The Nature of Knowledge

Jean Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology: Towards a Theory of Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 65.

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Clearly there is none which would unite all thinkers: the concept of knowledge as a whole is still (and perhaps always will be) a matter of provisional synthesis, a synthesis which is in part subjective because it is in fact dominated by value judgments which are not universally applicable but are specific to certain schools of thought or even to certain individuals. This is why all intelligent men educated as scientists, however enamored they may be of the philosophical ideal of knowledge as a cohesive whole, must eventually agree with Descartes that philosophical meditation should not exceed ‘one day a month’, the remainder of the time being more usefully set aside for experiment and calculation!

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Piaget’s Empirical Science

Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1954).

Observation and experimentation combined seem to show that object concept, far from being innate or given ready-made in experience, is constructed little by little. Six stages can be discerned, corresponding to those of intellectual development in general. During the first two stages (those of reflexes and the earliest habits), the infantile universe is formed of pictures that can be recognized but that have no substantial permanence or spatial organization. During the third stage (secondary circular reactions), a beginning of permanence is conferred on things by prolongation of the movements of accommodation (grasping, etc.) but no systematic search for absent objects is yet observable. During the fourth stage (“application of known means to new situations”) there is searching for objects that have disappeared but no regard for their displacements. During a fifth stage (about 12 to 18 months old) the object is constituted to the extent that it is permanent individual substance and inserted in the groups of displacements, but the child still cannot take account of changes of position brought about outside the field of direct perception. In a sixth stage (beginning at the age of 16 to 18 months) there is an image of absent objects and their displacements. (4)

(Example of Piaget’s Method)

OBS. 40. At 0;10 (18) Jacqueline is seated on a mattress without anything to disturb or distract her (no coverlets, etc.). I take her parrot from her hands and hide it twice in succession under the mattress, on her left, in A. Both times Jacqueline looks for the object immediately and grabs it. Then I take it from her hands and move it very slowly before her eyes to the corresponding place on her right, under the mattress, in B. Jacqueline watches this movement very attentively, but at the moment when the parrot disappears in B she turns to her left and looks where it was before, in A.

During the next four attempts I hide the parrot in B every time without having first placed it in A. every time Jacqueline watches me attentively. Nevertheless each time she immediately tries to rediscover the object in A; she turns the mattress over and examines it conscientiously. During the last two attempts, however, the search tapers off.

Sixth attempt: She no longer searches.

From the end of the eleventh month the reactions are no longer as simple and become of the type we call “residual.” (51)

“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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