The Genetic Epistemology of Jean Piaget

Abstract

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).

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

“…It also replaced the model developed during the first period of research in genetic epistemology (viz. Apostel et al, 1957; see Burman, 2021). Furthermore, it represented Piaget’s return 18 to theorizing the primary constructive mechanism required of his system: “ équilibration majorante ,” which—lacking explicit access to the updated logic of just a few years prior (see Burman, 2016)—previous translators had rendered unhelpfully as “optimizing equilibration.”…”

“…We can therefore take advantage of the citation numbers as proxies not so much for these texts’ meanings, directly, as for the consequences of each audience’s in-context interpretations of those texts’ relative importance: the more highly cited is a text in a collection, the greater is its perceived significance for that language group. Then, because different translations of the same text can be considered formally identical with themselves, or at least equivalent (following Quine), differences in relative position considered against the backdrop of a receiving (hidden) value-hierarchy then suggest differences in received meaning that can be investigated using more traditional historical methods (e.g., Burman, 2021).…”

“…Given this, it is no wonder that The Psychology of Intelligence was so influential: it marked Piaget’s return to English psychology. Indeed, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago for it in 1953 (see Burman, 2021).…”

“…At the same time, Piaget’s view is also clearly foreign . Rather than treating intelligence in psychometric terms, he considered it to be the consequence of a developing sequence of “operational” structures and groupings (see Burman, 2021).…”

“…It also did so experimentally, rather than through theoretical or philosophical argumentation (e.g., Piaget, 1949). And it directly foreshadowed the explicit mission of Piaget’s genetic epistemology as a scientific research program (see Burman, 2021).…”