The giant of developmental psychology and his collaborator talk about children — how they learn, when they learn, what they learn, Jean Piaget: | must_wam you that | cannat understand English when it is pronounced property. If you will say zis and zat and zhose, | will be eble to follow you. Elizabeth Hall: And if you promise to speak French wretchedly, 1 might understand you. But luckily wo have Guy Collonier here to sole our lan: ‘auage problems You and Sigmund Freud sree garded 95 the two giants of 20th-Cen: tury philosophy. If Freud has changed four thinking about personality, you have certainly changed our thinking bout inteligence, yet great deal of confusion surrounds your work. Whenever someone ties to explain your theoriss to the rest of us, ho succeeds only in obscuring them Piaget: Yes, vo soon that dona. Per haps we will do better today. Hall: It is interesting that both Fred Skinner an D. O. Hebb intended to become novelists Piaget: Is that so? Hall: | was surprised myself when 1 and Barbel Inhelder A Conversation with first heard it. They regard intelligence empirically, while you began as a natural scientist and look at inteli- ‘gence philosophically Piaget: First we must agree on what you mean by philosophical. All the problems | have attacked are epis- tomological. All the methods 1 nave sed are either experimental or for- malizations that Americans would also regard as empiical Hall: Psychology was originally @ part of philosophy; William James was a philosopher. You raided the Tela of pnitosopny again and cay tured the ares of epistemology. Piaget: It is true thet | have token istemology away from philosophy, ave not taken it only for psy chology. It belongs in all the sc 5; they are all concemed wih the nature and origin of ‘knowledge. Hall: What caused you to tum fom biology and the study of mollusks to epistemology? Plage’ | bogan to study mollusks when | was 10. The director of the Museum of Natural History in Neu: chatel, who wes a mollusk specialist, Invited me to assist nim twice @ week | helped him stick labols on his shell collection and he taught by Elizabeth Hall cology. | began publishing articles about shells whan | was 15. Hall: That's quite young to be pub- lishing scientific papers. Plaget: Specilisis in malacology ere rare. Because | was so young, | had to decline invitations from foreign Specialists who wanted to mest me. My fist paper—a one-page report of 4 partalbino sparrow | had seon— was published when | was only 10. It was about the time that | began to Publish articies on sholls that I found {@ book on philosophy in my father's Worary. My new passion tor philoso- phy was encouraged when my god- father introduced me to Henri Borg- son's creative evolution. Suddenly the probiem of knowledge appeared to me in @ new light. | became con- vinced very quicky that most of the problems in philosophy were prob- lems of knowiedge, and that most wore prob: the prob. problems of —knowlsdge lems of biology You see, lem of knowiedge 's the proolem of the relation between the subject and tha object—how the subject knows the object If you translate this into iological tems, it Is @ problem of the organisn’s adapting 10's envie ronment. 1 decided to consecrste my 25In somnolent Switzerland lives @ ‘aracious giant who has upset the world of developmental psychology. Jean Piaget, born in Neuchatel on ‘August 9, 1896, has done more to shake psychologists’ faith in the stimulus-response approach to child psychology than all the humanistic Dychologists ofthe Third Force put together. Sigmund Freud discovered the unconscious, itis Said, and Piaget oe When Piaget first ut forth this View of infancy it was radically opposed to accepted theory Both Freudian psychology and Traditional behaviorist ineory emphasized that man seeks to escape {rom stimulation and ox; wile Fi X some ‘writers claim thatthe confict betwoen Piaget's view of intelectual ‘development and madein Deniavioral theory s more apparent than real and they point to a compatibility between Piaget's system and D. 0. Hebb's neuroi In Piaget's view is not until the For eral. yOu Ge a veryarald wo tumble oech al fl f rangeads, hei free tat there ste seme unt OForngoadm sn ul Bota is yes you pour fhe orangeade fem one glass tal aro conten ws hat here mote orngeade the ne lass them nth od one ig ve-oor ld nos no cncoat ot Qe on Ot substan Ache coos not Understand ho conseraon efength \imantain haa neciec lad ut ma Sig ine longer nan an denial node tht Hos ma ode "he svorage chi acqures bth these concn yt te Sieh other mgeran coneeratons tat tho child mst eam ao tho wotgntand of voume Paget tested many of fs dees on his ow thos. cen, wetting. hour fer potent hou 8, astenne Laurent and Jocautine developed through infancy and chido Though he toaros have received ingeasialy wide atenton, Paget fomains 2 modest man Ho fre gran intervene and for 10 yoats he nas wih somo itor avoded. Swe tlovsoncameres He ets ate ‘spent taking with reporters is time stolen from his work, Itis said that he speaks no English, and it was with some trepidation that we schoduled 2 bblingval interview. But there was no need for concam. Piaget parnaps ‘does not speak English, but he Understands it. Frequently he answered questions before the translator could say