Piaget's Stages: The Unfinished Symphony of Cognitive Development

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Piaget's stages: The unfinished symphony of cognitive

development
Article in New Ideas in Psychology · December 2004

DOI: 10.1016/j.newideapsych.2004.11.005
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New Ideas in Psychology 22 (2004) 175–231

www.elsevier.com/locate/newideapsych
Piaget’s stages: the unfinished symphony of

cognitive development$
David Henry Feldman
Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA
Available online 26 January 2005
Abstract
After a period during which Piaget’s work in developmental psychology went into serious
decline as a central force in the field, it has once again gained considerable interest to theorists
and researchers. The purpose of the current discussion is to reconsider Piaget’s stage construct
so that a revised version is viable within the psychological part of the theory. The premise of
the discussion is that Piaget fully intended his stages to remain at the heart of his psychology,
but had difficulty meeting the objections of critics: that the stages as proposed were too vague,
too broad, and too dependent on faith in a ‘‘miraculous’’ transition process. By shifting stage
transitions to the midpoint of each stage, by adopting recursive transition processes from neo-
Piagetian theories, by embracing decalage as systematic and necessary, and by using Piaget’s
idea of the taking of consciousness, some of the main problems of his stages can be resolved in
a satisfying way. Although still not fully specified, the Piagetian stages can retain their place as
general guides to cognitive development and as sources of constraints on what structures and
functions are available to the developing mind.
r 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
1. Introduction
‘‘It is my conviction, illusory or otherwise—and the future alone will show which
part is truth and which but simple conceited obstinacy—that I have drawn a quite
$
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Philadelphia, PA, June 8, 2002. Support
by the Fund for Innovative Scholarship in Child Development of the Eliot Pearson Department of Child
Development at Tufts University is gratefully acknowledged.
E-mail address: davidhenry.feldman@tufts.edu (D.H. Feldman).
0732-118X/$ - see front matter r 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2004.11.005
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176 D.H. Feldman / New Ideas in Psychology 22 (2004) 175–231
clear general skeleton, but one still full of gaps of such a kind that, in filling them,
one will be led to differentiate its connections, in various ways, without at the
same time altering the main lines of the system.
yWhen one theory succeeds another, the initial impression is that the new one
contradicts the old and eliminates it, whereas subsequent research leads to
retaining more of it than was foreseen. My secret ambition is that the hypotheses
one could oppose to my own will finally be seen not to contradict them but to
result from a normal process of differentiation’’ (Jean Piaget in Bringuier, 1980, p.
144).
The purpose of the present discussion is to support Piaget’s ‘‘secret ambition’’

revealed in the above quote by suggesting revisions to his stages of cognitive
development. The goal of the exercise is to insure that the stages endure and remain
at the core of our understanding of the psychological development of mind. As
Piaget knew full well and as the quote acknowledges, his stages (or any other part of
the theory) are not likely to survive without at least some modification. Nonetheless,
Piaget’s claim is that, in general, the theory should be able to provide a solid
framework within which to guide efforts to better understand the development of
knowledge and understanding. Recognizing from the outset that the psychological
aspect of Piaget’s theory was only one of his preoccupations and that epistemological
issues remain at the core of the theory, the stages are the most widely known feature
of the theory and are fundamental to its psychological claims (Smith, 1999, 2002).
In the effort to preserve the essential qualities of Piaget’s psychological theory, a
number of devoted Geneva-centered or Geneva-trained scholars (e.g., Gruber &
Voneche, 1977; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) have come to the conclusion that the stages
should be jettisoned and that they are unnecessary. Piaget himself is sometimes cited
as the source of this conclusion (e.g., Ginsburg & Opper, 1988, p. 161). For some,
even in Geneva (see, e.g., Beilin, 1992; Gruber & Voneche, 1977), the stages of Piaget
need to be excised from the core superstructure of the theory as a way of lightening
the load since they are not as central to the general purposes of the genetic
epistemology journey. In this paper, a contemporary version of Piaget’s stages will
be offered that attempts to better express Piaget’s vision of what the stages are
intended to represent. It will be further argued, contrary to what some have claimed,
that Piaget never abandoned the stages; indeed, in his last major public presentation
of his theory (Graham & Van Effentere, 1977), Piaget repeatedly referred to the stage
construct as well as to four broad-scale stages of sensori-motor, preoperational,
concrete and formal operations.
The aim of this discussion, then, is to try to help fulfill Piaget’s vision of a viable
theory of cognitive development by using some of his own discoveries, as well as
those of other theorists, to revise and bring closer to completion his broad vision of
cognitive development as a sequence of four broad stages. Our goal is to provide a
sketch of a sequence consistent with Piaget’s broad outlines, but one that is more
coherent, more internally consistent, and more concordant with our best current
understanding of how cognitive development proceeds from birth through early
adulthood (Boom, 1992; Levin, 1986).
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D.H. Feldman / New Ideas in Psychology 22 (2004) 175–231 177
As Piaget came to believe ever more strongly (Beilin, 1992; Bringuier, 1980), the
first 2 years of intellectual development provide the prototype for all that is to
follow, and such is the case in this presentation as well. Sensorimotor behavior
provides the model for all of the stages; each succeeding operating system for each
succeeding stage is built using similar mechanisms, goes through similar substages,
reaches a halfway turning point, and then is applied in similar ways, pushed to its
limits until another, more powerful system is built. Although, as Piaget says, this
evolution is not the only way things could have gone, it is a natural progression that
exists as part of the stable core of human psychological development (Green, Ford,
& Flamer, 1971).
The presentation is framed by six sets of considerations, five of which have
typically been voiced as concerns about Piaget’s stages, and a sixth which identifies
several recent advances (by Piaget and his coworkers, and others) which can be
utilized in crafting a more complete and useful set of stage descriptions. The sets of
considerations that will frame the discussion are:
the question of structures as a whole and its place in the stage theory
the question of transition from stage to stage and the equilibration process
the question of variability, including individual differences
the question of possible within-stage sequences
the question of which features to preserve, which to revise or abandon in the stage
theory
the question of what additional theoretical constructs are needed to complete the
stage theory in ways consistent with Piaget’s vision
With respect to the last question, the present discussion will propose four
theoretical constructs to be integrated into the existing overall account, two of which
are of Piagetian origin, and two of which have come from neo-Piagetian theorizing.
From Piaget we will be adapting his notions of figurative and operative aspects of
knowledge and knowing, as well as the process of taking of consciousness. From neo-
Piagetians Robbie Case and Kurt Fischer, we will use two of the most important
features of their theories: maturation as a precursor to and enabler of transitions to
new stages; and, recursive or repeating patterns of within-stage sequences that
provide internal order and coherence to the overall stage account (Case, 1984,
1992a, b; Fischer & Pipp, 1984). These features—a set of underlying maturational,
central nervous system changes and a set of recursive within-stage patterns—are
common to both Case’s and Fischer’s theories.
2. Structures as a whole
The notion of structures as a whole, or structures d’ensemble, has been

controversial for many years (see e.g., Brainerd, 1978 and commentaries). The basic
idea is that each of the stages forms a coherent, interconnected, functional working
system that provides the rules and procedures, principles and capabilities, constraints
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and possibilities for the mind at that stage. There are four such systems, each of
which operates on different principles from the one preceding, but each of which also
integrates and transforms the previous one as it comes into being. Viewed in this
way, Piaget’s theory proposes a single linear sequence of four broad stages through
which each person passes on the way to adult intellectual functioning. Characterizing
the nature of each of these stages was one of Piaget’s main goals. What has made the
idea of structures as a whole controversial has been its claim that it is an overall
general operating system functioning at a deep level, much like the deep grammatical
structures posed by Chomsky and others for speech, but even more general and more
difficult to defend.
A child may not actually behave in ways consistent with the principles of the
operating system or overall set of cognitive structures of his or her stage. The theory
proposes that any stable instance of behavior characteristic of a given stage is
sufficient evidence to indicate that the system exists in the child’s mind (Piaget, 1970).
If the system exists in the child’s mind, it exists as a whole, according to the theory,
even if the child’s behavior varies in how well and how consistently it has utilized the
resources of the operating system. This discrepancy between what structures as a
whole for a given stage allow and what the child is actually capable of doing at any
given moment has been labeled horizontal decalage by Piaget, and it too has been
controversial (Case, 1984, 1992b; Feldman, 1980a, b, 1994; Fischer, 1980; Fischer &
Pipp, 1984; Turiel, 1966). The controversy revolves around the fact that it is very
difficult to prove the existence of an overall system like structures as a whole when
behavior is rarely if ever consistent with its theoretically prescribed functions
(Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980; Turiel, 1966, 1983). Unlike rules of grammar or syntax,
which have been reasonably precisely stated, the rules that govern the production of
behavior within each of the four Piagetian stages have not been so precisely stated as
to be put to rigorous empirical test, this in spite of many efforts by Piaget and the
Genevans to offer formal models. Piaget was very much aware of the need to
construct functional models of the stages, labored mightily to do so, but knew that
his efforts fell well short of the mark (Piaget, 1970, 1971a, b, 1975).
We will not try to extend Piaget’s effort to construct models of each of the four
stages of cognitive development here, but we will try to show how a notion such as
structures as a whole can be used in the revised version of the theory to be presented
later in the discussion. Our use of the structures as a whole idea will not solve all of
its problems, nor will it be systematic or formal enough to allow for rigorous
empirical test. We will, however, be able to see that a construct similar to structures
as a whole is a very useful way of giving clarity and coherence to key features of the
stages as well as to the processes governing movement from one to another, a topic
to which we now direct our attention (Boom, 1992).
3. Transitions processes
The question of how one moves from stage to stage in Piaget’s theory has been a
central one. Piaget’s equilibration model has stimulated numerous efforts at
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interpretation, clarification, critique and revision. Piaget was himself among those
who remained unsatisfied with the ability of equilibration to explain in detail how
transitions between stages take place. One of his last major projects was to offer an
elaborated version of equilibration so as to better capture movement from stage to
stage and structure to structure within his theory (Piaget, 1975). The main problem
with equlibration is not that it is necessarily wrong but that it lacks detail in its grand
sweep of generalizations. Most critics seem to agree that the model is almost
certainly right in general, but it leaves many unanswered questions about transitions.
As Piaget wrote on a number of occasions, and as critics have agreed, the key
question to be answered is how truly new knowledge is possible. Piaget wrote: ‘‘For
me, the real problem is novelties, how they are possible and how they are formed’’
(Piaget, 1971a, b). Critics from the nativist perspective have pressed Piaget to specify
how more powerful cognitive structures can be created out of less powerful
structures, claiming that it may be impossible to do so (Campbell & Bickhard, 1986;
Chomsky, 1980; Fodor, 1980; Molenaar, 1986). Information processing oriented
theorists such as Robert Siegler have proposed moving to a more microlevel of
analysis so as to be able to better chart change in the construction of more
sophisticated rules for solving tasks such as the balance beam (Siegler, 1984). Siegler
describes Piaget’s equilibration model as requiring an act of faith of almost Biblical
proportions, to accept a ‘‘miraculous transition’’ that cannot be seen or described in
detail (Siegler & Munakata, 1993).
The main features of Piaget’s equilibration process are adapted from biology, physics,
and his own brand of epistemology (genetic epistemology) and are intended to account
for a mind’s increasingly veridical understandings of the world that are, in turn,
increasingly adaptive, flexible, supple, and in the end, stable. Human minds are assumed
to be inherently intent upon representing and interpreting the world in ever more
adequate and accurate ways, and to come equipped with capabilities that are sufficient
to guarantee successful achievement, eventually, of the most powerful cognitive
structures known to man. A set of ‘‘functional invariants’’ is available through the life
span to perceive the world as it is (accommodation) and, simultaneously, to interpret
the world through currently available mental models and representations, including
symbols and symbol systems (assimilation). It is in the interplay of these two
complementary processes that all mental structures are built, revised, transformed, and
connected into functional units (Bringuier, 1980; Boom, 1992).
As a broad explanation for changes in mental models and structures, equilibration
makes a good deal of intuitive and theoretical sense. It only runs into difficulty when
applied to the largest structural units in the theory, and in particular when used to
try to explain stage-to-stage transitions at the most general levels. That is, while it is
almost certainly true that equilibration or something very much like equilibration is
involved in the extension, adjustment, elaboration and transformation of structures
for comprehending and interpreting the world, it is not at all clear how such
processes could account for the appearance of a set of structures as broad,
interconnected, qualitatively advanced, and dramatically improved as is true of each
of the stages succeeding sensorimotor behavior. How, e.g., could equilibration
account for the ability to form mental symbols and construct mental symbol systems
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out of structures that are constrained to function only through sensory and motor
behavior (Fodor, 1983)?
When equilibration processes are juxtaposed with structures as a whole, seemingly
insurmountable problems arise for the theory. The equilibration model forces us to
choose to accept ‘‘miraculous transitions’’ from stage to stage or to abandon the idea
of structures as a whole as one of the core components of the theory (Siegler &
Munakata, 1993), but doing so would seem to require abandoning some of the
theory’s most fundamental claims. One wonders if it is Piaget’s theory anymore that
is being presented (Beilin, 1971, 1992; Karmiloff-Smith, 1993). This tendency to
abandon one or both of the core qualities of Piaget’s stage theory has even been
found among Genevans long associated with Piaget’s enterprise (Ginsburg & Opper,
1988; Inhelder, De Caprona, & Cornu Wells, 1987).
In the revised version of Piaget’s stages presented in later sections of this paper, we
will retain the core qualities of the equilibration model and of structures as a whole,
but will add certain features and processes that will make equilibration and
structures as a whole compatible with each other and show them to be
complementary aspects of the framework. The result will be that transitions between
stages are less miraculous, but the stages themselves will continue to be composed of
large scale, system wide structures-as-a-whole components. It will not be necessary
to sacrifice scope or scale to achieve a more comprehensible account of stage change.
Our version of the stages and the transition processes that account for their
construction will draw upon recent work on ‘‘emergence’’ (Bedeau, 1997; Dennett,
1991; Hendriks-Jantsh, 1996; Richardson, 1998; Searle, 1988).
4. Individual differences, contextual influences, modularity, etc.
Piaget’s theory is notorious for being oblivious to individual differences. Indeed, it

was designed to be just that. One of Piaget’s central purposes was to construct a
theoretical framework that captured the common qualities of thought and its
development that occur regardless of the particular circumstances. In Piaget’s
rarified theoretical space, there exist only ‘‘epistemic subjects,’’ minds disembodied
from the rough and tumble of day to day existence, unmarked and uninfluenced by
ambient variations in experience. The developing mind was supposed to make its
way ineluctably toward mature thought regardless of gender, cultural context,
historical period, nutritional input, training, or even biological variations unless they
proved to very extreme indeed (e.g., Down’s syndrome). As Piaget said of individual
differences, ‘‘Generally speaking—and I’m ashamed to say it—I’m not really
interested in individuals, in the individual. I’m interested in what is general in the
development of intelligence and knowledgey’’ (Bringuier, 1980, p. 86).
In the face of an IQ-dominated psychometric tradition that made discrimination
between and among individuals and groups a primary purpose, Piaget’s theory was
intended to do the opposite. In the face of a framework that aimed to show each
person’s place on a predetermined and unchangeable scale of intellectual power,
Piaget proposed to show that each human mind is curious, independent, and an
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active creator of its own mental structures; each person is guaranteed to do so in a

way that is fundamentally similar to other human beings. One of the great paradoxes
of Piaget’s theory is that it places the individual at the center of its theoretical edifice,
and yet each individual is fundamentally the same as every other individual when it
comes to the kinds of mental structures that are constructed.
The idea of Piaget’s epistemic subject, the universal child, has recently been
balanced somewhat by a ‘‘psychological subject’’ in the writings of Piaget’s
collaborator, the late Barbel Inhelder (Brown, 1997; Inhelder & De Caprona,
1997, p. 1). This psychological subject is intended to allow for the variation in
behavior that the epistemic subject precludes; it brings the psychological child into
the picture where the disembodied mind seemed only to exist before. In one of her
last articles, Inhelder described the need for greater attention to the psychological
subject:
We began our research in the strong belief that genetic psychology had, up to that
point, provided a remarkable description of people’s spontaneous epistemology
and of the structures that organize their knowledge. It had sketched out a general
architecture of knowledge in terms of a given epistemic subject’s structures. At the
same time, we were convinced that it had not really analyzed individual know-
how and that this left a vast field of conduct to be studied (Inhelder & De
Caprona, 1997).
And later in the same article:
He [Piaget] conceived subjects, therefore, in terms of their nomothetic rather than
their idiosyncratic characteristics. This has led to important misunderstandings
that make it essential to distinguish between the epistemic and the psychological
subject. Certain psychologists have reproached Piaget and his school for studying
a ‘‘disembodied’’ subject devoid of life, but this misses the deep and enduring
meaning of Piaget’s approach (Inhelder & De Caprona, 1997, p. 4).
Consistent with these considerations and concerns about the general stage
structures of Piaget’s framework, the revised stages should be able to function as a
context for variations and differences between and among individual children, and
should have plausible relationships with psychological change processes that are
involved in the transformation of these structures (as well as the more local sets of
structures). They should, to borrow Inhelder’s terms, relate well to the epistemic as
well as the psychological subject. Without losing the important normative properties
of Piaget’s broad stage descriptions, we want to add properties that give
psychological reality to the experience of constructing, elaborating, extending, and
ultimately transforming the stages, and that specify how these two aspects of
cognitive development are related.
Although the purpose of the large-scale stages retains its original emphasis in the
version to be presented, viz. to characterize the common qualities of thought during
each of the major periods of human development, these stages should also serve as
powerful participants in the more individual and idiosyncratic processes of moving
from one level of understanding to another in any area of activity.
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Similarly, the revised stage framework needs to be compatible with contemporary

