Jean Piaget was a famous scientist whose interest was focused on the mechanisms of knowledge production.
How do you go from a state of less knowledge to another of greater knowledge in Science? This is the true Piagetian approach, that is, Piaget starts from an epistemological question.
To develop your Genetic Epistemology he resorts to two disciplines that will give empirical support to his theory: History and Psychology.
The first will allow you to make a conceptual reconstruction of Science. However, the further back the formation of knowledge goes in the History of Science, it observes that it is increasingly difficult to appropriate the dynamics and structure because there are less data and fewer sources..
How History is not enough to account for the processes of change of knowledge, uses Psychology as a methodological tool.
Given the insufficiency of Psychology at the time, he decided to develop his own psychological theory called genetic psychology, which today is framed within developmental psychology along with others such as cognitive psychology and Vygotsky's theory.
This Genetic Psychology will be a crucial component in the formulation of its Genetic Epistemology and will be adopted by other disciplines such as Psychology itself and Pedagogy..
Now, Piaget maintains that there are common mechanisms, that is, a functional continuity between the way of knowing of the child, the adult and the scientist.
Thus, Piaget develops a Genetic Psychology based on detailed studies with his own techniques, in different countries and in different cultures, collecting empirical evidence that contradicts a priori and empiricist theories..
According to Piaget, knowledge is not innate, as Innateism postulates, nor is it a product, as Empiricism maintains.. For Piaget, knowledge is built, it is not a state but a process of construction.
Piaget's Genetic Psychology provides the study material to elaborate a theory of the construction of knowledge but it also revolutionizes the classical conceptions about intelligence and learning processes..
During the first years of his research, Piaget explains the changes that occur over time with respect to the behavior of the child through two mechanisms known as assimilation and accommodation.
These mechanisms are opposite functions but they cannot exist one without the other and they are connected in the difference.. Piaget calls the interaction of the two adaptation.
This adaptation implies an organization, that is, an organized totality. However, in a second moment of his theory, Piaget introduces the equilibrium theory that allows you to explain how novelty arises from pre-existing structures that did not contain it.
According to Piaget, the development of knowledge is produced by a succession of states of equilibrium where mechanisms of unbalance at each level and rebalancing at new levels come into play..
It is important to note that Piaget maintains that the object constitutes a limited state to which we try to approach without ever reaching complete knowledge. and introduces the idea that there are notions that are built at a certain age, such as that of a permanent object, that of time, space, causality, and conservation of the amount of substance in between.and others.
In his theory of the stages of development Piaget introduces four stages where what is interesting is the fixed order of succession.
On the one hand, this order of succession shows that to build a new logical instrument, pre-existing logical instruments are always necessary. On the other hand, the ages may vary from one society to another but the order of succession remains constant..
In the first stage called sensory-motor Piaget recognizes that there is a sensory-motor intelligence prior to language which implies a coordination of the means to achieve an end.
In the second stage called pre-operative appears the symbolic function: language, symbolic play, delayed imitation, and mental imagery.
In the third stage, that of concrete operations, the child coordinates operations in the sense of reversibility, this being the fundamental property of the operative system. It reaches a logic of classes, relationships, numbers but does not yet have a logic of propositions.
Finally, in the fourth stage, that of formal operations, the subject constructs a deductive reasoning about a hypothesis, that is, it reaches a logic of propositions.
Although some postulate the inability of the Piagetian Theory to deal with social objects, others consider it as a general theory of knowledge construction processes that, although it was developed in relation to the problem of physical and logical-mathematical objects, could be suitable to account for the construction of other types of objects.
Such is the case of the research carried out by Emilia Ferreiro on the psychogenesis of the writing system.
According to Emilia Ferreiro, the child thinks about writing, formulates original hypotheses about this object. These hypotheses function as assimilation schemes that allow the child to produce and interpret writing..
The writing system constitutes a sociocultural object since it results from a creation of culture and also a psycholinguistic object. This object is of a mixed nature since it is loaded with social meanings and leaves "marks" on a surface..
Writing requires the presence of another culture that Emilia Ferreiro called interpreting and he is the one who introduces the subject in these practices in relation to the use of the written language.
Finally and doing a bit of history, we will say that in the first half of the 20th century the Psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud explained child psychosexual development and Behaviorism explained the mechanics of the learning process.
In the 1930s, Jean Piaget affirmed that a child is not “an adult in miniature” (an idea that prevailed since the 17th century) and argued that the child builds through action, that is, that action is constitutive of all knowledge.
Piaget explained that children build knowledge autonomously and actively in interaction with the environment and that "the ultimate goal of education is to train men and women capable of doing new things."
It is unquestionable that Piaget's work in its entirety paved the way for many other investigations devoted to Developmental Psychology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries..
Yet No Comments