Introduction

1896–1980

SWISS GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGIST, PSYCHOLOGIST

UNIVERSITE DE NEUCHATEL, B.A., 1915, Ph.D., 1918; POSTDOCTORAL STUDY AT UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH, UNIVERSITY OF PARIS, AND THE SORBONNE

The Swiss psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) developed his theory of genetic epistemology throughout a nearly 60-year career as a professor and experimental researcher. He first began his scientific investigations as a young biologist immersed in the study of mollusks. Before he was 30 years of age, he was world renowned for his explorations of the cognitive development of children. Piaget is credited with foundational contributions to the emerging disciplines of child psychology, educational psychology, and cognitive development theory. Piaget's empirical studies of infants, children, and adolescents provided insight into the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired. He took children's thinking seriously and respected them as the architects of their own intellectual development.

Jean Piaget was the only son of Arthur Piaget, a professor of medieval studies at the University of Neuchatel, and Rebecca Jackson. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Switzerland in the region near Lake Neuchatel. He was trained as a zoologist, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Neuchatel in 1918. His early fascination with and competence in the biological sciences, particularly the study of mollusks, continued throughout his lifetime. Piaget moved to Paris in 1919 for postdoctoral studies.

The turning point in his academic life came through his work with French school children, in which he administered and standardized British intelligence

tests as a research associate at the Simon-Binet experimental psychology laboratory. During the course of his work with intelligence testing, Piaget decided that the important issue to explore was not whether children gave the right answers to the IQ test, but rather, how they gave the wrong answers and what the patterns of the children's responses revealed about their developing capacities for reasoning.

In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland, where he made his home until his death. He was appointed Research Director of the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva in 1921 and that same year published his first article on the psychology of intelligence. Piaget was known as le patron (the boss) by his graduate students and research associates. His early work studying the reasoning of elementary school children became the basis of his first five books on child psychology and marked the beginning of his international fame as a revolutionary thinker in the area of childhood cognitive development.

Piaget used the term genetic epistemology to define his disciplined investigation into how knowledge develops within the human being and the means by which the developing mind moves through distinct stages toward maturation. At the heart of Piaget's biological theories of development is his emphasis on the human being's ability to adapt to the world through the dual processes of assimilation and accommodation, modifying one's mental schemes to allow room for new information.

Piaget's child-centered research and respectful observations of infants and children led him to the discovery that children think in qualitatively different ways than adults as they progress through four distinct and universal stages of development.

• Sensorimotor stage (birth to about two years): Infants rely on their senses to understand the world around them.
• Preoperational stage (about two to seven years): Pre-school children develop an increased capacity for symbolic thinking and the use of language and images.
• Concrete-operational stage (about seven to 11 years): Children think logically and begin to see the world from others' perspective.
• Formal operational stage (age 11 to adult): Hypothetical and abstract reasoning with systematic problem solving and abstract thinking.

Piaget's consuming interest was in the discovery of the universal mechanisms that underlie how knowledge is acquired. He understood this as a process governed by genetic factors and environmental experiences, with the environment playing an increasingly more important role as the individual matures. Piaget respected the developing child as an active agent in the construction of knowledge through trial and error experimentation. Even the fundamental ideas of space, time, relation and causality, he observed, are subject to this process. The child's earliest years, he believed, laid the foundation for the rational and moral adult personality, with increasingly complex intellectual processes building on the successful passage through earlier, more primitive stages of development. Piaget did not consider the fourth stage of formal operations as a final one. He believed there was no fixed limit to the possibilities of human development.

Throughout a brilliant research career that spanned more than 60 years, Piaget refined his structural and holistic methodology for observing, describing, and evaluating the stages of human cognitive development from the point of view of the child. His pioneering research and prolific publications on the nature of thought and the development of intelligence assured Piaget's place as a major influence in the scientific thinking of the twentieth century. The ingenuity of his approach to the study of children's ways of thinking continues to inform and influence the fields of epistemology, education, and developmental and child psychology.

Piaget continually changed his thinking as new possibilities occurred to him. His impressive list of publications include over 60 books, professional papers, book chapters, and articles in scientific journals. He received over 30 honorary degrees and awards from universities throughout the world. In 1955 Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology and served as its director for the remainder of his life. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 16, 1980. His genuine respect for and appreciation of the mind of the child and his prodigious research accomplishments continue to inspire and challenge scholars and researchers worldwide.