theories that have modular components in their architecture, as several contempor-
ary ‘‘integrative’’ theories have also attempted to achieve (Case, 1992a, b;
Demetriou, Efklides, Platsidou, & Campbell, 1993; Feldman, 1980a, b, 1994;
Gardner, 1983; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). It now seems likely that the next generation
of cognitive developmental theories will be characterized by modular in addition to
general structures (Gardner, Kornhaber, & Wake, 1996; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992;
Smith, 1999).
5. Possible within-stage sequences
Although the ‘‘miraculous transition’’ problem is troublesome for the Piagetian

stages, there are also serious problems with within-stage developmental shifts. Only
the sensori-motor period has a delineated within-stage sequence of six levels, from
the innate reflexes of looking, listening, grasping and sucking to the beginnings of
symbolic thought that appear near the end of the second year (Ginsburg & Opper,
1988). Although there have been numerous attempts to refine, modify, or change the
within-stage sequence proposed in Piagetian theory (generally to show that the infant
is more capable than the theory proposed), the first 2 years have been carefully
mapped and charted in terms of a refined and coherent set of changes as the child
approaches the creation and use of symbols (Cole & Cole, 1996).
The same cannot be said for the other three major stages of Piaget’s theory.
Preoperational (or Intuitive) stage thinking is often richly described, but has not been
organized into a plausible sequence of within-stage levels (although see Case, 1992a, b;
Fischer & Pipp, 1984). The same is true of concrete operations and even more so of
formal operations. There are many interesting sequences described, e.g., for the
various conservations (e.g., that number precedes continuous quantity), and seriation
has been elegantly portrayed in several different states of development between 4 and
12 years (Graham & Van Effentere, 1977). These rich accounts of change do not,
however, cohere into an account of an overall orderly within-stage sequence for stage
development. In formal operations, there is even less material to work with than for
the earlier stages, and what there is tends to revolve around the issue of whether or not
all children actually reach this final stage (Piaget, 1972), or if there are stages beyond it
(e.g., Moshman, 1998). There is little work that tries to construct a sequence of within-
stage levels from entry into the stage toward full mastery of its structures. There is also
the matter of formal operations being extended, elaborated, and refined through the
life course, making such an internal sequence of levels potentially difficult to chart
(Bringuier, 1980; Fischer & Farrar, 1987).
6. Core qualities of the stage theory
We will try to avoid the fate of other efforts to adapt Piaget’s theory to the
changing cognitive development zeitgeist; in these instances, core elements of the
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theory have been sacrificed to accommodate perceived new requirements. For

example, Karmiloff-Smith (1993) criticized Fischer’s (1980) theory for losing the
essential constructivist qualities of Piaget’s theory in the process of trying to impose
order through an overly tidy set of recursive substages, and suggested that neo-
Piagetian theories are actually better described as non-Piagetian.
Karmiloff-Smith’s theory was itself criticized as underspecified and loosely
conceptualized (Schauble, 1994). Karmiloff-Smith was right to recognize the
difficulties with Piaget’s stage construct, but went too far when she decided to drop
them from the theoretical landscape. Yet, as we will see few major changes are
required for the stages to achieve the kind of wholeness and breadth of explanation
that Piaget envisioned for them. The changes that we will make are intended not to
change in any fundamental way what Piaget had in mind, but rather to better express
his goals for the stages.
7. Four domain general stages
Along with a number of other prominent stage theories, including some that are
not focused on cognitive development, Piaget’s set of four stages and major
transition points seem well crafted and should be preserved (cf. Bruner, Olver, &
Greenfield, 1966; Erikson, 1950; Freud, 1938; Kohlberg, 1969, 1971).1 We will
continue to use Piaget’s (admittedly awkward) terminology for the stages, as well as
preserve the approximate age spans that each stage reflects. The stages, as should be
familiar to any student of cognitive development, are summarized in Table 1.
The age ranges of each of the stages were always intended to be approximate, and
we know that Piaget never intended them to be interpreted as strictly normative
(Bringuier, 1980). The ages encompassed by each of the stages appear to be about
right. In the presentation of the revised stages, the age of onset and age of transition
to each succeeding stage will remain as Piaget proposed. Piaget never saw it as
desirable to speed up the process of stage to stage progression, nor to compress the
time in which a stage tends to organize the acquisition of new knowledge. That
remains true of the revised version as well.
The following list summarizes the central components of the traditional and the
revised Piagetian stages and transitions model. The following features are preserved
from the original theory’s stage description:
The four broad stages most commonly associated with Piaget’s theory are retained
(Boom, 1992).
1
In most presentations, Piaget proposed four major stages, but in some places there seemed to be only
three (e.g. Smith, 2002). Similarly, some textbook presentations (e.g. Ginsburg & Opper, 1988) include
three stages (sensorimotor, concrete operations, and formal operations), with the years from about 2 to 5
seen more as precursors and early efforts toward logical analysis than an actual separate stage. Similarly,
many have proposed stages in addition to the four usually associated with Piaget’s theory, although Piaget
himself never endorsed additional major stages beyond formal operations. We will not adopt either of
these modifications of the theory.
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Table 1
Summary of Piaget’s four major domain general stages of cognitive development
Stage Age rangea
Sensorimotor Birth to about 24 months

Substages:
Reflexes: 0–2 months
Primary circular reactions: 2–4 months
Secondary circular reactions: 4–6 months
Coordination of secondary schemes: 6–12 months
Tertiary circular reactions: 12–18 months
Transition to symbolic thinking: 18–24 months
Preoperational About 24 months to about 6 years
Concrete operations About 6 years to about 12 years
Formal operations About 12 years to about 18 years and beyond
a
Ages are approximate; substantial variation in individual children is assumed.
The age span of each of the stages is also retained.

The assumption that the stages are universal is maintained.
The idea of structures as a whole is retained in modified form.
The following features reflect changes or additions to the original stage conception
of Piaget:
Piaget’s equilibration process will continue to play a central role in the

construction of cognitive structures, but will not have to carry the burden of
stage transition alone (Feldman, 1995).
The notion of ‘‘emergence’’ of qualitatively different behavior will help carry the
burden of transition from less to more powerful structures (Bedeau, 1997).
The idea of recursive substages found in several neo-Piagetian theories is used to
help provide internal order and cohesiveness for each of the four stages (Case,
1992a, b; Fischer, 1980).
Piaget’s distinction between figurative and operative knowing is used to help
provide a marker for where in the stage construction process a child is likely to be;
each stage will be characterized in terms of a recursive pattern alternating
between efforts to primarily construct and efforts to primarily extend the system
(Feldman, 2000).
The idea of taking of consciousness and the emotions associated with that process
(and of other emotions to be introduced later) are markers for completion of the
construction of each of the four overall operating systems associated with the four
large-scale stages (Bringuier, 1980).
The domain general stage framework will be compatible with domain specific
modular frameworks as well as with contextual, cultural, and individual
differences views of development (Fodor, 1983; Gardner, 1983).
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A set of maturational transformations of the nervous system is assumed to occur

as a consequence both of previous efforts at construction of cognitive structures
and as an emerging tendency of the growing body; this transformation provides a
‘‘glimpse’’ of the possibilities of the next stage and motivates the child to pursue
the new system (Case, 1984; Fischer & Pipp, 1984).
7.1. Recursive procedures
We can now proceed to elaborate in greater detail the theoretical elements that will
play key roles in the reconstructed stages. A number of contemporary theories of
cognitive development have exploited the idea of recursiveness in trying to add
internal coherence to their stages. Recursiveness refers to a repeating sequence that
can be found in more than one place, a kind of loop where the last event in the
previous set becomes the first event in the succeeding set, often with a parameter or
parameters shifting as the pattern repeats itself over and over again. Some of the
more prominent neo-Piagetian theories utilize recursive sequences within stages to
impose order on the seeming disorder within each of the traditional Piagetian stages.
The theories of Robbie Case and Kurt Fischer place recursive within-stage
sequences as central to the architecture of their stages (Case, 1984; Case, 1992a,b;
Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Pipp, 1984; although see Fischer & Bidell, 1998). In Robbie
Case’s theory (Case, 1998), e.g., there are four large-scale stages that superimpose
directly onto the traditional four stages of Piaget, albeit with different labels for three
of the four stages (see Fig. 1 for a summary of Case’s stages of cognitive
development). Case’s four stages are divided, in turn, into four substages which
repeat themselves cyclically four times, thus providing an elegant internal set of
structures through which the child moves toward adolescent reasoning. Case’s
framework is not intended to be as comprehensive as Piaget’s and no overall system
is assumed to be operating, no ‘‘structures as a whole’’ involved. Yet Case argues
that there are ‘‘central structures’’ formed through general stage transition processes
that his theory describes.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s (1992) effort to integrate modular with general Piaget-
like equilibration processes also depends heavily on a recurring sequence of
representation and re-representation to power the movement toward greater
sophistication in thought in each domain. And nonuniversal theory (Feldman,
1994) utilizes a six phase recursive sequence to help specify transition processes in the
domains (e.g., juggling) it has tried to map. In the version of the Piagetian stages to
be presented, recursiveness will be a key element in the effort to bring greater internal
coherence to each of the stages, as well as to suggest that there are similar rhythms to
the way in which each stage is encountered, engaged, constructed, and elaborated.
Within each stage there are increasingly large numbers of elements that become
coordinated, culminating in a highly complex set of accomplishments organized into
relatively large functioning units. At the sensorimotor stage, e.g., a baby might begin
with an effort to perfect a reaching ability that will allow her or him to touch the side
of the crib. That reaching ability, in the second substage (called unifocal
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Fig. 1. The neo-Piagetian stages of Robbie Case’s theory (Case, 1992b).
coordination) might be combined with a grasping ability so as to permit pulling the

fringe on the side of the crib. The third substage brings more complex coordination
(‘‘bifocal’’ in Case’s terminology) as using two hands to hold an object while at the
same time turning it. Finally, at the ‘‘elaborated coordination’’ substage, the 12–18
month old child is able to select from a repertoire of physical capabilities and arrange
them into a kind of algorithm for carrying out a planned activity.
The final substage of each stage in Case’s system is also the first substage of the
subsequent cycle, such that ‘‘elaborated coordination’’ of sensorimotor activities is
equivalent to ‘‘operational consolidation’’ of a perceived relation (such as how hard
one hits an object in relation to how far it rolls). The recursive cycle then repeats
through increasingly complex relations, dimensions, and finally vectors, the
equivalent in Case’s theory to Piaget’s formal operations. The superstructure of
Case’s theory is thus an elegant, nested one, proposing four substages within four
large-scale stages, thus potentially providing the missing internal order that all but
one of Piaget’s stages seem to lack.
A similar system is used by Fischer (Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 1991, 1998;
Fischer & Pipp, 1984), but Fischer used three rather than four large-scale stages and
extends the final stage’s development well into early adulthood. Again, there are
many novel features to Fischer’s adaptation of Piaget’s stage framework, but the one
that is of greatest interest in the present context is a four substage sequence that
closely mirrors Case’s recursive substages. For Fischer, the emphasis is on skills
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rather than abilities, and the substage sequence reflects this emphasis. Each substage
is described in terms of the number and type of skills that can be controlled by the
child, ranging from a single skill, to the coordination of two skills, to a system of
skills, to a system of systems of skills such as would be required to play a simple
game. The concept of a game is the kind of notion that helps begin the next cycle
(after sensorimotor skills, in this example), since the idea of a game and a set of skills
needed to play it is a representation broad enough to qualify for the second stage
(representations) in Fischer’s system.
Efforts to impose internal order on the stages have been successful especially as
guides to empirical research testing the claims of both Case’s and Fischer’s theories,
but they have tended to lose some of the flavor of the original Piagetian stages in the
process, leading Piagetian collaborators like Karmiloff-Smith (1993) to charge that
neo-Piagetians like Fischer are more neo than they are Piagetian. The idea of a
recursive pattern of internal stage movements is nonetheless one that has great
promise. The Piagetian stages are broad and are intended to cover too large an age
span (in either the three or the four stage versions) to be plausible without more fine-
grained internal roadmaps through them. Indeed, the persistently difficult problems
of structures as a whole and where they come from (the miraculous transition
problem) have been exacerbated by the scale of the stages and the fact that they seem
to appear out of nowhere.
Defenders of Piaget have argued that he never intended the notion of structures as
a whole to be taken literally, and that the transition from one stage to another must
be a gradual process of small-scale construction. Some abandoned the large stages
altogether and began to focus on the procedures involved in smaller-scale
construction implied by a more gradual transition process (e.g., Gruber & Voneche,
1977; Inhelder, Cornu-Wells, & De Caprona, 1987; Sinclair, Stanbok, Levzine,
Rayna, & Verba, 1989). This work on procedures and smaller-scale transitions has
been productive, but it has not solved the problems of the large-scale stages.
Recursive internal stage patterns for the original stages may be able to provide the
needed texture to the large-scale stages. Such a set of internal stage changes may be
constructed using several of Piaget’s discoveries and ideas that have not found their
place in the overall theoretical structure or are problematic for various reasons. An
example of a discovery of Piaget’s that can be used as part of a recursive set of
internal stage changes is ‘‘seizing of consciousness’’ or ‘‘taking of consciousness,’’ a
notion of great interest to Piaget during his later years (Bringuier, 1980). An example
of a theoretical construct that can be reinterpreted is structures as a whole; Piaget
seems to have either not fully communicated his intentions for this notion, or had
not quite figured out how best to use the idea. In any event, structures as a whole (or
more accurately, an adaptation of that idea) has a key role to play in the effort to
provide a plausible account of internal order for the stages.
7.2. Figurative and operative
Another Piagetian distinction that is used extensively in the revised stage account
is one that differentiates between figurative and operative aspects of knowing and
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understanding. Although the figurative/operative distinction was fundamental to

