Excerpt: Crossing the frontiers between conventional areas of study such as biology, psychology, and philosophy and seeking common themes that could unite them is a hazardous business. This is not only because of the absence of guidelines in the no-man’s-land between the occupied territories and the consequent danger of losing one’s way. More significantly, if the adventure has any consequences it will entail quite deep reorganizations of familiar patterns of thought within the separate disciplines, and such disturbance is always unpopular. However, a consistent reading of Piaget’s long, fruitful, and distinguished career sees all his scientific and intellectual endeavors stemming from a deeply-held conviction that the manifestation of intelligence is an inevitable logical consequence of the laws governing biological evolution, so that he inevitably found himself struggling to bring order to an unruly interdisciplinary domain. Thus, the articulation of transformation laws in the realm of developmental psychology (understood by Piaget as a particular aspect of biological process), which preoccupied him for much of his career, was no more than a necessary precursor to the more general task of describing the principles underlying the unifying generative foundations of biological and cognitive phenomena. This unification has the consequence that, under Piaget’s constructionist hypothesis whereby one realm of order arises out of another by a process of manifestation from a condition of latency or virtuality, the virtual domain for cognitive phenomena lies in organic life, in biology. This creative unfolding may be regarded as a part of the study he called genetic epistemology. The adjective “genetic” is not to be understood here in the narrow biological sense that connects it with genes, but in its proper sense relating to genesis, denoting both the problem of logical (necessary) origins as governed by law, and historical origins related to contingencies; i.e., it is the real problem of creation, or what Piaget preferred to call construction. This unites both structuralist and functionalist methods of analysis and description, Piaget steering boldly between what he saw as the Scylla of empiricist reductionism and the Charbydis of static, preformed idealist concepts, constructing a new world in his passage between these seductive polarities which have brought shipwreck to so much biological thought. To take on both these traditions and attempt a new synthesis and clarification over such a range of disciplines is not a modest endeavor; but then, Piaget was not a modest man.

Much of the conceptual and empirical work in environmental psychology has been directly shaped byconstructivism – a metatheoretical framework which views perception as essentially a cognitive process. Two influential constructivist theories are information-processing and Piaget’s genetic epistemology. As a consequence of adopting this framework, environmental psychologists have focused their investigations on cognitive processes rather than the environment. However, the role played by cognitive processes in perception is a function of the degree to which phenomenal characteristics of the environment are specified in the information available to the perceiver, and the present emphasis by environmental psychologists on cognitive processes may reflect an underestimate of the richness of this information. J. J. Gibson’s ecological analysis of perception postulates that environmental layout and meaning are directly specified in ambient light, and, as a result, his account suggests that the environment is a direct and unmediated determinant of perception and action. Further, he offers a framework which allows for both an objective and psychologically meaningful description of the environment. For these reasons, his perspective has much to offer the environmental psychologist.

Drawing on perspectives from a range of different fields (ethics, mathematics education, philosophy, social psychology, science education, social studies), the essays in this book invite us to reposition ourselves in relation to the major currents that have influenced education in this century, namely pragmatism, genetic epistemology, and social interactionism. They call for new reflection on the validity of knowledge and types of knowledge, the compartmentalization of school subjects, the mediating role of teachers, and, above all, the ends of education.

Basing on scientific results Radical Constructivism and Evolutionary Epistemology claim to be able to answer the question concerning the epistemological status of our knowledge – but they arrive at opposite conditions regarding the constructive or realistic character of our worldview. A critical discussion of these two positions reveals that they don’t satisfy their own demands. The limits of an exclusively scientifically based epistemology are getting obvious when we bring up the genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget who ties the knowledge of the world down to acting in the world, which brings the actor back into epistemology and transcends the realm of science. This discloses at the same time the insufficiency of a bipolar questioning that turns constructivism and realism into an unsuperable antogonism. In a concluding reflection the necessity of a sociological enlargement of the analysis of the process of knowledge is being established.

