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Challenges in Piaget’s Legacy

Roger Bibace

Published online: 26 June 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Abstract The publication of After Piaget (Martí and Rodríguez 2012) hopefully triggers a new effort to understand the richness of the efforts of that major psychol- ogist of the 20th century. Piaget was consistently concerned with part/whole relation- ships throughout his life. He addressed this issue philosophically, epistemologically, and psychologically. Conceptually Piaget struggled with the issue of continuity/ discontinuity in development and changed his mind about how to reconcile the discontinuities of stages with his concept of development. I also attribute his vari- ability to the implications of his important work on perception, and to his willingness to get involved in widespread concrete applications of his approach to education including the education of children with special needs; his center for genetic episte- mology, and his interest in psychoanalysis. Benefiting from all the authors of After Piaget, I want to point out that Piaget has identified many major issues that will continue to constitute challenges to psychology in this century. These include spec- ifying terms such as ‘development;’ methodological issues such as sampling both quantitatively in one culture and across cultures; comprehensive inclusion of the psychological processes covered by introductory textbooks in psychology; and con- ceptual issues such as the relationships among all these parts within a whole. I make a distinction between an ‘issue’ and a ‘problem’—problems have solutions; while issues refer to controversies in science generally as well as in psychology that have persisted for centuries.

Keywords Piaget . Part/whole relations . Continuity/discontinuity. Decentration

What a feast the book entitled After Piaget (Martí and Rodríguez 2012) is for us. Since I received the book I have not been able to do justice to each of the chapters as a distinct ‘repast.’ Rather I have skimmed all of the chapters. A mere ‘tasting,’ as one would at a ‘smorgasbord,’ and coming back for second and third helpings to my favorite chapters, such as the one that focuses on ‘analogy’ (Karmiloff-Smitth 2012).

Integr Psych Behav (2013) 47:167–175 DOI 10.1007/s12124-012-9208-9

R. Bibace (*) Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA e-mail: [email protected]

So this review essay reflects my egocentricities, my preferences or how I have been socialized during these past 62 years. The word “After” in the title is my cue to note other events chronologically. These events are based on this author, an 86 year old psychologist who has been in the Department of Psychology at Clark University since September 1950 and in Family Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School since 1974.

Continuing with this food analogy I will mention delicacies that I have enjoyed over the years. Important contributions that Jean Piaget made during his 84 years and that are surprisingly not present in After Piaget. My interest here is in “part/whole” relationships. This is the theme that Piaget identifies as crucial for his inquiry in his ‘autobiography’ published in Volume 4 of the History of Psychology in Autobiogra- phy in 1952 when Piaget was only 56 years old (born in 1896).

The Parts that Make Up the Whole

Human beings, as the aphorism goes, like to have their cake and eat it too! Analo- gously, Piaget subscribed to both continuity and discontinuity concepts of develop- ment. Piaget struggled and vacillated throughout his long life with this issue. On the temporal side it was the issue of continuity/discontinuity that fascinated him. On the structural side he preferred to rely upon classical logic in which continuity is the core.

Indeed it is only in closed systems, adequately depicted by classical logic, that a valid solution can be inferred from some, but not other, major and minor premises. Retrospectively in his ‘autobiography’ Piaget states that his readings in philosophy stimulated his focus on longstanding issues such as conflicting views on evolution, which led him to state:

I suddenly understood that at all levels (viz., that of the living cell, organism, species, society, etc., but also with reference to states of conscience, to concepts, to logical principles, etc.) one finds the same problem of relationship between the parts and the whole; hence I was convinced that I had found the solution. There at last was the close union that I had dreamed of between biology and philosophy, there was an access to an epistemology which to me then seemed really scientific! Thus I began to write down my system (people will wonder where I got the time, but I took it wherever I could, especially during boring lessons!). My solution was very simple: In all fields of life (organic, mental, social) there exist “totalities” qualitatively distinct from their parts and imposing on them an organization. Therefore there exist no isolated “elements”; elementary reality is necessarily dependent on a whole which pervades it. But the relationships between the whole and the part vary from one structure to another, for it is necessary to distinguish four actions which are always present: the action of the whole on itself (preservation), the action of all the parts (alteration or preser- vation), the actions of the parts on themselves (preservation) and the action of the parts on the whole (alteration or preservation). These four actions balance one another in a total structure; but there are then three possible forms of equilibrium: (1) predominance of the whole with alteration of the parts; (2)