Piaget’s theorizing, it has not had the prominence in most accounts of the theory that
it merits (although see Gardner, 1983, 1993; Milbrath, 1998). Indeed, there are
presentations of Piaget’s theory that hardly mention the figurative/operative
distinction at all, or do so in fragmented ways not well integrated into the overall
theoretical account (e.g., Ginsburg & Opper, 1988).
Figurative and operative are the terms that Piaget used to capture two aspects of
the knowing process. He assumed that human minds (epistemic subjects) are
motivated to know and understand their world through the use of whatever
capabilities they have available. The two basic forms of motivation arise from two
equally powerful desires to know: one which is primarily driven by the desire to
know the world exactly how it is (figurative knowledge); the other to make sense of,
to interpret the world using existing mental-structures of analysis (operative
knowledge). The two aspects of knowing, figurative and operative, never operate
in isolation. There is no pure figurative knowledge any more than there is any pure
operative knowledge. The two forms of knowing are in constant interplay, although
one or the other can be emphasized. Indeed there are disciplines that have evolved to
permit greater emphasis on one or the other tendency: meditation and acting to
illustrate figurative knowing, pure mathematics and logic to emphasize operative
understanding.
Schemes are typically described as the basic elements of cognitive structures, but
structures are actually formed from the interplay of schemes and schemata, two
different aspects of knowing that must be brought into the structure building process
(Cowan, 1978). The structures built from schemes and schemata are smaller scale
than the general stage systems referred to as sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete
and formal. But not structures as a whole, at least as the theory is presented. Thus, it
has always been difficult to determine what connection the construction of smaller-
scale structures or systems for knowing and understanding might have to the large-
scale structures of the overall stage accounts. We hope to show how each of these
important aspects of Piaget’s theorizing can be integrated into an overall stage and
transition account (Feldman & Fowler, 1997a, b).
The familiar terms of assimilation and accommodation are closely related to the
distinction we have been discussing, but are more directly involved with structures
themselves rather than motivation to know. Assimilation refers to the tendency to
interpret experience through existing structures of knowing as much as possible and
is assumed to be the child’s initial tendency, while accommodation refers to the
realization that current structures are insufficient for adequate understanding and
that they must be changed. Contrary to most presentations, however, accommoda-
tion does not refer just to the actual changes in structure, but to the realization that
such changes must take place. The process of transforming structures so that they
are better able to perceive and interpret a feature of the world involves both
operative and figurative activity in the extension, elaboration, formation, or
transformation of cognitive structures. This is achieved through the interplay
between the more operative schemes and the more figurative schemas which in turn
are integrated into structures for knowing the world, responsive to its reality. The
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revised stages to be proposed here have as their central process the construction of
increasingly large-scale structures for knowing the world through the integration of
figurative and operative knowledge.
7.3. Taking of consciousness and structures as a whole
Another of Piaget’s discoveries that will have an important role to play in the
revised stage and transitions model is the idea of ‘‘taking of consciousness’’ or
‘‘seizing of consciousness’’ (Bringuier, 1980; Piaget, 1976). This notion refers to the
fact that children occasionally show what appears to be a remarkably abrupt shift in
perspective, from an intellectually less to an intellectually more powerful one. The
shift has a sense of necessity about it. The event is akin to an ‘‘insight’’ in the
problem solving literature (e.g., Siegler, 1991). Here is how Piaget described one such
event:
The striking thing here is that the child reaches this feeling of necessity as soon as
he has understood the phenomenon in question. One can sometimes witness the
precise moment when he discovers this necessity. At the beginning of this
reasoning he is not at all sure of what he is stating. Then suddenly he says ‘‘But it’s
obvious.’’ In another experiment where Barbel Inhelder was questioning a child
on a problem which is not as in the above situation that of seriation but of
recurrent reasoning, which also involved the feeling of necessity, the child was at
first very uncertain. Then suddenly he said, ‘‘Once one knows, one knows forever
and ever.’’ In other words, at one point the child automatically acquires this
feeling of necessity (Piaget, 1971b, p. 5).
Another context within which Piaget discussed the notion of seizing of
consciousness was in his conversations with the literate and well informed (but
not psychologically trained) Jean-Claude Bringuier:
Bringuier: But listening to you I get the impression that the child suddenly
changes intellectually, as if there are sudden mutations.
Piaget: No, the transformation is slow. What is sudden is the final comprehension
when the structure is completed. You often see this kind of sudden comprehension
during an interrogation. A child muddles about and suddenly he sees the light:
‘‘Ah, now I understand,’’ and he says something completely unrelated to his
remarks at the beginning of the interrogation.
Bringuier: That’s wonderful!
Piaget: Yes, and of course it presupposes a whole preliminary labor, underneath,
of which the child had no consciousness; but taking consciousness [prise de
conscience] is sudden. Suddenly he sees things in the external world in a whole
new way. That’s what’s sudden—not the construction, but the taking of
consciousness (Bringuier, 1980, p. 45).
In these quotes, Piaget is clarifying his ideas about transitions. He is not claiming
that stage shifts occur all of a sudden, but rather ‘‘suddenness,’’ when it occurs, is an
indication that a long process has reached fruition, that a sustained effort to build
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new structures has been achieved and comprehended by the child. In this sense
suddenness of change may be seen as a marker indicating that a given structure or set
of structures has been well consolidated and is available for use in any situation the
child chooses to use it.
The fact that Piaget limits abrupt shifts in cognitive functioning to moments of
completion following long periods of construction and reflection sheds new light on
the notion of structures as a whole. Piaget seems to be saying that whole systems
for understanding the world do not appear out of the blue when their time of
emergence has arrived, as has been what most critics assume, including the present
author (Beilin, 1971; Feldman, 1980a, b; Siegler & Munakata, 1993). It helps us
understand why Piaget so adamantly rejected maturationist interpretations of his
transitions model (e.g., Piaget, 1971a, b, 1980), and also why so many critics, even
friendly ones, could find no other explanation than maturation for the shift from
stage to stage in the theory (e.g., Beilin, 1971; Flavell, 1971a; Fodor, 1980). Taking of
consciousness suggests a much more gradual stage transition, with partial
completion of structures more the rule rather than the exception (e.g., Flavell,
1971a, b; Turiel, 1966, 1983), followed by moments of recognition of a long labor
brought to completion.
It is this process of partial construction of the overall structures of each of the
stages that will characterize the proposed version of Piaget’s stages. Taking of
consciousness will be an indication that a more gradual process was actually what
Piaget had in mind all along (or at least it is where he got to after reflecting upon
equilibration; see Piaget, 1975). Stage transition will look like a process that leads up
to, recognizes, then extends gains achieved through sustained efforts at construction
of more powerful structures.
The issue of structures as a whole therefore remains in the theory, but takes on a
somewhat different meaning than in the traditional interpretation of the stages.
Structures as a whole is presented as an outline, a glimpse into the future, a set of
apprehended possibilities of the system that will energize and motivate the child to
pursue the construction effort, eventually allowing the child to apprehend the more
powerful system and transform it into a fully functioning and accessible instrument
available at will; i.e., to embody it. Taking of consciousness signals the availability of
the fully functioning system to the child to use for his or her purposes of selecting
information and interpreting its meaning.
7.4. Emergence as a transition process2
The core qualities of Piaget’s equilibration model can find additional conceptual
and empirical support from the emerging disciplines called ‘‘the sciences of
complexity,’’ especially evolutionary robotics (ER) and artificial life (Alife). These
2
Iris Stammberger, a student in Tufts, Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program, drafted this part of the
discussion. Thanks as well to the other members of the Ms. Stammberger’s Committee: Professors Daniel
Dennett, James Ennis, the late Sal Soraci, and to the Chair of the Interdisciplinary Program, Professor
Steve Marrone.
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disciplines study the emergence of the cognitive competencies of the agent—a robot,
a simulated Alife world or any living creature—as situated activity. In ER’s and
Alife’s theorizing and empirical research, the cognitive agent, through its activities in
the world, develops a set of emergent behaviors through differentiation of very basic
initial activity, of sensorimotor activity patterns. This differentiation occurs because
the emergent activity is constituted from the recursive operation of sensorimotor
activity patterns. Researchers in Alife and ER study the phenomena of cognition as
existing in the interaction between the agent and the environment and occurring as a
product of their history of interactions (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1993). In
situated activity cognition cannot be found in the head of the agent, nor in its
environment (Norman, 1993). The agent starts with very basic sensorimotor activity
patterns that get differentiated through recurrent activity, which can then be
described by an observer as emergent structures of behavior.
The study of cognition as situated activity represents a radical departure from the
prevalent approach of cognitive science that considers cognition as symbolic
processing. It can be surprising for those who have embraced cognitive
computationalism and rejected Piagetian epistemology to find how Piaget reappears
as a pioneer of the new approach to cognition (Varela et al., 1993, p. 176). The new
approach, known as situationism (Thompson & Fine, 1999) offers a different
taxonomy of cognition as well as different methods for its study (Hendriks-Jantsch,
1996; Johnson, 1987; Varela et al., 1993). It could overcome the limitations found by
the cognitive or computational model in which functional treatment of cognition
leads to enormous complexity and density of information for the study of even the
simplest functional task. Besides, the computational approach has found it extremely
difficult to observe all the relevant aspects of symbolic processing.
Instead of focusing on the processing of information where action is inside the
head and where there is a clear demarcation between what is inside versus what is
outside the mind of the epistemic subject, the situated approach focuses on the
ontology of its interactions. The situated paradigm does not decompose the
system under study by function but rather by activity. It uses the activity patterns as
the categories under study. The situationist approach is called ‘‘enactivism’’ because
it studies the subject as enacting activity patterns that have been differentiated
through the history of structural couplings between the subject and its environ-
ment (Varela et al., 1993). Rodney Brooks presents his situated approach to ERs
this way:
yThe fundamental slicing up of an intelligent system is in the orthogonal

direction dividing it into activity producing subsystems. Each activity, or
behavior, producing system individually connects sensing to action. We refer to
an activity-producing system as a layer. An activity is a pattern of interactions
with the world. Another name for our activities might well be skill emphasizing
that each activity can at least post facto be rationalized as pursuing some purpose.
We have chosen the word activity however because our layers must decide when
to act for themselves, not, by some abstract subroutine to be invoked at the beck
and call of some other layery (Varela et al., 1993, p. 209).
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The idea of layers of situated activity described by Brooks is consonant with the
clearly delimited stages of Piaget’s theory. Piaget’s focus is the study of cognitive
structures that emerge from the kind of recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable
action to be perceptually guided and that are present at birth as very basic circular
reactions. This is what makes him the pioneer of the study of cognition as situated
activity. His ‘‘circular reactions’’ correspond to Brook’s layers; they both emerge
through successive differentiation. The differentiation in layers—or the emergence of
structures in Piagetian terms—seems to invite the need for a special mechanism: how
is it that the basic circular reactions or recurrent patterns of sensorimotor activity
differentiate? In the absence of this mechanism, the transitions seem ‘‘miraculous’’
(Siegler & Munakata, 1993).
Why has Piaget’s equilibration model been insufficient to explain the emergence of
new layers or structures? These questions need to be explored with awareness of the
different frames of reference in which an answer could be given. The answers
required by neurophysiology require the identification of brain states that
correspond to the different layers of cognition. A philosophical explanation should
be given in terms of consistency with a determinate metaphysical paradigm. A
psychological answer could be offered in terms of mathematical equations or logic
statements (as did Piaget when he identified logic systems for each of his stages), or
in terms of any other taxonomy used to define the mind (Freudian, Behaviorist,
Cognitivist, Developmentalist, etc.).
The rejection of the Piagetian stages and the demand for an additional
transitional mechanism are related to the philosophical aspects of the theory.
From a materialistic and deterministic worldview, the Piagetian transitions
as well as the layers of ERs and Alife, seem indeed ‘‘miraculous.’’ They are an
expression of the perennial philosophical puzzle presented by the phenomenon of
‘‘emergence.’’
7.4.1. Structures, layers, and levels as ‘‘emergent’’ phenomena

‘‘Our Western scientific worldview tends to embrace a paradigm that is both
deterministic and materialistic: everything has a cause and this cause can be
identified in the material world. But, if everything has a cause, how can something
really new emerge from the old?’’ (Fodor, 1980). How can a new cognitive structure
emerge? The phenomena identified as emergent—Piaget’s structures or Brooks’
layers—represent a clear violation of the principle of causality that is at the core of
our scientific worldview. Determinism does not offer a clear explanation—a
mechanism—for those phenomena that seem to be emergent. This gives the
discussion of emergence its metaphysical flavor since it implies that the new layer,
structure, or level arises without having an identifiable causal origin except for the
operations of the previous layer (van Geert, 1991).
In Alife, ER and more broadly in the interdisciplinary nexus of scientific activity
called the ‘‘sciences of complexity,’’ emergent phenomena abound. It has became
commonplace to call emergent phenomena not simply thought structures, but all
those patterns of behavior that seem to be autonomous with respect to the massive
aggregation of its components; for instance a tornado in relation to the air and water
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molecules that constitute it. In the sciences of complexity, emergence is explained as

a real phenomenon whose hallmarks are
(1) constituted by, and generated from underlying processes,

(2) autonomous from underlying processes (Bedeau, 1997, p. 374).
Philosophers have recently developed arguments to set the issue of emergence,

concluding that emergent phenomena are ‘‘real,’’ that they represent observational
phenomena that emerge from low-level activity (Dennett, 1991). There is no need for
any additional transitional mechanism other than the set of processes underlying the
emergent phenomenon. Searle (1988), in making a case for consciousness as an
emergent phenomenon, explains the ‘‘wetness’’ of H2O as emergent even though
there is no transitional mechanism or property of the constituents of water that
could explain the new property. Bedeau (1997) tries to explain away emergence’s
illegitimate metaphysics which raises the ‘‘yspecter of illegitimately getting
something from nothing’’ (p. 377).
Studying the emergent properties of the computer simulations of Alife, Bedeau
(1997) focuses on explaining emergence with an argument that is ‘‘metaphysically
innocent,’’ i.e., does not purport any miraculous transition between levels, stages, or
layers. The argument for what he calls ‘‘weak emergence’’ as opposed to a version of
emergence that requires miraculous interventions has the purpose of providing a
philosophical ground for the phenomena observed in the scientific study of life and
mind, while at the same time being consistent with materialism. Bedeau’s argument
for ‘‘weak emergence’’ states that ‘‘Macrostate P of S with microdynamic D is
weakly emergent if P can be derived from D and S’s external conditions but only by
simulation’’ (p. 378). In our case the ‘‘simulation’’ to which Bedeau refers is the
situated activity of the agent, and the weakly emergent macrostates under study are
the Piagetian stages. Our conclusion is that philosophy has provided some of the
necessary grounds for a definition of emergence that is ‘‘metaphysically innocent,
consistent with materialism, and scientifically useful, especially in the sciences of
complexity that deal with life and mind’’ (Bedeau, 1997, p. 376).
In the present discussion, the claim is that the stages are real emergent phenomena
in the domain of the observable properties of the activities of the agent. They are, as
proposed earlier, a set of apprehended possibilities of the system that will energize
and motivate the child to pursue the construction effort, eventually transforming the
initial apprehension of the more powerful system into a fully accessible system
available at will. Taking of consciousness signals the availability of the fully
functioning system to the child to use for his or her purposes.
In the reality of changed physiological states of the brain, the claim here is that the
‘‘feeling of necessity’’ that signals the completion of the structure is a marker of a
physiological correlate. The feeling of necessity is a bodily sensation; as such, is
physiological in its substratum. Will this effort to provide a physical basis for the
completion of structure succeed in convincing the reader of the plausibility of the
revised version of the Piagetian stages? According to Wilensky and Resnick (1999),
we should be cautiously optimistic. They claim that an understanding of the concept
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of ‘‘emergent levels’’ is difficult because it implies seeing systems from different

perspectives. Thinking in levels implies a dynamic systems approach to making sense
of the world, which is not common even among scientists.
There have been two major efforts to use modeling techniques based on dynamic
systems modeling (van Geert, 1991) and chaos theory (van der Maas & Molenaar,
1992) to help account for emergent stage transitions, including stage transitions of
the sort proposed by Piaget. In both instances, plausible ways of accounting for
abrupt phase shifts in behavior, bimodality in performance, and increased variability
are proposed. A reasonable fit with existing empirical data is achieved. Research
literature on Piaget’s conservation tasks, e.g., can be plausibly accounted for using
formal modeling techniques that are nonlinear and that do not require a leap of faith
to account for stage or stage-like change.
With the preceding discussion in mind, we now turn to the heart of the matter: a
revised version of Piaget’s psychological stages that follows from his original insights
and offers a coherent framework for broad reorganizations and transformations in
cognitive development.We see the stages as emergent in the sense that we have just
discussed and believe that no ‘‘miraculous transition’’ is necessary to account for
them. A version of Piaget’s equilibration process, enhanced by insights from more
contemporary efforts to explain qualitative change, should be sufficient to provide a
plausible process for stage change. With the availability of powerful models of stage
transition at hand, there is no reason to abandon the idea of broad-scale stages.
8. The revised stage model
The basic approach to revising the stages of Piaget is to set them as a sequence of
recurring efforts to construct overall systems for understanding the world, efforts
that lead to the achievement of four large-scale systems at about the halfway point of
each traditional Piagetian stage. ‘‘Taking of consciousness’’ occurs to mark when
each of the systems is fully functioning, followed by a period devoted to extending
and applying the system as widely as possible. This is in turn followed by confronting
the system’s limitations during the latter part of the stage, and finally reaching the
point where a new system is apprehended as an acceptable alternative to the
prevailing system. As each stage becomes less satisfactory, construction processes
begin anew toward a more advanced system. Underlying each of the major
transitions is a set of maturational changes in the brain and central nervous system,
made possible by the child’s activities. These changes help prepare for the emergence
of qualitative advances in thought.
We will begin with sensorimotor behavior, and then describe proposed changes in
each of the succeeding stages. Recursive patterns of substages divide each of the four
stages roughly into halves: an ‘‘active construction phase’’ followed by an ‘‘active
extension and application phase’’. For each of the four Piagetian stages there is
therefore a proposed earlier and later phase. The turning point from construction to
application is marked by a ‘‘taking of consciousness’’ indicating that the system is
generally complete and available for the child to use more or less at will. A summary
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Table 2
Summary of the proposed stages and substages of Piaget
I. Sensorimotor Stage (Birth–2 years)

IA: Active construction phase
Reflexes (0– 2 months)
Primary circular reactions (2– 4 months)
Secondary circular reactions (4– 6 months)
Coordination of secondary schemes (6– 12 months)
‘‘Taking of consciousness’’ of system as a whole (12 months)
IB: Active extension and elaboration phase
Tertiary circular reactions (12– 18 months)
Beginnings of symbolic thought (18– 24 months)
II. Preoperational (Intuitive) stage (2–6 years)
IIA: Active construction phase
Initial symbol system use (2– 3 years)
Contruction of symbol systems (3– 4 years)
‘‘Taking of consciousness of system as a whole’’ (4 years)
IIB: Active extension and elaboration phase
Application of symbol systems, intuitive theories (4– 6 years)
Beginnings of logical thought (5– 6 years)
III. Concrete operational stage (6–12 years)
IIIA: Active construction phase
Number, categories and hierarchies (6– 8 years)
Concrete logical systems (8– 9 years)
‘‘Taking of consciousness of system as a whole (9 years)
IIIB: Active extension and elaboration phase
Application of concrete logical systems (9– 10 years)
Beginnings of hypothetical systems (10– 12 years)
IV. Formal (hypothetical systems) operations (12 adults)
IVA: Active construction phase
Hypothetical possibilities (12– 14 years)
Systematic testing of possibilities (14– 16 years)
‘‘Taking of consciousness of system as a whole (16 years)