a word. On one occasion he interrupted the translation to say that his reply had boen expanded but that he agreed win the adattion AV73, Piaget follows @ full ule. He teaches four hours @ 3k, supervises doctoral candidates, ‘rocts both the Institute for Psycho! ogy and the Intemational Center of Genetic Epistemology, and edits the Archives de Psychologie. And h writes. Each morning he produces his daily quota of manuscript before mast people are awake. In the summer he treats to the Swiss Alps where he writes in an abandoned farmhouse. During the year he writes inthe sirports of the world, Almays at least ‘wo hours eariy for his plane—and sometimes as much as fve—ne settles down to work, meerscheum clenched in his testh, unaware of the bustle about him. Thirty books end more than a hundred articles now bear his nama. But he is being surpassed by his admirers-at the current rate of publication there soon vill be many more volumes about an Piaget than by Jean Piaget, —Elizebeth HallMe 10 this biological knowledge. Hall: With your interest in the rele tion betiveen the subject and the ob- ject, | am surprised that you did not become a Gestalt. psychologist Piaget: If | had come across the wit: ings of Max Wertheimer and of Wolt gang Kohler when I was 18, 1 would have. But | was reading psychology conly in French, so | was unacquainted with their work Hall: In your autobiography, you saic that your natura-history background provided protection against he ‘demon of philosophy. Piaget: The domon of philosophy is taking the easy way out. You believe that you can solve problems by sit ‘ng in your office and reasoning them out. Because | was a biologist | knew that deductions must be mado from facts, Hall: But efter you establish the facts then you go back to your office and work out the problem. Piaget: Yos. Now, if you dont have @ explanation of philosophical outlook, you probably wont be a good scientist Abstract reflection 'S fundamental to seeing problems clearly But the etror of Philosopiy—ts demon—is to beleve that yeu can go ahead and solve the problem you formulated in the office without going into the eld and es tablishing the fects, Hall: You once wrote that you de- tested any departure from realty Piaget: That was because of my mothers poor mental health. At the beginning of my studies in psycho ogy, | was interested in psychoanal- ysis and pathological psychology because of her. But | always pre ferred the workings of ine intellect to the tricks of the unconscious. Hall: Does your disike of unrealiy extend to iterature? Piaget: Oh, no | read many novels— and 1 even wrote a philosophical novel many years ago. Novels are not pathological Hall: 1 understand that your study of inteligence came about when you es to Standardize reasoning tests at Allied Binet's laboratory school in Paris, Plaget: It was Binst's school, but | was not working on Binet's test. My task was to standardize Cyril Burt's tasts on the children of Pans. | never actually did it Standardization was not at all interesting; 1 preferred to study the errors on the test. | became tried to develop an inteligence test based on your research? Piaget: That kind of research is gong fon in two places ight now. Here st the Unversity of Geneva,Vinh Bang— 2 Vietnamese psychologists work Ing on a test. And Monique Leuren- eau and Adrien Pinard, two psychok ‘ogists at the University of Montreal have been using my experimental methods end giving all the various lesis 10 @ single child Just now they are back-checking to see if their ex pereents and mine produce similar results, and they are publishing vo! umes on different aspacts of the ‘experiments Hall; Would such a test have to be an individual test, oF could it be given to @ group of children at one time? Piaget: The hope is that we will have @ battery of tests that can be given to @ group of children together. The risk is that wo will got deformed Hall: Isnt a group test mora tksly to run aground on the same shoals that wreck the standard tests—a reliance fon the answer instoad of the method ‘of reasoning? Piaget: The diffaronce will be that the clinical method wil already have been used in studying the reasoning (of children at each slage of develop ‘ment, We wil have a background to help interpret the answers. twill have advantages that the | Q test lacks because the method of reason Ing is unknown, Hall: Your research — especialy in cconservation—revealed thal chidren ‘dd not understané things thet adults ‘assumed they knew Piaget: I's just that no adult ever had the idea of asking children about con- servation. It was so obvious that if you change the shape of an object the quantity wil be conserved. Why ask a child? The novelty lay in ask- Ing the question | first discovered the problem of conservation when I worked with young epieptics from 10 to 15. 1 wanted to find some empirical way of distinguishing them trom norma chile dren. 1 went around with four coins ‘and four beads, and | would put the coins end beads in one-to-one cor respondence end then hide one of the coins. If the three remaining coins were then stretched out into a longer line, the pllegtic children seid they had more coins than beads. No con- “Lalways preferred the workings of the intellect to the tricks of the unconscious.”