth century, took the psychological world by storm with The Language and Thought of the Child. Applying for the first time the insights of social psychology and psychoanalysis to the observation of children, he uncovered the ways in which a child actively constructs his or her understanding of the world through language. The book has since been a source of inspiration and guidance to generations of parents and teachers. While its conclusions remain contentious to this very day, few can deny the huge debt we owe to this pioneering work in our continuing attempts to understand the minds of the child.

This translation of the French Recherches sur l'abstraction reflechissante (1977), make available in English Piaget's only treatise on reflecting abstraction - a process he came to attribute considerable importance to in his later thinking and which he believed to be responsible for many of the advances that take place in human development, especially our understanding of mathematics. Rich with empirical research on reflecting abstraction at work in the thinking of 4 to 12 year olds, the studies in this volume examine its role in many contexts of cognitive development such as: reasoning about mathematics; forming analogies; putting objects in order by size and comparing the resulting series; and navigating through a wire maze. His theoretical discussions explore the relationships between reflecting abstraction and other central processes in his later theory, such as generalization, becoming conscious, and equilibration, as the differentiation of possibilities and their integration into necessities. These discussions indicate which aspects of his later theorizing were settled and which require further thought and investigation. Studies in Reflecting Abstraction will be of interest to developmental and cognitive psychologists, educationalists, philosophers and anyone who seeks to understand human knowledge and its development.

Over a period of six decades, Jean Piaget conducted a program of naturalistic research that has profoundly affected our understanding of child development.

Originally published in English in 1976, the book draws on and extends our knowledge of the process of learning. The subject of the study is the general stage in a child’s development that comes between his successful performance of an activity without knowing how he did it – that is, what he had to do in order to succeed – and the times when he becomes aware of what went into that action. The book reports the results of experiments conducted at the Centre of Genetic Epistemology. Children, ranging in age between four and adolescence, were asked to perform such tasks as walking on all fours, playing tiddlywinks, building a ramp for a toy car. They were then asked to explain how they had performed the task, and in some cases, to instruct the interviewer. Their answers show a number of surprising inaccuracies in the child’s ability to grasp the nature of what he has done. Taking a broad view of his results, Piaget shows that they reveal several stages in the gradual development of the child’s conceptualization of his actions. In analysing each stage, Piaget argues that the child’s concept of his own action cannot be considered a simple matter of ‘enlightenment’, but must actively be reconstructed from his experience. This view has always been at the core of Piaget’s work, and a new area of the child’s mental world is here given definitive treatment.