IVB: Active extension and elaboration phase
Application of systems reasoning (16– 18 years)
Formation of alternate systems (16– 20 years)
Domain-specific systems reasoning (16 adults)
of the Piagetian stages of cognitive development as revised in this discussion is

presented in Table 2.
It should be obvious to even the casual reader that the stages look very similar to
the way they usually look in textbook presentations of Piaget’s psychological theory
(see, e.g., Cole & Cole, 1996). There is no difficulty recognizing the four stages as
those proposed by Piaget and his collaborators. Yet there are some differences as
well, especially the recursive, two-substage process that divides each stage in half.
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Also in Table 2 are alternative labels for two of the stages (‘‘Intuitive Operations’’
and ‘‘Hypothetical Systems Operations’’) that seem to better convey the core
qualities of the second and fourth stages. As Piaget came to believe ever more
strongly (Beilin, 1992; Bringuier, 1980), the first 2 years of intellectual development
provide the prototype for all that is to follow, and such is the case in this
presentation as well. Sensorimotor behavior provides the model for all of the stages;
each succeeding operating system for each succeeding stage is built using similar
mechanisms, goes through similar substages, reaches a halfway turning point, and
then is applied in similar ways, pushed to its limits until another, more powerful
system is built. Although, as Piaget says, this evolution is not the only way things
could have gone, it is a natural progression that exists as part of the stable core of
human psychological development.
9. Sensorimotor behavior: revised
In Piaget’s presentation of sensorimotor behavior development, the first 2 years

are divided into six substages. In the revised account, we will propose only two
substages that divide into roughly equal halves. The proposed account does not
preclude additional demarcations of substage sequences, especially during the
sensorimotor stage which has had so much empirical and theoretical attention, but a
halfway division is sufficient to convey the flavor of the recursive within-stage shift
that is proposed for each of the general stages.
The halfway point of sensorimotor behavior is about 1 year, and this is the turning
point for the stage from active construction of the overall system to extension of the
system (see Tomasello, 1999). In Piaget’s terminology, the shift from ‘‘coordination
of secondary schemes’’ (substage 4) to ‘‘tertiary circular reactions’’ (substage 5) is the
critical dividing point of the stage. For the first 12 months or so of its life, the young
child is working at constructing action schemes and accurate representations of
features of the physical world, putting these together into small-scale structures for
experiencing and understanding the world around her or him, and building more
elaborate and more nested combinations of the resulting structures. The last part of
this phase (the ‘‘coordination of secondary schemes’’ in Piaget’s terminology) is the
time (8–12 months) during which the baby is preoccupied with coordinating two or
more skills into simple sequences designed to achieve its goals of exploration and
interpretation.
Our version of the stages assumes that what Piaget meant by structures as a whole
at the outset of a stage was something like a sketch or glimpse or apprehension of
possibility, not necessarily conscious, to mark the beginning of each stage. It does
not assume that the system is fully operational at the outset of the stage, but rather
that it is fully operational by the midpoint of the stage. From the midpoint forward,
the child is content with the overall system that he or she has constructed and the
motivation is strong to apply that newly complete system to as many situations,
challenges, and experiences as the child wishes. At this point the child owns the
system and knows it. The knowledge has become personal in Michael Polanyi’s
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terms (Polanyi, 1962) and is embodied in the child’s permanent base of experience.
From the child’s point of view, there is no reason to want to change the current
system, only to enjoy its power, range, and richness, a process that ultimately leads
to the possibility of building the next system in the sequence as its limitations emerge
from experience.
By the time the baby reaches about 12 months, she or he has constructed and can
use the full array of skills associated with the sensorimotor stage. In other words, the
basic construction process is complete, and a well-functioning system of
sensorimotor capabilities with a full repertoire of options (for this stage) is in place
and accessible to the child. What is usually meant by structures as a whole is in place,
but there is now no significant decalage constraint. That is, the performance of the
year-old child corresponds well to the presumably ‘‘deeper’’ system of competence
that underlies the child’s behavior. It takes about a year to perfect the many
capabilities of the sensorimotor stage and to organize them into a functioning system
that corresponds closely to the potential of the sketch or glimpse that exists in the
child’s nervous system as she or he begins the process. It is a time that in both
Piaget’s account and the child development literature more broadly report a
flourishing confidence in the child (e.g., Tomasello, 1992, 1999), a spike in the desire
to explore and experiment. It is also about the time when most children have become
mobile on their two legs, greatly enhancing their range of exploration as well as their
sense of control of their bodies (Cole & Cole, 1996; Harris, 1983).
There is in this and each succeeding stage a turning point around the middle of the
stage, a point at which the child becomes aware of the fact that a long, arduous
construction process has been completed. This point is marked by instances of
Piaget’s taking of consciousness, which are actually indications of the presence of a
fully consolidated operating system, available to the child who built it. During the
sensorimotor period, this turning point takes place at about 12 months.
What makes sensorimotor construction so remarkable is that it is not built from a
previous system but rather from a set of natural reflexes with which the newborn
comes into the world. Each subsequent stage is constructed out of a previously
constructed system, but the sensorimotor system is built only from the reflexes. This
is why Piaget described the first 18 months (we would say 12) as the most ‘‘creative’’
of the stages (see Bringuier, 1980). The newborn has the least existing structure to
work with, yet constructs a system for gathering and organizing knowledge worthy
of great admiration. Piaget resisted attributing this construction process to
maturational tendencies, insisting that the child had to be very much in charge of
the process; but it is difficult to escape the likely role that biological preparedness
and maturational processes would need to play, particularly during this the earliest
of the stages (Beilin, 1971; Gelman & Brenneman, 1994; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992;
Richardson, 1998).
From the present point of view, invoking biological processes that enable a
psychological change in no way diminishes the crucial role played by the epistemic
subject in building the structures of each stage. To whatever degree the overall
system is specified in the central nervous system, and that degree may vary from
stage to stage, at most there exists at the outset of the process an outline, sketch,
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glimpse or apprehension of what might be possible, just enough to spur on the

efforts of the epistemic subject to make reality out of possibility.
In our view, it does not compromise Piaget’s basic vision of the stages to
acknowledge that, especially during the sensorimotor period, the system architecture
is more fully specified naturally than will be true of subsequent stages, more
‘‘canalized’’ to use the biological term (Gelman & Brennenman, 1994; Marler, 1991).
To say that the biological system is prepared does not mean that it will reach its
potential without precisely the kinds of efforts, sustained in precisely the ways
that Piaget thought necessary. This is no less true of sensorimotor behavior than
it is of the subsequent stages in spite of the fact that biological specification of
system architecture may be greater in the earlier stages than the later (Demetriou
et al., 1993). To say that the child receives relatively highly detailed blueprints at
birth does not mean that the structure will build itself. This way of looking at the
role of biological processes seems consistent with Piaget’s perspective
(Piaget, 1971a, b).
9.1. Active extension and application
From the midpoint of the stage on, the motivation on the part of the child is no
longer to build a system but rather to celebrate the system’s completion, revel in the
system’s possibilities, extend the system’s reach into every perceived new area, make
minor changes in the system when needed so as to continue to apply it to every new
situation, and eventually, to begin to perceive that the system is not able to deal
satisfactorily with situations that are important to the child and may in turn require
some fairly substantial transformation. The proposed phases through which the
child moves between stages are based on those proposed by Karmiloff-Smith (1992)
as well as on some of our own empirical research on the development of expertise
(Feldman, 1994; Feldman, Katzir-Cohen, & Goldberg, 1999).
During the sensorimotor stage, the active extension phase is between the end of the
first year and the end of the second year. From the perspective of the child, her or his
achievement at 12 months is truly grand, and at that point the child sees no reason to
ever want a better system than the one now in place. There is a sense of confidence,
self satisfaction, even smugness (if that is possible in a year-old child) that leads to
the unrealistic belief that the system can deal with all situations; the child is fearless
in taking on many challenges extending (and eventually overextending) the now
highly elaborated and organized system. Heaving food from the highchair with
purposeful variation in force and trajectory is an example of how the newly
consolidated sensorimotor structures as a whole can be used productively (from the
point of the child, of course). Opening up all the cabinets in the kitchen and testing
the acoustical properties of their contents might be another example.
Following the lead of neo-Piagetians like Case and Fischer (Case, 1991, 1998;
Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Bidell, 1988; Fischer & Pipp, 1984), there are assumed to be
maturational shifts in the nervous system that prepare the way for each transition
into a new stage. Acknowledging again that Piaget rejected this possibility (Piattelli-
Palmarini, 1980), we nonetheless believe that it is necessary to invoke maturation if
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we are to provide a plausible explanation of how stage transition could possibly take
place.
On the need to provide such a plausible account, we are in accord with Piaget.
And Piaget did specify that maturation is one of the four processes responsible for
transitions. He asserted this goal as the central one to his enterprise, as e.g., in the
following quote: ‘‘yThe real problem is the creation of the structuresy.That’s
where genesis intervenes. Genesis is the formation of a structure, but it is a potential
of the structure itself. ‘‘(Piaget, in Bringuier, 1980, p. 40); and in another
similar quote:
For me, the real problem is how to explain novelties. I think that novelties, i.e.,
creations, constantly intervene in development. New structures, not preformed
either in the external world or in genetic structures, are constantly appearing. My
problem is how to explain the novelties (Piaget, 1971a, p. 192).
Thus Piaget was fully aware of the importance of explaining qualitative change, of
the appearance of structures that are more powerful than existing structures (see
Fodor, 1980). This would seem to be impossible unless such structures already exist
in the child’s nervous system. The solution we are proposing here, one that seems
consistent with Piaget’s overall perspective, is that there are maturational changes as
well as changes in experience that make possible the construction of a more powerful
system than the one currently in use, but that this process is as much a psychological
as it is a maturational one. It is even possible that the psychological processes of
knowledge construction are necessary for the maturational changes to take place,
i.e., that experience essentially helps with the wiring of the system’s circuits, laying
down some of the pathways that will be essential features, when suitably connected
and transformed, of the emerging system that will replace it. Emergence is
quintessentially a bootstrapping kind of a process (Richardson, 1998).
Piaget was right to resist a simple-minded nativist explanation of the process of
cognitive development, but we are now ready to move beyond such stark
dichotomies (see e.g., Carey & Gelman, 1991). It is now possible to build a
knowledge acquisition system that is constructivist in a very deep sense as well as one
that is governed by natural constraints that, in turn, change over time (Gelman &
Brenneman, 1994; Molenaar, 1986). Piaget was a biologist and certainly was aware
of the importance of the organism’s architecture in helping explain features of its
behavior, and so, it is to be hoped that the proposed role of maturational changes is
one that Piaget would see as compatible with his vision for the stages.
Piaget certainly understood that any adequate account of cognitive developmental
change would involve, among other things, maturational changes in the nervous
system. What we have tried to do is suggest the kinds of changes in both physical and
psychological structures that might be involved in the process of constructing more
advanced systems from less advanced systems. As many critics have said, Piaget’s
equlibration process is useful but not adequate to account for major qualitative
advances such as those of the large-scale stages, the structures as a whole (Brainerd,
1978; Beilin, 1971; Feldman, 1980a, b, 1994; Flavell, 1971a, b; Liben, 1987; Siegler &
Munakata, 1993). The effort in the present discussion is toward building an account
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that includes equilibration as a crucial functional invariant in the structure building

process, but that also brings maturation and other less controversial features into the
overall attempt to explain the appearance of qualitatively advanced systems for
understanding the world.
Where this account of the stage and transition process departs from traditional
ones can be seen primarily at three points: (1) what is assumed to be in place at the
onset of each Piagetian stage; (2) what is assumed to be in place at the midpoint of
the stage, and; (3) what leads the child to deconstruct, then prepare to build a new
stage with more advanced properties than the one currently in use (Bedeau, 1997;
Flavell, 1971a, b).
9.2. Transition to symbolic thought
The sixth substage of sensorimotor behavior is described as the beginnings of

symbolic thought in standard accounts of the stages. Several new behaviors are
associated with the transition out of sensori-motor behavior and into preoperations:
speech, symbolic play, deferred imitation and imagery (Ginsburg & Opper, 1988).
The broad, system-wide shift that underlies these changes is assumed to be the
availability of a semiotic function or symbolic capability that permits the child to
defer response, reflect on his or her own behavior, and represent events and
experiences symbolically, keeping them available for later use in ever more organized
symbol systems (Gardner, 1983; Ginsburg & Opper, 1988; Gruber & Voneche, 1977).
It is difficult to imagine how a child could construct a system for achieving such
challenging activities as constituting symbols, learning to speak, creating imaginary
situations, and the like based solely on the available sensorimotor structures (Fodor,
1980), but it is not so difficult to imagine that the 18 month old’s effort to build a
fully consolidated sensorimotor system and elaborate it in numerous ways may
provide internal signals to the central nervous system to extend its capabilities along
promising pathways, the so-called ‘‘sculpting’’ of the nervous system. These signals
may be necessary as catalysts for the maturational changes underlying the transition
to symbolic thought. Such maturational changes may provide the ‘‘outline’’ or
‘‘blueprint’’ or ‘‘glimpse’’ of a system to be built that mark the beginning of a new
stage, providing a motivational force as well as a sense of direction for the child.3
The remarkable shift to symbolic thought has been called by Piaget the
‘‘Copernican Revolution’’ of early childhood, representing a transformation from
purely egocentric toward a more reflective understanding of oneself as an object
among objects. To achieve this perspective, a child must first begin to have a sense of
his or her own reality as representing a system among systems, an object among
objects, an entity among entities, a person among persons. The ability to mentally
3
As Flavell (1971a, b) suggested more than 30 years ago, and as Turiel (1966) and others (e.g. Damon,
1980; Snyder & Feldman, 1977, 1984) have explored empirically, stages do not have to begin and end all at
once. Flavell proposed that there is substantial overlap between and among stage systems, and that a child
did not need to abandon a previous stage before embarking on the activities of a succeeding stage. The
maturational enabler account in the above passages is fully compatible with this ‘‘partial structure’’
proposal of Flavell and those who followed him (Flavell, 1971b).
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distance oneself from real time experience is indeed an achievement of monumental

importance, making possible development of virtually all reflective thought
structures. As Piaget wrote a number of times, though, the shift to symbolic
thought is not an immediate one, but rather takes place gradually over time. In the
present case of the construction of symbolic mediating structures, the initial phases
require at least 6 months, while reasonable first approximations of the major symbol
systems available in the child’s culture will preoccupy her or him for an additional 2
or 3 years (Bringuier, 1980; Ginsburg & Opper, 1988; Piaget, 1971b).
This account of partial or gradual structure transition is compatible with Piaget’s
concept of hierarchical integration, in which the structures of the previous stage are
transformed and integrated into the emerging structures of the succeeding stage.
Since there is no assumption or requirement for fully operational structures as a
whole at the outset of a stage’s development (Brainerd, 1978), there is also no need
for the structures of the previous stage to be fully transformed as soon as the
succeeding stage’s structures appear. Since their appearance is in the form of an
outline or blueprint or glimpse of the future, the effort to transform sensorimotor
structures into symbolic ones may actually help build the functional structures that
will support symbolic activity during the years from two to four. As Piaget has said,
sensorimotor structures become subroutines for all succeeding structures, and
become tools to be used to gather information in the service of the symbol systems to
be built during early childhood. The same is true for the later stages of concrete and
formal operations, and the current version of the stages conforms to these design
specifications of the original theory.
With the advent of the semiotic function (which in our version represents only the
barest outlines of such a function), the child begins building the system that will
become preoperational thinking, and will elaborate in the next few years that system
into the charming and delightful intuitive explanations that are characteristic of
children from about four to six.
10. The preoperational stage: revised
In contrast to sensorimotor behavior, which was carefully charted by Piaget and