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predominance of the parts with alteration of the whole; and (3) reciprocal preservation of the parts and of the whole. To this a final fundamental law is added: Only the last form of equilibrium (3) is “stable” or “good,” while the other two, (1) and (2), are less stable; though tending toward stability, it will depend on the obstacles to be overcome how closely (1) and (2) may approach a stable status. (Piaget 1952, pp. 241–242)

The reader will note Piaget’s continuous struggles over time with diverse philo- sophical perspectives on evolution that culminate in the ‘sudden’ discontinuity of understanding that there is a ‘solution;’ a solution that “there at last was the close union that I had dreamed of between biology and philosophy. There was an access to an epistemology which to me then seemed really scientific [emphasis added]” (Piaget 1952, pp. 242). A solution that focused on parts and wholes. My interpretation of this passage in his autobiography is consistent with the autobiographical accounts of creativity by persons in fields as diverse as mathematics and physics on the one hand and music on the other (Ghiselin 1955). All these accounts by the creative person stress the discontinuities between the duration of the creative process and the creative product.

I would disagree with Piaget’s belief that he had ‘solved’ the problem. As a number of authors point out this is still an issue. For instance, Shanahan et al. (1997) focus on the diverse meanings of the term ‘development’ across disciplines. This diversity is itself testimony to the foci of psychology in various historical eras. Theories of Learning were a staple in the 1950s in practically all departments of psychology as explanations for how changes in behavior and in psychological processes come about. Currently the fashion is to focus on ‘behavior’ and to neglect processes. This diversity was certainly experienced by Piaget later in his life through his participation in the Study Group on the Psychological Development of the Child in the years during his early 60s. Further apt questions are raised in Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s (2012) chapter since she transforms Piaget’s solution into an issue that is widely researched currently; namely the relationships between psychology and neuroscience.

Discussions on Child Development

This series of discussions, in the 1950s, sponsored by the Macy Foundation is particularly interesting in 2012 because it brought together 17 luminaries from numerous fields, usually referred to as ‘levels of organisation’ in epistemology, ranging from electrophysiology through psychology and psychiatry and cultural anthropology. The results were published in the Proceedings of the Meetings of the World Health Organization Study Group on the Psychobiological Development of the Child, Geneva, 1953–1956 (Tanner and Inhelder 1971).

Piaget’s age was 60 through 63 years old during these discussions. Readers in 2012 will surely note a major omission in this volume, namely genetics. These meetings also illustrate the limitations of what used to be called ‘interdisciplinary’ approaches to science. Interdisciplinary approaches have given way to ‘translational’ approaches that in medicine require representatives of all fields, including those concerned with

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universals and their application to particular patients to communicate with one another. Translational approaches require both scientists and clinicians to focus specifically on ethics and values. Piaget, at that time, was just one of many prominent scientists and theoreticians. Other participants included John Bowlby, Erik Erikson, Konrad Lorenz and Margaret Mead. The ‘egocentricities’ of participants from these divergent fields make very clear that Piaget here is not “the Patron” who dictated what and how a topic should be studied and how the results were to be interpreted.

Later, in 1961 Piaget published as Les Mécanismes Perceptifs (Mechanisms of Perception). Most interpretations of Piaget focus primarily on his contributions to ‘cognition’ and his well-known ‘stages of development.’ I will only briefly here indicate the importance of this nearly 400-page tome. The first part of this book deals with the “Primary Illusions and the Law of Relative Centrations.” Consider the Müller-Lyer Illusion (Piaget 1961/1969, pp. 44–45). In a study with faculty family physicians and faculty in obstetrics and gynecology, some participants remembered from their ‘psychology course’ that the length of the lines were identical even though the lower of the two lines looked longer. But the variant (Bibace et al. 2005, p.126) of this illusion is so powerful that all observers believed that one section was longer than the other. So much so that I had a ruler so that the observer could verify for themselves that both sections were equal!

The Law of Relative Centration specifies that this and other illusions are created by visual automatic processes. In the classic Müller-Lyer Illusion the person is able to override the illusion by centering their attention on the two ends of the lines, in contrast to the arrows that point inward or outward. The variant of this illusion did not allow for such a comparison. Even knowledge that it is an illusion led many observers to shake their heads in amazement.

