Celebrating 40 Years of Play Research by Patte Michael M.;Sutterby John A.;Johnson James E.;

Author:Patte, Michael M.;Sutterby, John A.;Johnson, James E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Conservation of Meaning and the Logic of Meanings

Keith Alward

Exploring Piaget’s Implicit Social Theory

in the Context of Newspaper Puzzles

It is not well known that sociological considerations were central to Jean Piaget’s general epistemology. He is generally regarded as an “individualist” and is often contrasted with Lev Vygotsky, who was explicitly concerned with the intersection between sociological and psychological-cognitive processes. With regard to Piaget’s general theory and its relationship to social life, I would say there is a relationship, but its exact character remains elusive and implicit rather than explicit.

Undoubtedly, the only writer to show an understanding of cognition that anywhere approaches the depth of Piaget’s is the Russian Lev Vygotsky, who was born the same year as Piaget, 1896, yet died as a relatively young man in 1934. Nevertheless, for so short a life, he produced an incredibly large corpus of writing, much of which is still to be translated. The thrust of his work is that cognition, first and foremost, is tied to social experience and is inseparable from historical-cultural forces, which constitute the matrix of all social life (Vygotsky, 1978).

In contrast, the seminal body of Piaget’s work traces the development of children’s intelligence, but says relatively little about how this development is tied to social experience. In reading Piaget, it seems that understanding fundamental concepts of space and time, conservation of quantities, concepts of number and causality, and the development of logical thought are virtually independent of social experience. The theory is one of internal regulations in the dynamics of assimilation and accommodation within and between internal schemes that coordinate sensorimotor and conceptual actions on the world.

The theory purports that the intelligence of an organism is what the organism can do and that this is a function of the coordination of schemes within the organism. Piaget’s theory says little about how social experience participates in this dynamic of schemes accommodating to reality and thereby furthering the grasp of intelligence and consciousness (Piaget, 1976). In addition, Piaget did empirical work to show that social experience, such as training, has little effect on the acquisition of concepts (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). On the face of it, it would seem that Piaget is in direct conflict with Vygotsky. I, along with others, claim that this is not the case and that, in fact, both Piaget and Vygotsky are constructivists who complement one another (Beck, 2013; Nicolopoulou, 1993; Van Hoorn, Nourot, Scales, & Alward, 2016). Nevertheless, one might ask, what is Piaget’s social theory? Where do we turn to find its substance, and, more important, where do we find the empirical work that fleshes out this theory?

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