his collaborators, the period of preoperational reasoning has few marked phases
along the way from the end of the second year to the end of the sixth year, the age
span typically associated with this stage. There is a great deal of description of what
the child does during this 4-year stage, with some indications of when a particular
kind of behavior appears and develops, but the overall picture is not one of order.
There are no substages arranged into an orderly sequence for preoperational thought
development, making it a challenging task to find a pattern of change that works well
for the stage and is consistent with Piaget’s overall account.
The great value of careful observation and analysis by literally hundreds of
researchers who have studied the sensorimotor period becomes clearer when
contrasted with the relatively sparse information about the years from two to six.
Other than general observations during Piaget’s early years on children’s reasoning
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about everyday events and everyday experiences, and of course a large and diverse
literature on children’s play (Gardner et al., 1996), the information base is relatively
scanty. It is not so much that little is known, but rather that what is known has not
cohered into a sharply etched account of patterns and sequences of transformations
in preoperational structures.
Our approach to preoperations is to apply the template of sensorimotor behavior
to the new stage, in recursive fashion, so as to be able to better describe the major
landmarks from 2 to 6 years of age. As in the previous stage we assume that there are
two halves to the stage: an initial phase during which the child will be concentrating
on bringing to fruition the potential of the stage. Along with recognition of the
increasingly problematic constraints of the previous system, a glimpse of structures
possible emerges at this point. This is followed by a second-half phase during which a
fully operational structures as a whole system is extended into as many areas as
possible by the child. Each phase of preoperations is assumed to be about 2 years in
duration (or about double the length of the phases of the previous stage).
Piaget saw the semiotic function as a deep capacity for symbolic representation
that is applied to various aspects of experience throughout the stage. In our version,
this emphasis is retained, but it is assumed that during the first phase, from two to
four, the child is naturally attuned to available symbol systems found in his or her
culture. In all cultures there are speech systems, systems for quantifying, organizing
space, time, and causality, and (not considered by Piaget) music, dance, drawing,
and other forms of expression (Feldman, 1994; Gardner, 1983). Our version of the
stages sees the traditional four markers of the transition from preoperational to
operational thinking as early indicators of the appearance of the potential for
symbolic representation, but they are only a small proportion of what will be the
focus of the child’s activity from two to four. For Piaget, the availability of the
semiotic function is sufficient to explain the development of speech and other
symbolic forms, and he gave little attention to the achievement of other symbolic
systems. Once Piaget established that symbolic activity was occurring, his attention
was directed to early versions of what would be the main purposes of the stage:
categories, logical distinctions, hierarchies, relationships (Ginsburg & Opper, 1988).
This is perhaps what led to the label preoperations in Piaget’s stage system and why
some have not considered it a real stage. While recognizing that there are without
doubt severe constraints on what the child is able to do, especially during the first 2
years of the stage, our version emphasizes the fact that another set of
accomplishments is achieved that rivals the great work of infancy. By the fourth
year of life, the child has built a set of general symbolic capabilities and several
specific symbol systems that permit her or him to participate in the activities of his
culture to an amazing degree.
The 3 year-old child can speak, count, sing, draw, understand things about time,
space and causality, and reflect on experience in ways that are all but inaccessible to
any other creatures on the planet (Tomasello, 1999; Vygotsky, 1978). Were it not for
the fact that almost all children do it, the construction of the ability to form symbols
and organize them into special purpose symbol systems in a mere 2 years’ time would
quality as nothing short of miraculous. In this sense all human beings are prodigies
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when they learn to speak well enough to participate in the language community into
which they were born. Although the other symbol systems that the child has
constructed by the end of the third year are not as amazing as speech (except in those
rare instances when children demonstrate radical precocity in another symbol system
and are actually child prodigies; see Feldman & Goldsmith, 1991), taken as a whole
the phase during which the child internalizes the essential features and rules of
several symbol systems and constructs first draft working versions of them is a
stunning achievement and qualities as a full fledged cognitive developmental stage
(Gardner, 1983, 1993).4
10.1. Preoperations: phase II
As with the previous stage, there is a point at which the basic construction effort is
completed, and at which a system for gathering information, organizing it into
meaningful units, and interpreting it, is fully operational within its design
constraints. This point is at about halfway through the stage (in the present
instance at about 4 years), and is marked by a shift from an external orientation
toward the critical features of each symbol system within its reach (a more figurative
orientation) toward a more internally oriented (operative) period in which the newly
consolidated system of symbolic systems serves as the springboard for exuberant
exploratory activity. The shift from active construction to active elaboration is
marked by a seizing of consciousness reminiscent of the turning point of the
sensorimotor stage at around 12 months.
Children from about four to six are often described as exceptionally creative, and
much more creative than they will be after age six (see e.g., Winner, 1996). This so-
called creativity is a reflection of the tendency for the child to believe that their mind
is as fully formed and as capable as it ever needs to be, and to believe that it can be
used to accomplish any goal the child wishes to accomplish. As with the 12 month-
old, we know that this is a temporary phase of overconfidence and untested faith in
the power and range of the system the child has so painstakingly constructed during
the previous few years. At four, he or she believes that explanations for all
phenomena are within reach. Children are often described as asking endless
questions (see Elkind, 1970), and of offering up all sorts of logic defying explanations
for the natural phenomena of the world. For example, children often believe very
4
There is the question as to why Piaget spent relatively little time mapping out the amazing activity of
the years from two to four, and the related question as to why he was so little interested in language. We
know that Piaget saw language as an application of the semiotic function primarily and thus requiring
little separate attention, and we also know that he wanted to emphasize the great accomplishments of the
period prior to language during the sensorimotor period. In his debates with Chomsky (e.g. Piattelli-
Palmarini, 1980), Piaget wanted to show that major construction work on the development of thought
structures was completed before children were able to speak, thus blunting the nativist claim that speech
must be a natural device encapsulated in the central nervous system at birth. Our view is that it in no sense
diminishes the greatness of the work done by every newborn to also celebrate the greatness of the work
done by every toddler in constructing several challenging symbol systems and the more general symbolic
capabilities that make them possible.
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confidently in the fact that the sun and the moon follow them around, that dreams
are about real events, that small insects have ideas and feelings about the same things
as do humans. Piaget (and others before him) used labels for these nonlogical
theories such as animism, artificialism, participation, moral realism, and character-
ized children’s reasoning as syncretistic, i.e., lacking in logical relationships and
proceeding from idiosyncratic premise to improbable conclusion, with little
intermediate connection between them. And yet to the children themselves, the
explanations, stories, and interpretations are the very model of correct thinking. In
fact, during this phase children show little interest in explanations different from
their own and profess great confidence that their point of view is fully adequate
(Cowan, 1978; Elkind, 1970; Ginsburg & Opper, 1988).
It is not just that the children’s theories are different from adults, it is that they
operate from a set of principles and rules that defy adult logic; indeed they seem to
have little to do with that logic (Bringuier, 1980). Yet they have a coherence and
integrity, not to mention a charm, that must be recognized:
Clearly, the child’s reasoning did not rest on an inarticulate or poorly formulated
logic; it wasn’t a clumsy attempt at adult logic. It owed nothing to that logic. It
rested instead on something else, another world—a world that Piaget had been
exploring for a long time (Bringuier, 1980, p. 33).
We must acknowledge that the confidence with which we can propose a recurring
sequence of phases, from system building during the years from two to four,
followed by system elaboration during the years from four to six or so, must be less
than in the previous stage. Especially lacking at this point is a coherent account of
the nature of symbol systems (although see Gardner, 1993; Gardner et al., 1996), and
through what preliminary labors it comes to full operational form. We are confident
that the child is learning to speak as well as learning the basic format and procedures
of other symbol systems, but unless we accept that language is a privileged domain
(which Piaget was loathe to do), then the symbolic process, the semiotic function as
Piaget called it, must be much better specified than it currently is.
Similarly, although there are rich accounts of the various ‘‘primitive’’ theories of
4–6 year-old children, these too have not crystallized into a coherent account of the
elaboration, extension and eventual transformation of the architecture, constraints,
principles and procedures of the overall thought system of the 4-year-old
child. Barbel Inhelder and her collaborators were pursuing related topics before
Inhelder died in 1996 (see Inhelder & De Caprona, 1997; Inhelder et al., 1987), but
the task is far from complete. We must for now content ourselves with a very general
account of the nature of the development of preoperational thinking, as well as how
that system is applied to the questions, goals, purposes and experiences of the
growing child. By keeping the account simple and general, we avoid over
specification and reduce the risk of distortion. A two phase sequence, reprising the
shift from active construction to active elaboration of the sensorimotor period,
seems appropriate for a stage double in duration (4 years versus 2) and relatively
sparsely mapped.
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10.2. Egocentrism and the preoperational stage
We cannot leave the preoperational stage without pausing to consider the issue of
egocentric thought, a controversial feature of this period (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). For
Piaget, the entire stage is characterized as one in which children have great difficulty
taking the point of view of another, whether literally as in the traditional three
mountains perspectives task, or psychologically, as in comprehending that a blind
child may need help in finding the way to the bathroom. Many have questioned
Piaget’s description of egocentric thought, including his contemporary Vygotsky
(1978), who argued that Piaget over-generalized the phenomenon. From Vygotsky’s
perspective, egocentric speech is real, but the broader characterization of the overall
system as egocentric was inappropriate.
In one of the few instances in which he conceded a point to a critic, Piaget (1995)
acknowledged that Vygotsky was probably right in interpreting egocentric speech as
an intermediate phase between early social speech supported by more experienced
peers and/or adults and later speech as consisting of two functioning operating
systems, one social and one private (Vygotsky, 1978). Piaget recognized that
Vygotsky had observed something real, and that egocentric speech offered a rare
opportunity to study a system in formation. By the age of six or seven, according to
Vygotsky’s account, the child’s social speech system resembled that of an adult too
closely to be interesting as a system in formation, while private speech was not only
internalized, but also unavailable to observation under most circumstances
(Vygotsky, 1962, 1978).
What is interesting in the context of this discussion of stages is that the age at which
Vygotsky put egocentric speech at its apex was about the midpoint of preoperations, i.e.,
about age three or four. And it is also interesting that the task of internalizing the two
speech systems, social and private, is largely completed in Vygotsky’s account by about
age six or seven, the end point of the preoperational stage. It is perhaps not too much of
a stretch to see Vygotsky’s egocentric speech as a good illustration of the phases of the
stage; along with other symbol systems, the speech system is constructed in working
form during the years from two to four. During that period what is called egocentric
speech reflects both the construction process itself as well as different speech patterns
being formed into two related systems for two different purposes (social versus private).
In this respect, the egocentric speech so carefully observed by Vygotsky provides
empirical support for a shift from building an operational system during the first half of
the stage, to applying and extending that system during the second half of the stage. One
application might be to extend the system internally to become private speech,
confirming Vygotsky’s claim that the initial speech system is social in nature and
modeled on what is available in the child’s speech community; only later (during the
second half of the stage) it is used as the basis for private speech (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978).
Piaget wrote of Vygotsky’s interpretation of egocentric speech as a precursor to
private or inner speech:
He put forward the new hypothesis that egocentric language is the point of
departure for the interiorized language of the more developed subjects, specifying
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that interior language could serve both autistic ends and logical thinking. I find
myself in complete agreement with these hypotheses (Piaget, 1995, p. 330).
But Piaget went on to voice his objection to Vygotsky’s effort to limit egocentric
thought to egocentric speech:
On the other hand, what I think Vygotsky still failed to appreciate fully is
egocentrism itself qua obstacle to the coordination of viewpoints and to
cooperationyIn The moral judgment of the child I studied children’s collective
games (marbles, etc.) and found that children, before the age of seven years, do
not know how to coordinate their rules during a game, so that each one plays
for himself and all win at the same without realizing that it is a ‘‘match’’yThus
there exists a general phenomenon which it seems to me Vygotsky has neglected
(Piaget, 1995, p. 330).
Thus Piaget holds out for a system-wide constraint that impacts speech but is not
limited to it. In spite of empirical evidence indicating that the constraint is not as
severe as Piaget believed it to be (see Bloom, 1998; Hart & Goldin-Meadow, 1984;
Maratsos, 1973), there seems little doubt that Piaget has captured one of the key
features of the preoperational system. This does not mean that it is impossible for the
child to see things from another point of view, only that it is very difficult for her or
him to see things from more than a single point of view at a single moment in time
(see Case, 1984, 1992a, b, 1998). The architecture of the preoperational system is
built with a constraint on how many ideas, issues, perspectives, variables, or
relations can be entertained at once. By age four, children are able to control and
begin to systematically explore one dimension of a topic, e.g., quantity, shape, color,
size, but need to transcend a system wide constraint to be able to entertain and
explore more than one such dimension simultaneously.
10.3. Summary of the preoperational stage
Whatever pattern or order we propose for this stage, it must be tempered with the
understanding that the view we have of this stage is based on less systematic data
than the previous one. Our strategy was to apply a modified version of the two-phase
sequence proposed for the sensorimotor stage to preoperations and see how it fit.
Most of the elements that Piaget laid down for the stage have been retained: its span
of years (four); the central advance of the stage (symbolic thought); intuitive theories
such as animism to explain the world and the child’s experience; a key role for
egocentric thought; and a limitation on the number of dimensions, issues, elements,
problems or the like that can be attended to simultaneously (one at a time).
Where we took liberties, we tried to do so in ways that do not contradict or violate
Piaget’s overall account of this important stage. As with sensorimotor behavior, we
do not assume that the overall system exists at the level of competence at the outset,
but we retain the basic idea of an integrated, functional system being achieved
through the efforts of the child. Again, similar to how the sensorimotor stage was
described, we proposed a halfway turning point (at about 4 years) when the child
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seizes consciousness and shifts from the more figurative, active construction
orientation of the structure-building phase to the more operative phase of active
application and elaboration. This midpoint shift gives rise to the many charming but
syncretistic explanations that children tend to offer, as well as to the many questions
that they ask about how the world works.
There is some ambiguity about what the overall architecture for the stage consists
of, particularly the general features of the semiotic function versus the specific
features of each symbol system. Piaget clearly believed that there are overall systemic
properties to the stage, both positive and less positive. The ability to think in
symbolic form is obviously an enormous leap for the child and very likely one that is
all but unique to our species (Gardner, 1983, 1993; Gardner, et al., 1996; Tomasello,
1999; Vygotsky, 1978), but there also seem to be severe system constraints such as
great difficulty in decentering. Although broad features such as these are helpful in
conveying the distinctiveness of preoperational thinking, they are at best a sketch,
lacking the fine grain provided by the several decades of infant research (including a
great deal of work done outside the Genevan tradition). Finally, there is the crucial
assertion preserved in the present account that the child’s activity, curiosity, and
efforts to construct a better system for understanding the world are key to the
process of development, providing both crucial conditioning of the nervous system
necessary for it to grow as well as expanded psychological and emotional experience
out of which new structures are painstakingly crafted into a fully operational system.
As with the sensorimotor stage, the argument is not that the child must simply
wait for neuronal changes in order to begin to transform psychologically. The
present account assumes that activity itself is also necessary to prepare the system for
the growth that will enable it to be transformed into a more powerful system; the
child conditions his or her own central nervous system by constructing the kind of
thought system that is possible within its constraints, then extending that system to
the point where its limitations become more apparent, where the need to change its
properties becomes unavoidable. At this point (6 or 7 years), the child is ready to
begin the hard labor of building yet another system, and the system this time will be
strikingly more logical and more akin to one of an adult. Once again we will propose
a sequence that divides the stage (in this case, concrete operations) into two halves,
an active construction phase from about 6 or 7 to 9 or 10 years, and an application,
extension, and elaboration phase from about 10 to about 13 years.
11. Concrete operations: revised
The stage of concrete operations is distinctive for its focus on the empirical reality
of experience, a preoccupation with the facts and how they can be documented, and
an emerging set of logical operations that permit hierarchies to be formed and classes
to be established. Concrete operations is also described as logical in the adult sense,
conforming to most of the requirements of rational thought (Ginsburg & Opper,
1988). There are, in addition, several other features typically associated with this
middle childhood period. One of these is the ability to reason about two or more
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aspects of a problem simultaneously (Case, 1984), while another is a quality of

