Jean Piaget on Genetic Epistemology

Discussion

Brendan Graham Dempsey:

"Though largely known for his research on child psychology, Piaget’s work was far more wide-reaching and profound. As a “genetic epistemologist,” the Swiss psychologist sought to understand the origins and mechanisms of knowledge itself. Through his prolific career of research and writing, Piaget developed a constructivist model which showed that learning advanced through distinct stages.

According to Piaget, at the heart of this learning process is the emergence of higher-order wholes from lower-level parts. The way human beings come to identity and relate parts to wholes is central to the essence of knowledge. As he reflects in his autobiography, “I noticed with amazement that the simplest reasoning task involving the inclusion of a part in the whole or the coordination of relations of the ‘multiplication’ of classes (finding the part common to two wholes), presented for normal children up to the age of eleven or twelve difficulties unsuspected by the adult. …At last I had found my field of research. First of all it became clear to me that the theory of the relations between the whole and the part can be studied experimentally…” (p. 244-45).

Learning proceeds by attaining to new “structures-of-the-whole,” which act as distinct equilibria or attractor points for the mind. The movement from one equilibrium to the next means a genuine development of knowledge, since higher equilibria resolve contradictions that had appeared at lower levels. Higher stages subsume the previous ones into a more comprehensive whole, giving them a more inclusive and expansive scope.

Piaget was the first to identify a sequence of cognitive stages that unfold in this way:

• Sensorimotor

• Preoperational

• Concrete Operational

• Formal Operational

Each stage represents a new equilibrium of part-whole relations with new cognitive capacities.

Piaget suggested that this part-whole structuring process of the mind was occurring all throughout nature in a great hierarchy of nested wholes. As Michael Chapman notes in his book Constructive Evolution: Origins and Development of Piaget’s Thought:

“Piaget … believed that a tendency toward the emergence of ever more inclusive relational totalities could be observed on all levels of reality, from the lowest forms of organic matter to the highest forms of human thought and action. In terms of their part–whole structure, such totalities can be described as forms of equilibrium, and the tendency toward emergence as a process of equilibration” (p. 434).

Or, as Piaget himself put it in his autobiography: “My one idea, developed under various aspects in (alas!) twenty-two volumes, has been that intellectual operations proceed in terms of structures-of-the-whole. These structures denote the kinds of equilibrium toward which evolution in its entirety is striving; at once organic, psychological and social, their roots reach down as far as biological morphogenesis itself” (p. 256)."

(https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/emergentism-notes)

More information

• Book: Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. By Adyahanzi, Brendan Graham Dempsey. Metamodern Spirituality Series, Vol. VI. [1] For more, see also: Emergentism as a Religion of Complexity