“Subjective Synthesis” in the Child/ 儿童的思维方式与"主观综合"

Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child (London, New York: Routledge, 2002).

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“White dust will ne’er come out of sack of coal” is compared to “Those who waste their time neglect their business.” The proverb is understood verbally: “I thought it meant that white dust could never come out of a sack of coal, because coal is black”—Why do these two sentences mean the same thing?—People who waste their time don’t look after their children properly. They don’t wash them, and they become as black as coal, and no white dust comes out.—Tell me a story which means the same thing as: “White dust will ne’er … etc.”—“Once upon a time there was a coal merchant who was white. He got black and his wife said to him: 'How disgusting to have a man like that.' And so he washed, and he couldn’t get white, his wife washed him and he couldn’t get white. Coal can never get white, and so he washed his skin, and he only got blacker because the glove [washrag] was black.”

It is quite clear in a case like this that the mechanism of the subject’s reasoning cannot be explained by judgments of analogy affecting the details of the propositions. Having once read the proverb, the child is ready to attach to it any symbolic significance which chance may reveal in the perusal of the corresponding sentences. All that the proverb has left in his mind is a schema, a general image, if one prefers—that of the coal which cannot become white. This is the schema which has been projected, whole and unanalyzed, into the first of the corresponding sentences which was fitted to receive it (those who waste their time … etc). Not that this sentence really has anything in common with the proverb; it can simply imagined to do so. Now—and this is where syncretism comes in—the child who fuses two heterogeneous sentences in this way does not realize that he is doing anything artificial; he thinks that the two propositions united in this way involve one another objectively, that they imply one another. The corresponding sentence into which the proverb has been projected actually reacts upon the latter, and when the child is asked to tell a story illustrating the proverb, the story will bear witness to this interpenetration. To reason syncretistically is therefore to create between two propositions relations which are not objective. This subjectivity of reasoning explains the use of general schemas. If the schemas are general, it is because they are added on to the propositions and are not derived from them analytically. Syncretism is a “subjective synthesis,” whereas objective synthesis presupposes analysis. (141-142)

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When the child hears people talk, he makes an effort, not so much to adapt himself and share the point of view of the other person as to assimilate everything he hears to his own point of view and to his own stock of information. An unknown word therefore seems to him less unknown than it would if he really tried to adapt himself to the other person. On the contrary, the word melts into the immediate context which the child feels he has quite sufficiently understood. (157)

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