reversibility that allows the child to recapitulate a line of reasoning from beginning
to end and from end to beginning, as well as to compensate for changes by
reciprocity (Richardson, 1998). All of these features are important to the stage, but
not all appear at the same time. There are some other qualities of concrete operations
that need to be emphasized in order to provide a description of the stage that reprises
the recursive sequence that has been proposed for the sensorimotor and
preoperational stages.
As with the other stages, there are assumed to be changes in the central nervous
system that help enable the transition from preoperations to concrete operations.
Also as with the previous stages, there are likely to be certain activities of the child
that groom, prepare, condition, and help extend the possibilities of the system, as
well as transition inducing experiences that begin during the previous stage. We
expect to see ‘‘precocious’’ examples of behavior from concrete operations while the
stage of preoperations is still being elaborated, extended and applied across a wide
array of situations. Indeed, it is this tendency to apply the capabilities of the
preoperational system that help to catalyze the beginning of the next stage. A
number of investigators have found that there are examples of ‘‘out of stage’’
behavior that go beyond horizontal decalage or the application of a stage structure
to situations of greater or lesser resistance (Feldman, 1994; Siegler & Munakata,
1993; Turiel, 1966, 1983).
Children of three or four begin to conserve simple number and continuous
quantity transformations well before the stage of concrete operations emerges at six
or seven. Our interpretation of these sorts of situations, which are quite common, is
that they are regular, predictable instances of sometimes short-lived and ephemeral
elements of the next stage. Because the new system exists only in schematic,
blueprint-like, connect-the-dots form, its use is both limited and unstable. The fact
that children perform tasks that sometimes are well in advance of the stage suggests
that a new system is being prepared for wider use both behaviorally and neurally
(Cole & Cole, 1996).
11.1. Recursive substages
As in the first two stages, the proposed framework for Concrete Operations
divides the stage into two phases or substages: the first half (ages about 6–9) is
(again) an active construction period, the second half (ages about 10–13) is (again) a
period of application of a substantially completed structure as a whole system. There
is a similar initial emphasis on the more figurative motivation to craft the new
structures to match those that operate in the child’s context; also a focus on detail
and close observation that is characteristic of the first phase of this stage.
The first half of Concrete Operations is marked by activity aimed at constructing
systems for understanding categories based on abstract properties like color, shape,
size, and the like and hierarchies that use appropriate superordinate and subordinate
distinctions. For example, given a bunch of different kinds of berries, children may
be able to sort them based on criteria such as the colors of the berries, or berries
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versus other round fruit. Logical relations become available such as incremental sizes
of objects arranged in proper sequence (seriation), transitive relations across three or
more examples (Macy is taller than Bill, Bill is taller than Eloise, Macy is therefore
taller than Eloise), reversible thought such as pouring water from a tall, thin
container to a shorter, wider one, then mentally doing the opposite, appreciation of
other perspectives, both spatial and psychological, and an increasingly coherent
system for using these and other concrete operational capabilities in increasingly
challenging situations (see, e.g., Cole & Cole, 1996).
Given our assumption that the first half of each stage is more oriented to the
figurative, i.e., that it tends to reference external reality more closely than it will
during the second half of the stage, the kinds of models that are available can be
expected to have effects on the pace and specific form of structures formed. The fact
that children in most western societies are taught to read at about the age that
concrete operations begin is probably no coincidence. Similarly, simple arithmetic
and many of the games of childhood can be seen as crystallizing agents available in a
culture (see Feldman, 1971, 1980a, b, 1994, 1974; Sutton-Smith, 1979). The argument
is not that concrete operations is not universal; it is rather that the specific ways in
which the structures of the stage appear and are built may vary from context to
context, perhaps even from person to person (Case, 1984, 1998).
By having each stage divided into two substages, variation in children’s ability to
use the full power of each operating system is an expected part of the construction
process. It is also expected that there will be both predictable and unpredictable
variation in the construction process for each stage’s operating system. It has been
known for some time that the various conservation problems studied by Piaget and
many others are mastered in approximate order from number to continuous quantity
to liquid to volume ( Murray & Almy, 1979). Sequences such as these may be a good
source of information about which features of the new operating system are
accessible first and which are added to the repertoire along the way. We may find
that there are invariants as well as variants in what is constructed.
In the case of Concrete Operations, there are more data about more of the stage’s
activities than for any other stage, and for this reason Concrete Operations may be
the most promising one for studying ‘‘precocious’’ early instances of the use of a
more advanced system (e.g., Fischer & Bidell, 1992, 1998) and variations from
culture to culture (Dasen, 1972). If the proposed process of building from a few
points to a fully operational system during the first half of a stage is right, it should
be possible to describe in some detail just how the process proceeds toward the
midpoint of the stage. With Concrete Operations, we might expect to see a few
examples of concrete operational behavior as early as 3 or 4 years, even thought the
typical marking point for the ‘‘miraculous transition’’ (Siegler & Munakata, 1993) is
about 6 years.
Flavell (1971a, b) proposed such an overlapping of stages, with the onset of a later
stage appearing while the current stage is still operating. The framework for the stages
proposed here is consistent with this more gradual process of stage transition. And
with the structures-as-whole problem largely resolved by moving the fully functioning
system to the midpoint of the stage, a gradual onset makes sense. It also makes sense
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that the behavior of the previous stage ‘‘grooms’’ or ‘‘conditions’’ the system to such
an extent that early instances of behavior from the next stage begin to appear while the
child is still using a less powerful operating system in most situations.
11.2. The turning point or seizing of consciousness for concrete operations
Teachers have reported for decades that there are, at least in traditional western
schools, often notable differences between third and fourth grades (Feinburg &
Mindess, 1994). Teachers often prefer to teach one or the other grade, but rarely both.
The differences between typical third and typical fourth grade behavior (at least in
North America) may help reveal the point at which the active construction process has
been largely completed for Concrete Operations. Teachers describe children up to
third grade as on the whole attentive, interested in learning the standard curriculum,
accepting of teacher authority, and relatively easy to manage. Fourth grade, on the
other hand, is a handful. Children are often more difficult to manage, less interested in
the standard school curriculum, less respectful of their teachers, and preoccupied with
their own interests. Elkind (1970) has provided many examples of what children are
like during the latter half of Concrete Operations (although to be sure he, as most
others, did not divide the stage in half as is done here). Here is one of them:
yan eight year old boy came to the dinner table with his hands dripping wet.
When his mother asked why he had not wiped his hand he replied, ‘‘But you told
me not to wipe my hands on the clean towels.’’ His mother threw up her hands
and replied, ‘‘I said not to wipe your dirty hands on the towels’’ (p. 59).
Elkind also describes a sense of moral superiority that later Concrete Operational
children tend to display: ‘‘While the child has respect for adult authority (the power
to punish) he has little respect for adult intelligence. He thus sees no reason, other
than fear of punishment, to obey rules adults have laid down.’’ Using a perceived
superiority in intelligence, which is in reality more based on juvenile sophistry than
intelligence, children will split hairs, set semantic traps, find loopholes and otherwise
try to hoist adults on their own petards.5 The emotional tone of later Concrete
Operations is thus very different from that of the earlier years of the stage.
Our explanation for the shift from one set of emotions to another at the midpoint
of the stage is that another major construction contract (with oneself) has been
completed, and the 9 year-old child celebrates her new powers with the exuberance,
panache, sense of superiority and confidence that seems to mark each such turning
point. Concrete Operations has its distinctive qualities, to be sure, and these are
5
In a recent scandal in the US Presidency, the sort of reasoning characteristic of later Concrete
Operations seems to have played a significant role. President Bill Clinton was a master at evading
responsibility for his indiscretions by answering questions much as a nine year old would, by using
pedantic semantic distinctions and other evasive devices so as to avoid being found to have lied. Of course
it was perfectly obvious that he lied, but he seems to have the point of view that if there are distinctions
between what he says and what he means that adults are too stupid to perceive, then it is their problem.
Legal training seems in some ways to be based on reasoning of this sort, and the President appeared to be a
master practitioner of the technique.
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found in the distinctive ways in which the turning point expresses itself in most
children. The power of concrete operations lies in its ability to analyze things
logically, hierarchically, and within interconnected (but still concrete) systems (Cole
& Cole, 1996). These qualities manifest themselves in the behavior of children who
have achieved a sense of mastery of the world of experience by organizing it
according to their newly consolidated structures. Fascination with dinosaurs or
royalty or baseball can help crystallize the kinds of structures that are constructed
during concrete operations, while these same structures can be later applied to social
status, power relationships, and the cliques that begin to appear around fourth grade
in a typical US classroom. In other words, examples of the sort just cited reflect a
shift from the more logical, ordered, hierarchical to the more expressive, interpretive
kinds of activities, from construction of new systems for organizing and analyzing
experience to extension, elaboration and transformation within the constraints of the
established operating system.6
11.3. Consolidation of concrete operations: the second half of the stage
Between the ages of about 9 and 12, the structures of Concrete Operations are the
basic operating system for analyzing and extending experience. Not until the exercise
of these structures begins to groom the central nervous system for the next (and in
this theory final) stage will we see qualitatively new behavior that marks the first
signs that another way of understanding the world is on the way. As was true for the
stages that preceded it, there is a period following a seizing of consciousness at the
functional completion of the concrete operations, a turning point marked by delight
and deep satisfaction for the task just completed. With good reason, because
however much the process depends upon maturation of brain and nervous tissue and
tissue interconnections, the child has earned the right to be in a celebratory mood.
During this period the child believes that the system now in place is truly the best
that she will ever need and that all that she need to do is use what she’s got to deal
with any situation, solve any problem, learn any new material, figure anything out.7
6
Elsewhere we have described a recursive sequence of six phases through which children pass as they
move from developmental level to level within nonuniversal developmental domains (Feldman, 1994;
Feldman & Fowler, 1997a, b). The two phase framework for the Piagetian stages was to some degree
modeled on this more detailed account of domains like map drawing and juggling, and it is assumed that if
more were known about the substage sequences within each of the Piagetian stages, a more detailed
sequence might well be found that would resemble the six phase sequence for nonuniversal domains. The
sensorimotor stage was of course divided into six substages by the Piagetians, and a close analysis of these
substages as compared with the six phase sequence for nonuniversal domains might be fruitful as a way of
refining both sequences.
7
When children find themselves having difficulty in school at the same time as they have completed the
building process leading to a fully functioning Concrete Operational system, the consequences are often
very difficult indeed. If the child has a learning problem with certain content, is being asked to learn things
that are beyond the constraints of the system, or for other reasons, the calibration between what is going
on externally and what is going on internally may be off. Piaget’s perspective would lead us to predict that
the achievement of Concrete Operations would occur in any event, but it might be delayed, distorted, or
otherwise affected by external events and pressures. This may be why Piaget was so skeptical of formal
schooling with its rigid timetable (Bringuier, 1980; Elkind, 1970; Piaget, 1972).
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During this period the child tends to be so confident of the power of his newly
consolidated operating system that he will use it in situations presented by teachers,
parents, or other adults, but is most responsive to challenges laid down by those with
whom he shares cognitive structures, something akin to a shared worldview. This
overconfidence is vitally necessary because it leads the child to elaborate, extend, and
transform (within the constraints of its rules) the system to a sufficient variety of
situations and challenges so as to guarantee that some of them will prove, eventually,
to be problematic. And it is this perturbation, as Piaget called it, that prepares the
system to experience productive disequilibrium and thus begin to ready itself for one
more fundamental transformation (Bringuier, 1980).
As situations occur that are both within the compass of the existing system but
beyond its capabilities to deal with them fully, the late Concrete Operations child
comes to see some of the limitations on his current structures (Case, 1984, 1992a, b,
1998). It may well be that the maturing of the central nervous system and brain tissue
permits new problems to be perceived, but whatever the cause, the importance of
increasing disparity between what can comfortably be accomplished with existing
structures and a stretch toward more powerful, more adequate structures, provides
the critical catalyst for the child to entertain the prospect of once again building
another system. Toward the end of the stage of concrete operations, children are
more and more capable of accomplishing tasks that are usually associated with the
next stage, sometimes with support as Vygotsky might have proposed, sometimes
ephemerally, sometimes under direct instruction (e.g., Siegler et al., 1981); whatever
the specific reasons, the die is cast toward formal operations.
12. The stage of formal operations: revised
Perhaps the most controversial of Piaget’s stages, formal operations represents the
end point in the development of major, overall systems for understanding experience
and interpreting information. In the classic Piagetian account, formal thought is the
highest and most powerful form of reasoning available to human beings. It is
achieved during adolescence and sets the constraints and establishes the rules that
provide the basis for all subsequent thought development. Piaget did not believe that
development came to an end with the achievement of formal operations; the
structures could be infinitely elaborated, extended, differentiated, compounded and
transformed (Bringuier, 1980; Fischer & Pipp, 1984). The basic operating system,
though, remains in place for the rest of the individual’s lifetime, and in this respect
the stage is different from the three preceding it. Formal operations are the
culmination of the process of development of cognitive structures and the pinnacle of
human reasoning.
Questions about formal operations have generally taken three forms: Is the stage
universal, i.e., Does everyone achieve it?; Are there stages beyond it?; and, Are the
structures of the stage adequate to capture its essential qualities? (Commons,
Richards, & Armon, 1984; Moshman, 1998). The first question stimulated research
that tended to cast doubt on Piaget’s claim that formal operations, like his other
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stages, is universal (Keating, 1990; Siegler et al., 1981). Among groups of subjects in
US culture and especially in other cultures, substantial proportions of participants
were unable to complete the typical tasks used to assess formal operational
reasoning. These tasks included a combinations and permutations task involving
chemicals and their interactions and/or deductive reasoning problems that involve
logical necessity (Cole & Cole, 1996; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). If so many people
seem unable to successfully do the kinds of things that the stage involves, can the
stage be universal? Given our revision of the structures-as-a-whole criterion as
present at the halfway point rather than the beginning of the stage, this ‘‘decalage’’ is
not necessarily a problem if eventually all people are able to carry out tasks
emblematic of the stage. The other possibility is that the tasks typically used are not
the best markers for the presence of the stage’s central structures (Case, 1992a, b;
Cole & Cole, 1996; Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971).8 A number of investigators
have found that using other tasks, especially tasks that are ecologically valid for a
particular cultural group, raises the proportion of people manifesting ‘‘formal’’
thought (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971; Linn & Hyde, 1988 in Cole & Cole, 1996).
The extent to which such alternative tasks are ‘‘really’’ formal is a question to which
we shall return as we reprise and to some degree modify the focal qualities of this,
Piaget’s final stage of cognitive development.
As far as stages beyond formal operations, a number of proposals have been put
forward. Dialectical thinking, systems of systems, quantum physics and various
forms of spirituality have all been used as a basis for a set of core structures making
up one or more stages past adolescence (Commons, Richards, & Armon, 1984;
Fischer & Pipp, 1984). Each effort to add a stage or stages to the Piagetian paradigm
is worthy of serious consideration, and ultimately some form of post formal
reasoning may need to be appended to the traditional four stages of the theory. But
for the present purposes, it is not necessary to take a stance on the likelihood of the
need for a fifth or sixth stage. We will content ourselves with proposing a plausible
sequence for the original four stages and follow Piaget’s practice of limiting the
developmental course to the end of adolescence or the early twenties. Piaget’s
assumption was that the structures developed by this point are the final set, and we
will assume the same. The revisions that we will propose for the stage, we believe,
will have the effect of reducing the need for stages beyond its possibilities and
constraints, partly because the revisions integrate some of the features of the kinds of
structures that have been proposed as post formal.
8
There is also a technical problem unique to the stage of formal operations: Where is the halfway point
of a stage that is supposed to be the final one and which is achieved sometime during adolescence? There
can be no definitive answer at this point, but since each stage has been about 2 years longer than the one
preceding it, we can guess that the ‘‘halfway’’ point in Formal Operations probably is reached by about
age 17 or 18. Placing the ‘‘turning point’’ at this age means that the second half of the stage should be
completed by about age 22 or 23, leaving open the possibility of other stages or, as Piaget would have
preferred, that the nature of Formal Operations is in this respect different from the other stages and its
second half opens up so many possibilities that a lifetime is too short to engage more than a fraction of
them.
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Finally, then, we come to the question of whether the account of the structures of
the stage of formal operations is itself adequate. We know that at least one theorist
became less and less enamored of the logical structures and systems most often
associated with this stage, and this theorist was Piaget himself (Beilin, 1992;
Bringuier, 1980; Neimark, 1985; Piaget, 1972). During the 1970s, Piaget made a
number of important revisions in the theory, and some of these are relevant to his
final stage. Over time Piaget saw the limitations of the kinds of formal logical models
he had favored as illustrations of what he meant by formal operations, finding, along
with his critics, that extensional logics were plagued with inherent difficulties. As
Harry Beilin writes:
Piaget’s effort to develop a theory of meaning was based first on a recognition
that extensional logics, even from the logician’s point of view, have inherent
difficulties. More importantly, from a scientific viewpoint, many do not map onto
natural thought in a wholly satisfactory way (Beilin, 1992, p. 3).
Based on both critical responses to his efforts to represent formal operations in
truth table logical form as well as developments in the field of logic itself, Piaget
turned toward a much less rigid framework within which to discuss and describe his
final stage, a project based on a theory of meanings; but his efforts were cut short by
his death in 1980 (Beilin, 1992). The revisions to the stage that we propose are
intended to take into account to at least some degree Piaget’s final efforts to better
capture the essential qualities of this stage.
As with each of the previous stages, our approach to formal operations assumes
that it is divided into two substages, with the first half being devoted to active
construction and completion of the overall operating system for the stage and the
second half (which in this stage extends into adulthood) turns toward application of
the newly completed system. Between the ages of about 13 and 18, the system is put
into place and brought to functional completion; after 18 the system is used to
organize, interpret, explore, analyze and transform new experience. But since Piaget
believed that the range of potential application for formal operations was so great,
the process of applying its principles, procedures, techniques and possibilities is one
that for all practical purposes is infinite. As Piaget said:
Piaget: yThe process leads toward equilibrium. But, since equilibrium is never
attained—thank heavens!—because the whole world would have to be
assimilatedy
Bringuier: We’re always chasing it.
Piaget: We’re always chasing it, and that is science. Once it is caughtywell, we’ll
talk about this again later, but I don’t believe mankind will ever do it.
Bringuier: Ever?
Piaget: What is completion? Mathematics completed would bey (A Silence).
(Bringuier, 1980, pp. 44–45)
Therefore, in Piaget’s stage sequence there is at this final stage no requirement for
the system to be prepared for another transition, it is not necessary for the young
adult to apply the newly completed structure to any particular content or domain
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(Piaget, 1972). Unlike the preceding stages, formal operations does not have the
seeds of its own demise built into it and there are no major maturational tendencies
brought forth by the activity of the system.
There are extensions and transformations in the formal system, to be sure, as there
are in the previous stages, but these changes do not in turn lead to the creation of a
qualitatively more powerful or advanced operating system. Those who would
propose stages beyond formal operations are therefore faced with the challenge of
showing that post formal structures are qualitatively different from those of formal
operations, i.e., that they are governed by an operating system that uses different
principles, rules, processes and procedures from those in place at about 18 years.
Given our interpretation of the stages, we would also expect any claim for a post-
formal stage to include evidence of changes in the brain and central nervous system,
a challenging criterion but one not inconsistent with Piaget’s formulation (see
Fischer & Pipp, 1984).
We can appreciate Piaget’s efforts at providing formal symbolic representations of
central properties of formal operations without necessarily accepting them at face
value; this is apparently what Piaget did himself toward the end of his life (Beilin,
1992). Piaget never claimed that the stage was fully captured by various logical
models such as the sixteen binary operations or the INRC group, only that these
formulations came closer than anything else he had been able to think of to express
some of the qualities that distinguish formal operations from previous systems.
Contemporary interpretations give less weight even to this claim (Cole & Cole, 1996;
Gardner et al., 1996), and we will not rely overmuch on representations from formal
logic to describe the nature of the formal operational system.
In fact, it might make sense for the stage to be labeled differently since the formal
part of the stage seems less critical to its nature than some other features.
Hypothetical Operations might better express the essence of the stage; Abstract
Operations (Fischer & Pipp, 1984) and Vectorial Operations (Case, 1984) have been
suggested as labels for the final stage by other theorists. Whatever label we finally
settle upon, the qualities that seem essential to its functioning can be summarized
without symbolic logic. Doing so, as Piaget well knew, sacrifices precision and
systematicity for richer and perhaps more veridical description, but less formal
representation (Beilin, 1992; Ginsburg & Opper, 1988; Piaget, 1970).
The positive side of Piaget’s decision to specify in formal symbolic terms the
properties of formal operations was that claims for universality and functional
application could be tested empirically. Good theory is theory which can be proven
false, and Piaget’s reward for providing us with good theory was to find that his
claims for formal operations tended not to be supported by the data (Bart, 1971,
1972a, b; Neimark, 1985). This leaves us with the challenge of trying to describe
better what is true of the stage in such a way that it can be tested, but which does not
rely on abstractions for which it is either not ready or which distort too greatly its
reality, a problem worthy of this stage.
What seems to change with the onset of formal operations is not so much logic,
which is after all quite well (even hyper) developed during the previous stage, but
rather an expanding sense of the range of what is possible or, more accurately, what
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might be possible. This expansiveness does not appear to be present at the onset of
the stage, however, but rather achieved as a consequence of the cognitive structures
that are built between about 12 and 16 years. The kinds of structures that can
support the flights of speculation of the late teens may include more systematic,
rigorous structures such as those that are found in mathematical domains like
algebra and geometry, and these are the kinds of models that exist in the world that
would help the process along, help form and crystallize some of the system
components that are necessary building blocks but not the system itself (Feldman,
1971). Thus, the logical models that Piaget proposed earlier in his career may reflect
the kinds of structures that are initially of interest to the 12–16-year old, but not
where they are ultimately going.
This is by way of saying that the kinds of situations that are challenging to
preteens and early teens may provide clues to the earlier phases of the construction
process that will, in several years, become integrated into a much freer, more flexible,
more expansive system. Although not all students like or can easily do algebra, its
placement in the school curriculum seems tuned to the changing mind/brain of the
early teens young person. Similarly, science can now be more readily taught as
experimental manipulation and testing of hypotheses, similar in structure to Piaget’s
five chemicals combinations task (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Social and moral
situations also become more complex; both the number and kind of relationships
that young teens deal with increase markedly. Endless amounts of time are often
spent putting together and reconfiguring two, three, four and larger groups of kids,
typically involving for the first time boys and girls in the same system. A number of
religions help move the process along by involving young members in various
transition rituals, some of which involve conceptual content more abstract and more
complex than previously shared (Cole & Cole, 1996).
Piaget’s (1972) observation that formal operations may not be applied except in
domains of interest and/or which are pursued professionally may be an indication
that he was beginning to see a two phase sequence for this stage. If the system is
actually built in the manner we have proposed for each of the stages, then Piaget
would have been describing not only what happens in the process of constructing
formal operations, but in seeing that the first half of the stage is spent attending to
models and seeking out experiences that will help with the construction process. As
with the other stages, the range and variety of such experiences may be quite great
(Bidell, 1991; Fischer & Bidell, 1988), but the systems built are functionally
equivalent at least with respect to the central processes that define the stage.9
9
It probably needs to be said that I am guessing that Piaget would have come to the same point of view
about stage to stage movement that has been proposed in this account. To me it seems consistent with his
overall framework and with his commitment to the four stages, and he certainly recognized that
modifications would have to be made to the original account. The 1972 paper in Human Development
(Piaget, 1972) seems to point in the direction that we have gone here, and in all likelihood has groomed my
mental structures and prepared them for the present process of elaboration and transformation of the
stage construction process. Another story within a story, I suppose; I have proposed elsewhere that there
are processes analogous to the universal ones involved in the four stages of Piaget that account for
development in "nonuniversal" domains (Feldman, 1980a, b, 1994).
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In fact, Piaget has written an account of the transition from adolescence to

