Home > Encyclopedia of Psychology > Jean Piaget

1896-1980
French psychologist, philosopher, and naturalist.

Jean Piaget is universally known for his studies of the development of intelligence in children. Although he is one of the creators of child psychology as it exists today, psychology was for him only a tool of epistemology (the theory of knowledge). He identified his domain as "genetic [i.e., developmental] epistemology." He thus studied the growth of children's capacity to think in abstract, logical terms, and of such categories as time, space, number, causality, and permanency, describing an invariable sequence of stages from birth through