Piaget’s third section in the book (Piaget 1961/1969)—Structures of Perception and Intelligence—is entirely devoted to the differences and the similarities between the structures of perception and of intelligence. Both in this work and in his preface (Piaget 1962a) to Causal Thinking in the Child, Piaget re-affirms his claims of discontinuity or stages and continuity or filiations throughout development. Devel- opment over very short periods of time as in microgenetic development as well as ontogenesis. Piaget is surprised and pleased that the stages of development for children in Switzerland were also similar to the stages of cognitive development for children both for French Canadians in Quebec, Canada and in Martinique. In his conclusion on the epistemology of perception, Piaget differentiates between the ‘figurative and operative aspects of knowledge,’ a theme that he elaborates in his Heinz Werner Lectures at Clark in 1974.

In his preface to Laurendeau and Pinard’s (1962) Causal Thinking in the Child, Piaget admits that:

I was taken by surprise and even felt somewhat uneasy when I received the first of their impatiently expected books and realized that it did not have any bearing on the operational aspects of development, but dealt exclusively with the verbal forms of precausal thinking in the child [emphasis added]. (p. xi)

Piaget notes that the sample included 500 children from 4 to 12 years of age and addressed previous ‘contradictory’ results by other researchers in studies by Deutsch,

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Hazlitt, and others. Importantly, Piaget agrees with these authors on ‘how’ to recon- cile the issue that is the important theme in his theory, that of discontinuity or stages with continuity in cognitive or perceptual development. Piaget asserts that continuity is maintained by ‘filiation.’ Piaget states that

reconsidering the problem of the succession of stages—a succession which may be based either on a process of direct filiation as in the case of “operations” deriving from action, or on one of substitution—the authors agree with me that the transition from artificialism to natural explanations constitutes an instance of succession by substitution: when a child accepts the idea that a lake has been dug by a river after he has already attributed the digging to the shoveling by workmen, his final belief is not derived from his initial one, but is substituted for it, even if, intermediate between the two beliefs, there is evidence of final- istic thinking, such that the town had to exist before the lake, because, lakes must be beside towns.... The very gradual transition from finalism (which is the principal motive for artificialism) to mechanistic explanations is thus based upon a process whereby operations are derived from action through direct filiation; but this process is made possible by a progressive decentration [emphasis added] which eliminates the egocentric features of the subject’s actions (thereby its finalism) in favor of coordination as such, which is the source of objectivity. (1962a, pp. xv–xvi)

Piaget’s Visit to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas in 1961

Piaget spent 3 days at the Menninger Foundation where Karl and William Menninger were the heads of this famous psychoanalytic training center. An anecdote may give the reader an idea of the pervasive Freudian atmosphere when I visited the clinic in the late 1960s. I was invited to a dinner by one the faculty. I was told that since Topeka was a small city and since many people living there were could be connected to the clinic, it was important to avoid social interactions that could violate the anonymity of the analyst/analysis and relationship. So this person read me the names of the other people who would be at the dinner party. There are a number of interesting articles in this Bulletin including a vivid description of Piaget as “The gentleman with the rosy cheeks riding on his bike”. Pitsa Hartocollis aptly describes his relationship to students:

As he passed, all conversation would drop immediately, everybody’s eyes turning and staring at the big man, his imposing figure dressed in the same shapeless dark suit, his hair flying magnificently on both sides of a French beret, the face preoccupied, with hardly any indication he had noticed us at all. (Harticollis 1962, p. 115)

Gardner Murphy – in the Bulletin of the Menninger clinic – noted:

The other story is more personal. He was obviously enjoying his pipe and greatly hating to be limited to the three pipes a day which his physician regarded as his outside limit. I said “Why not fill up your pipe only halfway

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and smoke six half-pipes a day?” He looked astonished, then confused, then his face became clear; “Why yes,” he said, “that really makes sense.” All the rest of his time in Topeka – and I hope forever – he has been a six half-pipe-a-day smoker. (Murphy 1962, p. 114)

I have decided to focus on Piaget’s article on “Will and Action” because it addresses his assumptions regarding cognition and affectivity in ways that flesh out his autobiography. He cites William James own subjective report on sitting at his desk as he prepares a lecture (Piaget 1962b, p.140). He claims that James provides an “excellent description, but there is no general explanation.” Piaget then states

I shall now try to deal with the problem of will by showing two things: first, that the problem of will is analogous to that of the operations of intelligence with the only difference that it is an affective operation that deals with values, actions, or decisions. Second, I should like to show that there is no need of an additional force, that the problem of the additional force comes simply from the fact of reasoning in terms of absolute values; but if we look at will from the point of view of relative values, as we have to do in the perceptual field, for example, the problem disappears. (1962b, p.141)

The following lengthy quote illustrates how Piaget attempts to integrate will and action by linking the laws of relative centrations in perception to the formal oper- ations in cognitive developments:

First, look at the analogy between the will and the operation of intelligence. We find the exact equivalent of the conflict of tendencies that James has described, whenever a logical operation is in conflict with a tendency that is momentarily stronger, a tendency, for example, related to a perceptual configuration. Take the experiment with children concerning the conservation of number at the beginning of the stage of concrete operations, in which the first two rows of coins are equivalent by virtue of visual correspondence.