adulthood (Piaget, 1972) that is remarkably close to the one proposed here. It
includes a hint that the structures of the stage are acquired gradually and are not
fully equilibrated until about age 15 (the point at which we mark the end of the first
phase construction):
yfrom 11 to 12 years to 14 to 15 years a whole series of novelties highlight the
arrival of a more complete logic that will attain a state of equilibrium once the
child reaches adolescence at about 14–15 years (Piaget, 1972, p. 3).
After this point in development, Piaget suggests, late teens often begin their
specialization into various fields and that this experience can be crucial to the
application of the common structures. European universities require that entering
students have selected their professional goals. Piaget was of course trying to offer a
plausible explanation for the frequent empirical funding that many teens and young
adults have not demonstrated command of formal operations with the traditional
assessment procedures used for this purpose (e.g., the five chemicals task, bending of
metal rods activity). His idea was that the universal stage structures are there in
everyone, but that they may only be seen when applied to the specific content
domains in which each person has become involved. There is in this adjustment no
backing away from the claim that formal operations are universal, only an
acknowledgment that they may need to be detected in more individual ways than is
true for the other stages. Piaget has therefore implicitly divided the stage into two
substages; the first during which the structures become equilibrated between 11 and
15, and the second during which the structures are used to achieve advanced levels of
mastery within the chosen field of each individual:
youryhypothesis would state that all normal subjects attain the stage of formal
operations or structuring if not between 11 and 12 and 14 and 15 years, in any
case between 15 and 20 years. However, they reach this stage in different areas
according to their aptitudes and their professional specialties (advanced studies or
different types of apprenticeship for the various trades): the way in which these
formal structures are used, however, is not necessarily the same in all cases
(Piaget, 1972, p. 10).
This speculation on Piaget’s part, it now may be said, was the source of the overall
two phase recursive stage sequence that is at the core of the present discussion.
Having now established in Piaget’s writing about formal operations that there is a
period of increasing equilibration for each stage that takes several years to achieve,
we now turn to the nature of the construction process between the ages of about 12
and 15 years old.
12.1. The active construction substage of formal operations: building systems for
formal hypothesis testing
As with the previous stages, some of the earliest indicators of the transition from
concrete to formal operations are likely to be found in the central nervous system
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and brain, stimulated to appear by attempts to apply the tight logic, precise rules,
and clear empirical criteria for judgment of the current operating system to
situations that require a broader, more flexible, system that generates possibilities,
weighs their significance, and organizes them into scenarios and potential outcomes.
What seemed to be well within the range of the existing system begins to be perceived
to lie beyond it, stimulating a sense of unease and dissatisfaction with the capabilities
of that system. The need to accommodate to the challenges of situations that cannot
be resolved with hair splitting distinctions, concrete logical hierarchies, clear
principles and the like, lead to more subtle distinctions that energize the process of
building new, more hypothetical structures.10
The kind of thinking that will need to be done to make sense of the world, both
physical and social, may help galvanize the system into readiness to begin the heavy
labor of deconstructing the tidy if limited system of concrete operations. Longer
term goals and strategies for achieving the new structures necessitate projecting into
the future in ways that are more than fanciful; generating options and their
implications requires an ability to produce possibilities and entertain them
simultaneously. Coming to conclusions in complex contexts requires building
frameworks that systematically lead to alternative scenarios, and provide a sense of
participation in larger and larger social structures. As (Keating, 1990) has observed,
the primary qualities of formal reasoning include the ability to generate and reflect
upon possibilities, to think and plan in long range terms, to find ways to
systematically reach conclusions that can be verified and revised, to reflect on
oneself as a system in process with alternative paths and potentials, and the ability to
consider hypothetical, improbable, even bizarre transformations of current reality.
Initially, the 12–13 year-old child is probably not confident that the newfound
capabilities of the emerging system are altogether welcome, under control, or even
necessarily better than the system being replaced. Whether from the demands from
the outside to learn more challenging things, from the sheer stimulation of emerging
new capacities, from frustration at the constraints of the current system, or (most
likely) all of the above, the motivation to do the work of building the new system is
sufficient to launch the effort. Once launched, the process is irreversible and, as in the
other stages, will require sustained effort over an extended period of time to bring it
to full functional operating effectiveness. In the case of formal operations, the
construction process seems to require about 4 or 5 years. Since other physical
changes accompany and influence the cognitive developmental ones, the interplay
among all of the transforming systems is no doubt also involved in moving the
process along. If a 12-year-old finds that her body seems to be transforming before
her eyes and that she must deal with the reality of a menstrual period, a number of
very challenging questions and very pressing problems will perforce occupy her
10
One possible source of stimulation from culture that could help groom the child’s mind to perceive the
need for broader, more comprehensive systems of analysis and understanding is the narrative form
(Bruner, 1986). Myths, stories, history, belief systems, even school environments (middle, high school in
this culture), military life, and the like are the kinds of large-scale entities that are of increasing interest to
children as they reach ages 10–12 and that require forms and structures beyond simple categories and
hierarchies.
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conscious activity (Ford & Lerner, 1992). The question: ‘‘What does it mean to be a
woman?’’ is apparently not within the capacities of Concrete Operations to answer,
or to be more precise, the answer that concrete operations would tend to generate
might not be very helpful to the perplexed 13-year-old girl.
The reader may be concerned that this way of describing the initial impetus for the
motivation to construct a new set of structures for interpreting the world is far
removed from Piaget’s account, which, of course, focused primarily on science, logic,
and mathematical systems with abstract properties that can be symbolically
represented. Piaget almost certainly had in mind that the ways of thinking of the
natural scientist, the logician, and the pure mathematician were the ideal outcomes
of the cognitive development process. The kind of reasoning done by western,
academically trained scientists seems to represent Piaget’s end point for the stage
sequence, and as such it tends to cast its shadow backwards into infancy as the place
where the system must begin (Kessen, 1984). As many critics have pointed out,
however, hypothetico-deductive, scientific, western rational thought is not necessa-
rily the single appropriate end point to project for the whole system (Feldman, 1994;
Gardner, 1983).
Other than those few youngsters who have a natural bent toward science and who
are fascinated and curious about logic and mathematics (as was Piaget himself), it is
unlikely that these domains would be sufficiently compelling for most young people
to generate the motivation to build a whole new operating system. It may have been
sufficient for Piaget (Bringuier, 1980), and, to be sure, the kinds of reasoning that are
central to western science and rationality are reflected in the core qualities of this
final Piagetian stage (Beilin, 1992). But Piaget may have overemphasized the more
formal aspects of the cognitive structures and favored those aspects of the stage that,
at least initially, lent themselves to representation in logical systems like the 16
Binary Operations or the INRC group. But toward the end of his life, Piaget began
to see the limitations of such an approach and was actively pursuing alternatives like
morphisms, natural logics, logics of meaning, and cybernetic systems (Beilin, 1992;
Borel, 1987; Cellerier, 1987). Others, inspired by Piaget’s efforts, have proposed
extensions, alternatives, and wider views of the ends of development that encompass
much more than logic and science, all within the Piagetian tradition. For example,
grappling with the issue of abortion, or of the existence of a supreme being, or the
best baseball player of all time, require generative, synthetic, integrative, critical,
aesthetic, and perhaps spiritual capabilities (Brown, 1997; Inhelder et al., 1987).
This is by way of acknowledging that there is risk in proposing such a broad and
general framework for formal operations as we have done here, but we can take
comfort in the fact that the process of trying to reformulate the stage is one begun by
Piaget and his collaborators themselves. We are guided by their efforts and recognize
that this stage, more so than perhaps any of the others, may emerge from the process
of reformulation more transformed than was true for the other stages. Scientific
reasoning, systematic testing of hypotheses, logical deduction and other forms of
western, rational thought will no doubt be preserved to some degree in our version of
Piaget’s final stage, but they are less central in the proposed version than in most
traditional accounts. And we also recognize that changing the end point of a
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developmental stage sequence has the tendency to influence all that precedes it,
making it even more critical that the qualities and characteristics of this, Piaget’s last
stage, accurately reflect both the reality of adolescent and adult thought and the
theory that inspired and guides efforts to describe it.
Since it is the child’s curiosity about the world and his or her efforts to understand
what that curiosity leads to, it seems critical that we have a good sense of the range
of things that arouse the curiosity of 12–15-year-old children, a point made many
years ago by Flavell (1971a, b). For some but not many children, the beauty and
efficiency of the scientific experiment will stimulate sustained efforts to construct a
functioning system that entails key features of hypothesis testing and experimental
design. For others, however, the source of both the stimulus to begin constructing
anew and the models that exist in the world (both social and physical) are likely to be
about relationships, about power and control, about self image, about fields like
music, technology, fashion, or moral/spiritual development. If Piaget believed that
formal operations are applied perhaps only in a person’s areas of commitment and
interest, we may extend that idea to the formation of the structures as well (Piaget,
1972). It seems likely that a variety of crystallizing possibilities exist in the world of
the early teens youngster and that they are available at the beginning of the stage for
purposes of initial construction as well as available at the end of the stage for
purposes of application and consolidation (Feldman, 1971).
Studies of possible sequences of levels or stages in realms like friendship, moral
behavior (Kohlberg, 1969; Damon, 1980), self development (Gilligan, 1982), gender
identity (Gilligan, 1982) and other fields should help provide examples of the kinds
of tasks and challenges that can be used as ‘‘aliment’’ for the forming structures of
formal operations (Bringuier, 1980). Now that we have been freed from the overly
demanding requirements of a miraculous transition (Oyama, 1985; Siegler &
Munakata, 1993; van Geert, 1991; Wilensky & Resnick, 1999) that produces a
functioning structures-as-a-whole operating system, and since Piaget has suggested
that the point of full consolidation of the structures of each stage comes at least a
year after its earliest manifestations in behavior, we may search for candidate
domains to help us better chart the path of the 12–15 year old who is in the throes of
building a formal operational set of structures. It is also likely that, as at the end of
the stage, the specific tasks and challenges used as catalysts for the initial
construction of the formal operating system will vary from child to child (Bidell,
1991; Siegler & Munakata, 1993).
12.2. Seizing of consciousness and consolidation of formal operations
If Piaget was right about formal operations not being necessarily manifest in
behavior until the later teens (and he very likely was right), it may be possible to
detect their presence indirectly through patterns of emotions that accompany
thinking (Feldman & Hao, 1995). Such marker emotions may prove to be as
accurate as indicators of the presence of a given set of structures as tasks which are
designed to reveal the structures, even more accurate if, as children grow older, their
individual talents and proclivities determine the domains within which they will
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display the leading edge of the emerging structures. For example, an ensemble of
emotions that include delight, excitement, exhilaration, satisfaction, and confidence
might mark a taking of consciousness. By the last year of high school or first year of
college (in typical western contexts) most young people will have completed the
construction of formal operations and will manifest this great achievement in the
emotions they display as they pursue their interests if not in the actual level of
sophistication in their thinking behavior (Feldman, 1994). Emotions patterns may
prove to be common across domains and thus serve as better indicators of the
presence of structures than content; this seems to be true in our studies of
undergraduates who are learning to master various content domains like drawing,
dance, sports, music, yoga, and others (Feldman, 1994).
For students who go to college (especially the liberal arts-oriented colleges in
North America), the turning point from active construction toward active extension
activity in formal operations may manifest itself in sophomoric behavior. The all
night discussions of philosophy, politics, law, morality, culture and religion
that are so common in these settings may be markers for the initial phase of activity
after completion of the overall operating system that is labeled formal operations.
There is the sense in many of these situations that it is the sheer pleasure and
joy of using one’s expanded mental capacities more than the content that drives
these sessions.
It may be that the general topics and the general courses in most US liberal arts
curricula have been placed in the first and second years in part because they are well
suited for giving full flight to the emerging capabilities of early adult reasoning: of
generating many possibilities, some of which are unconventional or even radical; of
being more fascinated with what might be than concerned about what currently is; of
exploring new ways of living in societies and judging their value; of calling into
question longstanding assumptions, looking for models of the highest quality in all
realms of life; and of seeing inconsistencies in belief systems of adults, often leading
to a diminished sense of respect for adult authority. This latter example is
reminiscent of the tendency of children in the second phase of concrete operations to
think of adults as often stupid, lacking in wit or decisiveness, and unworthy of the
respect or obedience of children of this age. For the younger group there is a playful
quality to the relationship between child and adult, whereas for the late teenager,
there is a shocked, disbelieving quality: ‘‘How could the adult generation have been
so stupid and incompetent to have created a society this bad?’’ they sometime seem
to be saying.
The combination of realizing that there is now at one’s command a system of
unsurpassed (and in this case unsurpassing) power along with the ability to
comprehend large-scale proposals for dealing with large-scale issues (e.g., racial
differences, globalization, wealth and property) seems to generate powerful sketches
of ideal or idealized alternatives to current modes or cultural practices. Being able to
hold both a real and a more ideal system in mind simultaneously, as well as to be
able to juxtapose, reorganize, reconstruct, and otherwise reflect on alternate systems
of large scale, may be carried out with relative ease. In societies where such activity is
tolerated or even encouraged (e.g., US upper middle class white culture), an
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explosion of reform and reformist, holier than thou, often harshly judgmental
rhetoric often emanates from the college campus.11
Although it is not too difficult to describe some of the distinctive markers of the
shift from the construction to the application and extension purposes of this stage, it
is more difficult to capture what the core qualities and capabilities of the stage are.12
In general terms, we can say that this last stage, when completed, provides the most
coherent systems and relations framework that the human mind will be able to
construct. It also has the potential to generate the greatest variety of possible
rigorous systems and frameworks and allows for these to be compared and
contrasted with as much detail as desired. The reasoning of the late teenage years is
hypothetical (considers possibilities and scenarios) if not necessarily hypothetico-
deductive, and can control and gauge how far from current reality a newly generated
alternative system might fall.
Science fiction is a concretely grounded basis for producing alternatives to current
realities that are sufficiently concretely expressed to be stimulating to concrete
operational children. With formal operations, the kinds of alternative realities and
possibilities considered need not be based on imaginative transformations of physical
reality or projections of known features toward alternative forms. Formal operations
brings with it greater attention to hypothetical systems that are nonetheless within
perceived constraints of existing physical, social, cultural and historical realities. The
thought of the late adolescent is at once more serious and more attuned to complex
reality, at the same time as it is maximally free to soar to new heights of generativity.
Out of the interplay of these two capabilities emerge the models and frameworks
within which most adult thinking will take place.
12.3. Summary of formal operations
Along with physical changes that mark the beginning of the transition into
adolescence, there are undoubtedly changes in the brain and central nervous system
that interact with the construction of a new system for understanding experience.
These as yet unspecified physical changes are both the outcome of the tendency of
the existing system to extend itself toward challenges that ultimately prove to be
beyond its scope as well as potential bodily changes that are made possible by the
growth and differentiation of its various organs and tissues. With the onset of
puberty there are obvious physical changes, but there are also less obvious changes in
the cognitive structures of the child. These structures will evolve over the course of
11
Given what the parents of these young adults may be paying handsomely for the opportunity for their
offspring to engage in their newfound powers, they can be forgiven for having second thoughts about the
wisdom of providing an ‘‘elite’’ educational experience for their children. Fortunately, this phase of
development is relatively short-lived for most students, after which they tend to orient toward more limited
goals like choosing a major.
12
There have been a number of efforts to describe Piaget’s ‘‘new’’ theory, including his changing
perspective on Formal Operations (e.g., Beilin, 1992; Gelman, 1979). Here we can at best try to offer a
view that is concordant with the direction Piaget seemed to be going. There is no attempt, however, to try
to capture the details of Piaget’s reasoning about his last stage, especially the more technical aspects.
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the next four or so years into the most powerful, comprehensive, systematic, rational
set of capabilities that the developing young person will ever attain.
The stage is achieved in two phases, the first of which involves active construction
of a new set of structures through which to gather information and interpret
experience, culminating in a taking of consciousness at about age 15 or 16 when the
new system is fully operational. At this point there is a sudden, dramatic, salutatory
shift in perspective, a realization that a long process has reached a critical juncture.
The longstanding theoretical assumption associated with Piaget that the complete
structure appears at the onset of the stage is once again replaced by a more gradual,
slow and deliberate formation of local systems that, with time, are brought into
coordination with each other, until finally, at the midpoint of the stage (or in this
instance, at about 4 or 5 years past the onset of the stage’s first manifestations in
consistent behavior), the structures-as-a-whole is apprehended by the proud young
person who has just built it.
From this turning point forward, there are no fundamentally new cognitive
structures created. The broad framework of formal operations proves sufficient to
orient, guide, analyze, construct, and transform knowledge for a lifetime. The
structures of formal operations are sufficiently flexible, supple, systematic, and
capable of organization into ever more complex systems that they can be applied to
an infinite variety of experiences, situations, challenges, possibilities, and imagined
scenarios.
The main features of this revised framework are that it deals comfortably with the
hypothetical, can be rigorously systematic in seeking ever more sound principles of
knowledge and understanding, inclines toward the rational use of mind, is virtually
infinitely expansive, is unsurpassed at organizing complex data into functioning
systems, and is able to reflect on its own processes to an unprecedented degree. Once
in place at about 15 years of age (not 12, as was earlier believed), the growing mind
has reached the peak of its potential powers as a vehicle for achieving knowledge and
understanding experience, of coming to understand what is true. It remains to
harness these powers to productive purposes, and this process usually begins with
great flights of conceptual imagination and construction of idealized systems to solve
the world’s problems. Following this phase, the young adult may use only some of
the system’s power to become an expert within the constraints of a given domain of
practice (Piaget, 1972).
Piaget’s speculation that formal operations is only applied toward the mastery of
the young adult’s discipline, craft, trade or professions in no way suggests that the
stage as an overall system has failed to develop. It is more accurate to say that
the nature of this system is such that its range, power, flexibility, and
comprehensiveness make it impossible to apply in more than one or two domains
systematically and fully. And since the development of expertise is itself a lengthy
process of a decade or more (see Gardner, 1993), the use of the formal operational
system is limited to the one or two areas that the person decides to pursue. An
implication of this constraint on the use of formal operations is that most people will
tend to function more like a concrete operational mind in most areas of activity than
a rational, formal operational one. The evidence that most people do not seem to
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actually use formal operations most of the time would support this interpretation of
how development works in this stage of Piaget’s system (Cole & Cole, 1996; Keating,
1990; Neimark, 1985).
It must be acknowledged that we know less about the nature of formal operations
than any of the other stages in Piaget’s system, particularly in light of Piaget’s decision
to revise his account. It is especially important that Piaget seemed to move away from
the more formal, logical models of his earlier account and toward more, semantic, less
precise structures in the ‘‘new theory’’ (Beilin, 1992). This does not mean that formal
operations is not systematic, does not allow for the use of more constrained formal
logical models for certain purposes, or is less universal than the theory originally
proposed. It means that the scope and reach of this stage is such that it cannot be
easily captured with any particular form of conceptual or logical model; since
generating varieties of conceptual models and systems is the essence of the stage, it
should not be surprising that that there is no obvious way to represent them visually or
in symbols. In a way, it confirms the point that a stage of some sort must exist and
that, if it is indeed the final stage, it will be difficult to describe. We do not have the
same distance from Formal Operations that we do from the three previous stages;
being in it, we have trouble trying to stand outside of it and expressing what we believe
we see. This in no way compromises the claim that, within a specific area of expertise,
which is after all an application of some of the stage’s capabilities, we may be much
more articulate in communicating our knowledge and understanding of the domain
within which we have focused our efforts.
13. Conclusion
The four psychological stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development are not
knowledge per se but rather the sets of mechanisms by which knowledge can be
achieved. These stages will be constructed, according to the theory, by all intact
human minds between infancy and early adulthood. Influences from environment,
changes in culture, advances in various content domains, didactic techniques,
technologies and the like may influence the formation of structures in various ways,
especially in their speed of formation, but do not fundamentally affect the process.
The many forms of prolepsis (Cole & Cole, 1996) that influence the growing child,
ranging from gender roles to religious beliefs to family traditions, are thus ruled out
of the process so far as the formation of structures and systems for establishing
knowledge is concerned. Piaget commented on the issue as follows:
I suppose that, with civilization and the social environment, which can’t help but
play a significant role, there is an acceleration and that today’s child evolves more
rapidlyy . But to return to the main question: wherever one sees the beginnings
of knowledge, one finds a process very similar to the processes one sees in the
child (Bringuier, 1980, p. 93).
This is what is meant by universal in the psychological theory (Smith, 1999, 2002).
Aristotle, Robin Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Mohammed, Mozart, Joan of Arc and
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everyone else constructs a functionally equivalent set of structures for establishing

