On the implications of object permanence: Microhistorical insights from Piaget's new theory

Burman, Jeremy Trevelyan

doi:10.1017/s0140525x19002954

Cited by 2 publications

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“…And thus the mechanism sought by Bruner was provided explicitly, in terms that he himself had pioneered (viz. the "spiral curriculum" [see Burman, 2020a]). Yet the implications of this "new" effort and what came after, for developmental psychology and education and the study of knowledge in general, remain largely unexamined.…”

Section: Afterwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Genetic Epistemology of Jean Piaget

Burman

2021

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology

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Jean Piaget (1896–1980) is known for his contributions to developmental psychology and educational theory. His name is associated especially with Stage Theory. That we believe him to have focused solely on cognitive development, however, is not because he did. This is instead the result of the popularization of his writings in the United States during the Cold War. (A period of crisis and subsequent education reform.) The overpowering influence of those interests blinded us to his larger framework, which he called “genetic epistemology,” and of which his stages were just a part. To address the resulting and continuing misunderstandings, this essay presents original historical scholarship—distilling over a thousand pages of archival documents (correspondence, diary entries, budgets, and reports)—to provide an insider’s look at Piaget’s research program from the perspective of the Rockefeller Foundation: genetic epistemology’s primary funding agency in the United States from the mid-1950s through the early-1960s. The result is an examination of how a group of interested Americans came to understand Piaget’s writings in French in the period just prior to their wider popularization in English, as well as of how Piaget presented himself and his ideas during the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. My goal, however, is not to summarize the whole of this misunderstood program. Instead, I aim to provide a source of archivally-grounded perspective that will allow for new insights about the Genevan School that are unrelated to American Cold War interests. In the process, we also derive new means to see how Piaget’s experimental examinations of the development of individual knowledge served to inform his team’s investigations of the evolution of science (and vice versa).

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Section: Afterwardmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Genetic Epistemology of Jean Piaget

Burman

2021

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology

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“…19.In historical investigations of the intellectual context informing these sources, I have referred to related ideas as level-spanning downward completion (Burman, 2013), meaning projection (Burman, 2016) and morphisms across levels in a spiral—the comparison between which in turn powers abstractions and generalizations (Burman, 2020b). …”

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“…32.The allusion here to deontological ethics is intended, except that what I have in mind is developmental and without need for references to a codified set of rules against which actions can be judged (following Piaget, 1932/1932; discussed in Burman, 2020a). The formal framework through which this then makes sense derives from the formalization of levels introduced to Piaget by Ladrière following the publication of Gödel’s Dialectica interpretation (Burman, 2016, 2020b). The results, however, were both explicitly evolutionary and developmental (Burman, 2013, 2019).…”

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Meaning-Change Through the Mistaken Mirror: On the Indeterminacy of “Wundt” and “Piaget” in Translation

Burman

2022

Review of General Psychology

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What does a name mean in translation? Quine argued, famously, that the meaning of gavagai is indeterminate until you learn the language that uses that word to refer to its object. The case is similar with scientific texts, especially if they are older; historical. Because the meanings of terms can drift over time, so too can the meanings that inform experiments and theory. As can a life’s body of work and its contributions. Surely, these are also the meanings of a name; shortcuts to descriptions of the author who produced them, or of their thought (or maybe their collaborations). We are then led to wonder whether the names of scientists may also mean different things in different languages. Or even in the same language. This problem is examined here by leveraging the insights of historians of psychology who found that the meaning of “Wundt” changed in translation: his experimentalism was retained, and his Völkerpsychologie lost, so that what Wundt meant was altered even as his work—and his name—informed the disciplining of Modern Psychology as an experimental science. Those insights are then turned here into a general argument, regarding meaning-change in translation, but using a quantitative examination of the translations of Piaget’s books from French into English and German. It is therefore Piaget who has the focus here, evidentially, but the goal is broader: understanding and theorizing “the mistaken mirror” that reflects only what you can think to see (with implications for replication and institutional memory).

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On the implications of object permanence: Microhistorical insights from Piaget's new theory

Cited by 2 publications

References 16 publications

The Genetic Epistemology of Jean Piaget

The Genetic Epistemology of Jean Piaget

Meaning-Change Through the Mistaken Mirror: On the Indeterminacy of “Wundt” and “Piaget” in Translation

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