If we enlarge one row, the child finds himself in conflict. At the beginning there is an inferior tendency which is strong: It is the tendency of judging according to the configuration; there is a longer row, and consequently there will be more elements in that than in the shorter row; there is no conservation. There is also a tendency of superior order, but weaker, which consists in conserving the equality not by virtue of a perceptual verification, which is strong, but simply by virtue of reasoning, which is weak. How does a superior tendency, initially weaker, end by triumphing, by remov- ing the inferior perceptual tendency which at the beginning is the stronger? What happens is that the superior tendency carries away the inferior one by an act of decentration, it carries it away from the moment the child is subordinating the actual perceptive tendency to a system of transformations. The superior tendency removes the inferior one from the moment that there is decentration and reversibility, this is to say, from the moment the child is capable of remembering what precedes, from the moment he is capable of coming back,

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of remembering that there was an optical equality of the rows of coins and that all that one did was to change their spacing. In the other direction, from the moment the child is capable of anticipating what can follow, of foreseeing that one can also space the other row and achieve again an optical equality. So there is decentration when the actual configuration is subordinated to previous as well as to future configurations and especially to transformations that relate these configurations to one another. So here the problem is exactly parallel and the inferior tendency becomes strong simply by decentration and reversibility. Well, I maintain that exactly the same thing takes place in the act of will. Why is it that the tendency, the actual inferior desire is stronger at the beginning? It is simply because one forgets to think of the past, or of the future; it is simply because one lives in the present, because he is situated in the actual perceptual configuration: I am in front of my desk; I have no particular desire to work; I see the sun outside; I feel like walking. It is the actual perceptual configuration that carries me away over everything else; if I give in to my desire, it is simply that I stayed in the present and did not think either of the past or of the future. Why did the initially weak tendency to continue my work end by being the stronger? Because, in this case, there is decentration: I can free myself of the actual desire in two ways, but it is always by calling upon the conservation of values. I can free myself then by a double act of reversibility: either I recall the past, or I anticipate the future, I anticipate the satisfaction that this work will give me when accomplished, what I am going to feel when I will no longer be engaged in this task which is not particularly pleasant to me. Therefore, the act of will consists here simply in relying upon a decentration, upon something which consists in subordinating the actual value, the desire, to a larger scale of values, the value of the engagement that I have undertaken, the value of the work. From the moment that I react according to my ordinary scale of values, from the moment that I include my actual desire in the permanent scale of values, the conflict is resolved and the initially strong tendency becomes the weaker one. The will is, therefore, it seems to me, exactly parallel to an intellectual operation except that it is an affective operation that bears only on the conservation and coordination of values, and on reversibility in the domain of values, while the intellectual operation bears on the coordination and the conservation of verifi- cations, or of relations. What about the problem of the additional force? There is no need for an additional force because the force of the initial tendency, which was momen- tarily the stronger, is but a relative force: This tendency was stronger simply because we plunged into the actual configuration, forgetting the past and the future, and therefore forgetting the permanent scale of values. So we have to do here with a restricted configuration and it is within this restricted configuration that the force, the desire, carries away the other tendency. On the contrary, once the act of decentration and reversibility intervenes, this force diminishes, but not absolutely; it diminishes only in a relative sense, relative to the values that we had forgotten, which regain their force and then modify the force of the actual configuration. In other words, the problem of the additional force in the domain of the will must be put in terms of analogous to those of perceptual values and not in terms of absolute forces.