knowledge and interpreting experience. What each of us does with these systems, as
the preceding list illustrates, may vary wildly, but in Piaget’s theory we all start from
the same place and go to fundamentally the same place.
Constructing the system Piaget called formal operations is one thing, of course,
making good use of it is another thing altogether. Piaget recognized that individuals,
societies, periods of history, etc. differ greatly in how (and how well) they use their
capabilities for creating, sustaining and preserving new and better knowledge. He
understood that political and/or religious ideologies can profoundly constrain and
limit what is possible for the system to do, and he was aware of how destructive war
can be to the expansiveness of possibilities in thinking (Gruber & Voneche, 1977).
But these matters never distracted Piaget from his goal, which was to find the
common mechanisms that give human minds their unique capabilities for
constructing successive mental systems with the unique qualities that mark the four
stages of cognitive development (Boom, 1992).
Whatever else may be true of Piaget’s psychological theory, whatever modifica-
tions, extensions, elaborations, etc. may be required, it seems clear that the stages of
development remained at the core of Piaget’s theory’s architecture. Remove the
stages and you are no longer talking about Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
The task, then, is not to characterize Piagetian theory without the stages, as some
have tried to do (Cellerier, 1987; Gruber & Voneche, 1977; Inhelder et al., 1987). The
task is to formulate the stages in a plausible way that permits them to remain at the
center of his psychological theory of development.
Doing so has not been easy. There are formidable problems with the theory, at
least as interpreted by this author and many others (Brainerd, 1978; Case, 1984;
Feldman, 1980a, b, 1994; Fischer, 1980; Fischer & Pipp, 1984; Gardner, 1993).
Especially troublesome have been the issues of structures d’ensemble and decalage
(Siegler & Munakata, 1993). Also difficult to deal with have been questions about
the universality of the sequence, the effects of context, the role that expertise in
specific domains might play, the adequacy of equilibration as a transition
mechanism, and a number of others (Siegler & Munakata, 1993). Preserving the
essential features of the stages has had to be done in full recognition of the challenges
to the theory that have been mounted over the years. I believe that the version of the
stages presented in this discussion is a reasonable effort toward revising them where
necessary without compromising their integrity. It has been possible to find uses for
some of Piaget’s own ideas and to provide systematic roles for them in the version of
the stages proposed in this discussion: talking of consciousness has been particularly
useful in marking a turning point midstage in each of the four stages.
As readers have no doubt noticed, the present discussion has focused primarily on
description and has for the most part skirted the issue of the transition processes that
might account for the proposed sequence of cognitive developmental stages. We did
try to introduce a systematic role for neurological and brain growth as a necessary
(but certainly not sufficient) part of the process of stage transition, as have a number
of others (e.g., Beilin, 1971; Case, 1984, 1998; Fischer & Bidell, 1988; Fischer & Pipp,
1984), and we endorsed the idea of emergence as a likely source of explanation of
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change. Piaget has always acknowledged maturation as one of the ingredients

involved in cognitive growth, of course; but the specific role that maturation plays
has not been given as much attention as it has been in this version of stage-to-stage
movement.
As with all the proposals in this discussion, an effort was made to preserve the
integrity of Piaget’s overall stage account while at the same time offering plausible
additions that might help solve some of the problems of the psychological theory or
better explain some of its claims, such as how a more powerful system can be
constructed from a less powerful one (Bereiter, 1985; Campbell & Richie, 1983;
Fodor, 1980; Molenaar, 1986). Beilin (1992) summarizes Piaget’s stance on
transitions in this way:
‘‘Piaget who, on more than one occasion, agreed with a questioner’s objection
that he had no adequate account of the nature of transitions in his stage theory,
did so either because he could see its limitations and inadequacies, and/or knew
that there was an improved version on the way.’’ (p. 9)
Our tactic in this discussion has been to try to describe the stages of cognitive
development in sufficient detail so as to more richly frame the issue of transition
between stages. In a future discussion, I would hope to be able to find systematic
roles in the stage transition process for such recent Genevan ideas as strategies and
procedures, the role of possibility, the theory of morphisms, and others. As with the
psychological stages, the theory’s account of transitions must be plausible,
empirically testable, coherent within its theoretical context, and satisfying. There is
still much to be done in providing an adequate overall description of the stages and
their substages, the role of recursive patterns in the development of each stage, and
the core operations and distinctive qualities of especially the second and fourth
stages. The effort to more adequately describe the stages does not preclude parallel
efforts to construct better equilibration models, as Piaget showed us, but it is likely
that achieving the former will be a prerequisite to the success of the latter.
As Piaget sensed in the quote that opened this essay, his vision of a sequence of
four large-scale stages of cognitive development, available to all normal human
beings, is on the whole accurate if not complete in every detail. As he hoped, the field
that he all but brought into being, after an initial tendency to deconstruct his
psychological stages, may find that they actually stand the test of time remarkably
well. Granted that, in the history of science, a few decades is not much time, the
Piagetian stages, in the revised form presented here, may have the potential to extend
their scientific life indefinitely.
As Piaget envisioned, through the knowledge seeking activities of the individual
child, the structures of the stages become embodied and available in further efforts to
seek true knowledge. Such is the case also with bodies of knowledge themselves.
Epistemology is a human activity, and therefore, like the psychological stages, comes
to be embodied in ever better representations of knowledge. The psychological stages
can serve as an organizing framework for the study of cognitive development,
helping the field avoid the entropy and fragmentation that often threatens its
ARTICLE IN PRESS
progress (Damon & Lerner, 1998) and giving our field its best chance to make
headway in its quest for true knowledge.
Acknowledgements
A special thanks to Les Smith, who showed me how the topic pursued in this essay
is relevant to, but not the central issue for Piaget’s genetic epistemology. Thanks as
well to these colleagues who read and commented on the manuscript in draft form:
Ann Benjamin, Howard Gardner, Rich Lerner, George Scarlett, and Uri Wilensky.
Graduate students Tamar Katzir and Iris Stammberger were also helpful critics and
able contributors to the project. Finally, thanks to MA student Susan Butler for help
in preparing the manuscript for publication.
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Piaget's stages: The unﬁnished symphony of cognitive

Article in New Ideas in Psychology · December 2004

David Henry Feldman

Transformation of cultural knowledge domains View project

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New Ideas in Psychology 22 (2004) 175–231

Piaget’s stages: the unﬁnished symphony of

0732-118X/$ - see front matter r 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The purpose of the present discussion is to support Piaget’s ‘‘secret ambition’’

The notion of structures as a whole, or structures d’ensemble, has been

4. Individual differences, contextual inﬂuences, modularity, etc.

Piaget’s theory is notorious for being oblivious to individual differences. Indeed, it

active creator of its own mental structures; each person is guaranteed to do so in a

Similarly, the revised stage framework needs to be compatible with contemporary

5. Possible within-stage sequences

Although the ‘‘miraculous transition’’ problem is troublesome for the Piagetian

6. Core qualities of the stage theory

theory have been sacriﬁced to accommodate perceived new requirements. For

7. Four domain general stages

Stage Age rangea

Sensorimotor Birth to about 24 months

 The age span of each of the stages is also retained.

 Piaget’s equilibration process will continue to play a central role in the

 A set of maturational transformations of the nervous system is assumed to occur

7.1. Recursive procedures

Fig. 1. The neo-Piagetian stages of Robbie Case’s theory (Case, 1992b).

coordination) might be combined with a grasping ability so as to permit pulling the

7.2. Figurative and operative

understanding. Although the ﬁgurative/operative distinction was fundamental to

7.3. Taking of consciousness and structures as a whole

7.4. Emergence as a transition process2

yThe fundamental slicing up of an intelligent system is in the orthogonal

7.4.1. Structures, layers, and levels as ‘‘emergent’’ phenomena

molecules that constitute it. In the sciences of complexity, emergence is explained as

(1) constituted by, and generated from underlying processes,

Philosophers have recently developed arguments to set the issue of emergence,

of ‘‘emergent levels’’ is difﬁcult because it implies seeing systems from different

8. The revised stage model

I. Sensorimotor Stage (Birth–2 years)

‘‘Taking of consciousness of system as a whole (16 years)

of the Piagetian stages of cognitive development as revised in this discussion is

9. Sensorimotor behavior: revised

In Piaget’s presentation of sensorimotor behavior development, the ﬁrst 2 years

glimpse or apprehension of what might be possible, just enough to spur on the

9.1. Active extension and application

that includes equilibration as a crucial functional invariant in the structure building

9.2. Transition to symbolic thought

The sixth substage of sensorimotor behavior is described as the beginnings of

distance oneself from real time experience is indeed an achievement of monumental

10. The preoperational stage: revised

In contrast to sensorimotor behavior, which was carefully charted by Piaget and

10.1. Preoperations: phase II

10.2. Egocentrism and the preoperational stage

10.3. Summary of the preoperational stage

11. Concrete operations: revised

aspects of a problem simultaneously (Case, 1984), while another is a quality of

11.1. Recursive substages

11.2. The turning point or seizing of consciousness for concrete operations

11.3. Consolidation of concrete operations: the second half of the stage

12. The stage of formal operations: revised

In fact, Piaget has written an account of the transition from adolescence to

The age span of each of the stages is also retained.

Piaget’s equilibration process will continue to play a central role in the

A set of maturational transformations of the nervous system is assumed to occur