Annotationen:Homage to Jean Piaget (1896–1980)
Piaget came to this conclusion, not as a physicist, not as a psychologist, but as a biologist. From the theory of evolution, he imported the concept of adaptation into the study of cognition.
To grasp the full extent of this epistemological shift, one needs to be clear about what precisely ‘adaptation’ means and how it works. There is a wide-spread notion that adaptation is an activity carried out by living organisms when they are being pressed by the environment. The case of the mollusks may serve as an example. It is as though a growing mollusk could notice that the water around it flows quickly, and that the shell it is building had therefore better be flat, so that it offers less resistance. From an evolutionary point of view, such a notion is even worse than the Lamarckian heresy.
What Piaget intended, was that the building of a mollusk’s shell is genetically determined as a function, but what this function produces, may depend on the specific constraints of the environment. The important thing is that the mollusk builds a shell that allows it to survive in spite of the constraints that hem it in. To put it generally, an organism must fit, i.e. be viable within the constraints of the environment.Adaptation is, in fact, a negative concept. It does not require any knowledge of what really exists – it merely implies that whatever is functionally successful will live and reproduce itself. It is the result of trial and the elimination of what does not work. The fact that an organism is ‘adapted’ only shows that it has found a way of coping with the world in which it lives – it does not show what a world might be like before it has been perceived and conceived by a particular living organism. The focus, now, is on knowledge as an instrument of adaptation that enables the organism to steer clear of external perturbations and internal contradictions. Knowledge thus turns into a tool in the pursuit of equilibrium, and its purpose is no longer the representation of a ‘real’ world.
Piaget elaborated the notion of reflection on mental operations, and provided a model for how it operates in conjunction with abstraction and generalization. Thus he provided a theory of learning that successfully resolves the so-called ‘learning paradox’, a problem we inherited from Plato. It concerns the generation of new knowledge, which in Plato’s theory was God-given and accessible only through the mystical pipeline of reincarnation. Piaget’s reflective abstraction opened the door to fortuitous conjecture, the kind of imaginative ‘what-if’ assumptions that Charles Peirce incorporated in logic as abduction.
I see abduction as an integral part of accommodation. Peirce described it as a simple process. If we experience a surprising event – it may be a pleasant surprise or a disagreeable one – we try to discover what caused it. If we isolate some novelty in the situation, we may conjecture a rule that says: if such and such is the case, we get this surprising result. This conjecture constitutes an abduction, because it is not drawn from prior experience. We may then test the hypothetical rule – and if it is confirmed, we have an accommodation, because we have in fact generated a new rule that can serve us as a scheme of action. There is nothing paradoxical in this form of learning, nor does it require a mystical explanation. What it does require is an active mind that is able to reflect upon what it perceives and upon its own operations. There is no doubt that we have such minds. Let me give you a very simple example. It is a charming anecdote I read, but cannot remember where. A little girl is walking, and every now and then she pushes her ball to roll ahead. As the path begins to go up a hill, the ball, to her surprise, comes rolling back. And she asks: “How does the ball know where I am?.” The little girl’s question demonstrates that she is at least to some extent aware of her experience and can reflect upon it. Only a reflective mind, a mind that is looking for order in the baffling world of experience, could formulate such a question. It is the kind of question that, after innumerable further trials and untenable assumptions, would lead an imaginative thinker with the stamina of Galilei, to an explanatory principle such as ‘gravitation’.
We have no idea what it is that gives us this internal awareness and the power to reflect. But we know that we have it. As you are listening to me now, you can become aware of your own listening. And as I am speaking to you, I can become aware of what I am doing and ask myself, why can I not say all this more simply? – We know that we can reflect, but we do not know how.Most philosophers considered knowledge as a static entity. Knowledge, for them, was there, ready to be discovered. The notion that individuals could generate knowledge, and that one could specify the processes involved in its production, was not a notion that fitted the traditional pattern. How something arises and comes to be what it is, its evolution, was not to be considered a justification or valid explanation. Indeed, philosophers had formulated a ban against ‘genetic fallacies’.
There is a great deal of resistance against this view of knowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular. The philosophical tradition has for more than two thousand five hundred years perpetuated the notion of human knowledge as the more or less ‘true’ representation of a real world. This view has dominated absolutely and it is no wonder that people find it difficult to change their perspective. No matter how often Piaget has reiterated that our knowledge is not and cannot be a picture of the world as it might be in itself, his theory is nevertheless taken as a description of reality. This is a colossal distortion and leads to contradictions that cannot be resolved.
The Irish philosopher George Berkeley, for instance, stated quite clearly that the only form of ‘being’ his rational thought could grasp was a being which his senses could substantiate with repeatable evidence. In order to ‘exist’ in itself, that is without a human observer, the world required faith in a God who could keep it constant by His divine perception. But Berkeley’s logic was generally misunderstood – and so was his metaphysics. He did not claim that our picture of the world is ultimately like God’s reality, he merely posited God’s world as an independent substrate that allowed the human mind to construct its own. The deliberate separation between rational thinking and metaphysics as the domain of mystical intuitions was not understood by Berkeley’s contemporaries nor by most of his later readers. Consequently, in much of the literature, he is condescendingly referred to as ‘Bishop Berkeley’ – as though he might be important to religion, but irrelevant to philosophy.