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Perceptually, when we compare sizes, if B compared to A is smaller, or B is bigger in comparison with C, B will be then overestimated in relation to A, and underestimated in relation to C; B will change value according to the context. There is no constant absolute value, there are only relative values. With the decentration, on the contrary (perceptive or intellectual), we arrive at a certain conservation of these sizes, of these values. It is exactly the same in the affective field. As long as we are in the actual configuration, the momentarily strong desire is strong as related to what we forget. On the contrary, from the moment that it is replaced in the perma- nent scale of values, its relative value diminishes. Therefore, the problem of the additional force does not exist; it is a pseudo problem, because it is put in terms of absolute values. (Piaget 1962b, 138–145)

General Conclusion

I have outlined both the advantages and disadvantages of attempts at ‘systematiza- tion’ of ‘consistency’ by Piaget across diverse ‘levels of organization in biology, psychology and sociology.’ What seemed like an “insight” resolving the problem in all sciences early in his career, yields to “variability” as a cornerstone of his work. I would emphasize that the omission of ‘perception’ is still absent in many discussions in psychology. This omission is also evident in chapters in this book that do not take into account Piaget’s “Law of Relative Centrations.” The latter is the center of current research in many studies in ‘neuroscience.’ Piaget’s approach to cognition has raised many questions, whereas Piaget’s approach to perception is central to current research in many sciences (eg., Blair and Raver 2012, pp. 309–310). Lastly, all the authors in After Piaget may be left in ‘doubt’ as to how Piaget, in his diverse selves, would respond to our interpretations of his work.

References

Bibace, R., Leeman, R., & Noller, K. L. (2005). Analysis of psychological processes related to outcomes in sensory-driven medical procedures. In R. Bibace, J. D. Laird, K. L. Noller, & J. Valisner (Eds.), Science and medicine in dialogue: Thinking through particulars and universals (pp. 121–138). West- port: Greenwood.

Blair, C., & Raver, C. C. (2012). Child development in the context of adversity: experiential canalization of brain and behavior. [Special Section of Prevention; Healthy Marriage; Child Development]. American Psychologist, 67(4), 309–318.

Ghiselin, B. (1955). The creative process. New York: Mentor Books. Harticollis, P. (1962). Piaget, the man and the teacher. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 26(3), 115–116. Karmiloff-Smitth, A. (2012). From constructivism to neuroconstructivism: The activity-dependent struc-

turing of the human brain. In E. Martí & C. Rodríguez (Eds.), After Piaget. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Laurendeau, M., & Pinard, A. (Eds.). (1962). Causal thinking in the child: A genetic and experimental approach. New York: International Universities Press.

Martí, E., & Rodríguez, C. (Eds.). (2012). After Piaget. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Murphy, G. (1962). Professor Piaget’s visit. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 26(3), 113–115. Piaget, J. (1952). Jean Piaget [Autobiography]. In E. G. Boring, H. S. Langeld, H. Werner, & R. M. Yerkes (Eds.),

A history of psychology in autobiography (Vol. 4, pp. 237–256). Worcester: Clark University Press.

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Piaget, J. (1962a). Preface. In M. Laurendeau & A. Pinard (Eds.), Causal thinking in the child: A genetic and experimental approach (pp. xi–xvi). New York: International Universities Press.

Piaget, J. (1962b). Will and action. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 26(3), 138–145. Piaget, J. (1969). Mechanisms of perception (G. N. Seagrim, Trans.). New York, NY: Basic Books.

(Originally published in French as Les Mécanismes Perceptifs, 1961, Paris, France: Presses Universi- taires de Gravee).

Shanahan, M. J., Valsiner, J., & Gottlieb, G. (1997). Developmental concepts across disciplines. In J. Trudge, M. J. Shanahan, & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Comparisons in human development: Understanding time and context (pp. 34–71). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tanner, J. M. & Inhelder, B. (Eds.) (1971). Discussions on child development: A consideration of the biological, psychological, and cultural approaches to the understanding of human development and behaviour, The Proceedings of the First Meeting of the World Health Organization Study Group on the Psychobiological Development of the Child, Geneva, 1953: Vol. 1. The Proceedings of the Meetings of the World Health Organization Study Group on the Psychobiological Development of the Child, Geneva, 1953–1956. New York, NY: International Universities Press.

Roger Bibace has been at Clark University since September of 1950. He got his doctorate in 1956 with Heinz Werner as Chair of his dissertation committee, and has all over his career appreciated the contribu- tions of Jean Piaget to developmental psychology. Currently, he is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Clark and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He has been a core member of the Faculty Family Physician group since 1974, and of the Kitchen Seminars Group at Clark since their beginning in 1997. He is the author of the Partnership Model (Bibace, R., Dillon, J and Dowds, B (Eds.) Partnerships in Research, Clinical and Educational Settings. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company).

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