This chapter reviews the research, focusing particularly on studies that support a new synthesis of learning theory, epistemology and philosophy of science. In physics, the earliest and most powerful studies investigated students’ conceptions of basic Newtonian mechanics. Many students, regardless of age or prior experience, appear to subscribe to a kind of Aristotelian notion of moving bodies. In contrast to the Newtonian view, these students hold that moving objects are kept in motion by a constant force, and in the absence of a force, the objects are either at rest or slowing down. These views have been elicited from many students who have been asked to forecast the course of a moving body acted on by an exterior force. The consequence, as diSessa describes it, is “a collision” between an Aristotelian worldview and a Newtonian reality. Students’ explanations of natural phenomena often resemble theories offered by previous generations of scientists and natural philosophers. The fundamental hypothesis of genetic epistemology is that there is a parallelism between progress made in the rational and logical organization of knowledge, and the corresponding psychological processes. Learning is the responsibility of the learner, and the conscious decision to learn meaningfully is one that only students can make.

Key words: language development, mind, genetic epistemology, social research, cognition, child development, developmental stages

The explanation of the transition from one epistemic theory to another is an important part of Piaget’s genetic epistemology. It is argued that this epistemic transition leads to a retrodictable orthogenetic tendency toward optimizing equilibration. The objective of this paper is to establish a relationship between Piaget’s epistemic subject and Pascual-Leone’s metasubject and to demonstrate that the postulation of the latter can be considered as an epistemic transition between two constructivist – rationalist theories, which leads to the development of a theory with greater explanatory power. Epistemic transition in this paper refers to a progressive problemshift (cf. Lakatos, 1970), between the theories of Piaget and Pascual-Leone. Piaget builds a “general model” by neglecting individual differences, that is, studies the epistemic subject, whereas Pascual-Leone by incorporating a framework for individual difference variables, studies the metasubject – the psychological organization of the epistemic subject. Empirical evidence is presented to demonstrate that Pascual-Leone’s theory of constructive operators is a model of the psychological organism (the metasubject), which is at work inside Piaget’s epistemic subject. Finally, it is concluded that the greater explanatory power of Pascual-Leone’s theory can be interpreted as an epistemic transition between Piaget’s epistemic subject and Pascual-Leone’s metasubject.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Temporal Puzzle: Metamorphosis of the Body in Piaget’s Early Writings” by Marc J. Ratcliff. Abstract: Ratcliff’s target article is an insightful introduction to a major corpus, the journal comprising the notes of Jean and Valentine Piaget in their studies of their three children. These studies were part of a research program in what Jean Piaget called “genetic epistemology.” My commentary focuses on a series of epistemological issues central to this theory of knowledge.

Excerpt: Everybody “knows” what is wrong with education… Few have the courage to face two fundamental questions involved: (1) what is the purpose of the institution of public education, and (2) what is the nature of knowledge. Failure to deal with the first leads to tinkering with trivial elements of a complex societal institution that should be a mechanism for guiding change (whether of the child or society) while unwillingness to confront the second produces, at best, temporary excitement about “innovation” and, of course, keeps thousands of people in higher education and the federal government busy… The purpose of this essay relates to the second point and explicates certain issues relevant to implications of one’s view of the nature of knowledge for instruction of children.

Key words: Genetic epistemology, cognitive development, operational structures, experience, equilibration, figurative thought

Among constructivist metatheoretical approaches, a strong version is defined as that which reveals reality to be actively and subjectively constructed rather than passively incorporated as objective environmental or innate “facts” by the subject. Given this definition, however, ambiguities arise concerning the potential and limits of construct integration over the course of development. Piaget’s stronger constructivist model is offered as a means of clarifying and broadening the strong constructivist position on knowledge evolution. Piaget’s genetic epistemology model places dramatic emphasis on the organizational capacity of the subject, specifying personal development as a strongly continuous and subsuming process. Discussion of commonalities between Piaget’s position and Kelly’s personal construct theory concludes this article.