Piaget has repeated this point innumerable times, but it is still the most profoundly misunderstood feature of his theory. His readers and interpreters seem to remain forever unaware of the simple fact that ‘adaptation’ does not involve the replication of the structures to which an organism has adapted.
On the other hand, many of those who acknowledged the principle of individual construction of knowledge, accused him of disregarding the role of social interaction. In the English-speaking world, this may be partly due to the fact that Piaget’s 1965 volume Études sociologiques is practically unknown. A translation has only recently become available, and the delay of more than thirty years has obviously done a certain amount of damage, because in the meantime Vygotsky’s work has been advertised as the only source of relevant answers. In his “Sociological Studies”, Piaget analyzes the processes of social interaction in far greater detail than any of the authors, who focus on the social rather than the individual construction of knowledge.
The constructivists who follow Piaget, attempt to think in a way that includes the observer. They are trying to devise a model that may show one way in which intelligent organisms, who start their thinking career in the middle of their own experience, could possibly come to have concepts of others, of themselves, and of an environment, and could ultimately arrive at a comprehensive non-contradictory complex of livable ideas.
This enterprise, although it is far from complete, has a wonderfully invigorating effect. No longer do we have to think of ourselves as powerless, passive receivers, who are not only physically but also mentally determined by the structures of a preestablished universe. Instead, we become aware that our thoughts and actions are ours, and that it is we who have generated them and therefore have to assume responsibility for what we think and do.
I would claim that this leads to a significant change of intellectual attitude – and so I close my homage to Jean Piaget by thanking him for having carved out a path along which we might eventually come to have a truly human conception of the world.[The child] is socialized in the same way as it adapts itself to the external physical environment. (Piaget, 1965, 264)
Human learning presupposes a special social nature by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them. (Vygotsky, 1978, p.88)
It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand. (Vico, 1744/1961, p.18)
The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality. (Piaget, 1971, p.27)
Expressed in the English title given to one of his books: ‘To understand is to invent’ (1973), it created an uproar and was fiercely criticized. Most of the critics had no idea that Einstein had said exactly the same. It is of considerable historical interest to note that while the physicists became aware of the decisive role the observer played in scientific observation and theory construction, Piaget published La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant (1936) and La construction du réel chez l’enfant (1937). The two books, which have remained fundamental in his theory of cognition, provided a model of how an active thinker – whether scientist or layman – may come to have a relatively coherent picture of the world. The core of his theory of knowledge was summarized by Piaget in his conversations with Jean-Claude Bringuier:
I think that all structures are constructed and that the fundamental feature is the course of this construction: Nothing is given at the start, except some limiting points on which all the rest is based. The structures are neither given in advance in the human mind nor in the external world, as we perceive or organize it. (Piaget, 1977b, p.63).However, Piaget was from the beginning interested in development, and after a few studies of biological organisms, he turned his interest to the development of knowledge. Already as a teenager he had been puzzled by the process of biological adaptation. He studied it with mollusks by transplanting them from lakes to running water and vice versa, and he observed the different shape of the shells the mollusks developed as an adaptation to the dynamics of their environment.
In retrospect, when he had worked as a scientist for well over sixty years, he wrote in his Foreword to the most important English collection of his writings:
My central aim has always been the search for the mechanisms of biological adaptation and the analysis and epistemological interpretation of that higher form of adaptation which manifests itself as scientific thought. (Piaget, 1977a, p. XI)Einstein explained this in 1938 with the help of a striking metaphor: Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. (Einstein & Infeld, 1967, p.31)
When Einstein read Schrödinger’s first paper on wave mechanics, he wrote to Max Born that he did not believe it, and Heisenberg considered it “disgusting” (Holton, 1988, p.169).
In this context, to fit means to be adapted – and adaptedness, as Piaget has said explicitly, is tantamount to the ability to survive. (Piaget, 1976, p.18)
Both schools take a stand against Kant’s notion that our concepts of space and time are ineluctably innate in the human mind. For Piaget, they are constructs whose build-up begins very early, namely in the course of what he called ‘circular reactions’ during the first two years of the infant’s cognitive development. The concepts of space and time arise in conjunction with those of object permanence and causality, and Piaget has provided at least an approximate model of how these concepts could be built up (Piaget, 1937). For evolutionary epistemologists, such as Konrad Lorenz and Gerhard Vollmer, “Adaptation to a given circumstance of the environment means acquiring information about that given circumstance” (Lorenz, 1979, p.167).
Who has read John Locke, may remember that in his Essay concerning human understanding, he said about reflection:
the ideas it affords being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own
operations within itself. (Locke, 1690, Book II, 4)Piaget himself, throughout his work, remained extremely reticent about the nature of consciousness. In his Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (1971), he discussed his disagreements with the definitions of consciousness of Bergson, Husserl, Sartre, and other philosophers, but refrained from presenting an explanatory model of his own. In La prise de conscience (1974) – a title that, as Leslie Smith has pointed out, should be translated as “The attainment of consciousness”, he provided evidence that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but has several successive levels. Finally, and I think most significantly, he explained in his conversations with Jean-Claude Bringuier: We study behavior, including consciousness when one can attain it, but when one cannot attain it, it is no problem. (Piaget, 1977, p.18)
