Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Major Swiss structuralist thinker in the fields of psychology and epistemology. From the outset of his career, he was interested in studying how intellectual structures are established in the human being. This was to be his key to the way in which knowledge is acquired. The result was that he spent a great deal of his time on the development of intelligence during childhood. For Piaget, human beings construct solutions which, if they work, are necessarily linked structurally with the laws of the human mind and, ultimately, natural laws. On a broader scale, he moves from this position to a theorizing of the growth of an individual's reasoning faculties in relation to a progression of human understanding in general. Since the individual's intelligence and the intelligence of the human race in general are ultimately derived from one and the same structure, that of the biological human being, the relation between the two is one of mutually verifiable complicity. This theory is the root of his concern with psychology, and links it with his concern with epistemology. For Piaget, the relation between the two is of such importance that he cannot simply study one or the other; he must pay attention to both, in tandem. In keeping with his structuralist method, Piaget concentrated on the relations between elements. Thus he looked at the growth of individual reasoning in and through its relationship ... log in or subscribe to read full text