Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)

Jacques Montangero, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

Ó 2001 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 17, pp. 11427–11433, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

Passionately interested in biology and philosophy in his adolescence, Jean Piaget completed studies in natural sciences in his
hometown (Neuchâtel, Switzerland). He then studied psychology and history of sciences in Zurich and Paris. From 1921,
when he was appointed researcher at the J.-J. Rousseau Institute in Geneva, until his death in 1980, he conducted research in
this institution, with the help of a team of coworkers. His early psychological research on the specificity of children’s thought
brought Piaget almost immediate international fame. In the 1930s he became professor at the University of Geneva and
codirector of the J.-J. Rousseau Institute, and published books on infant cognition with an original model inspired by
biology. The numerous books published in the following decades used a new formal model to explain children’s (and later
adolescents’) reasoning abilities. Prodigiously productive, Piaget continued to research and write until the end of his life,
studying various fields beside psychology and epistemology and developing constantly new concepts to explain cognitive
development. His comprehensive ‘constructivist’ theory, based on innumerable experimental data, had a considerable
influence on child psychology and on the development of cognitive developmental psychology. By its multidisciplinary
approach it is a precursor of today’s cognitive science.

A most productive scholar in the area of children’s intellectual
development, Jean Piaget was primarily interested in episte-
mology or theory of knowledge. His genetic psychology
(psychology of the genesis of thought) was intended to provide
a scientific basis for epistemology, with the main concern to
explain how knowledge can become more rigorous and more
objective. Piaget’s psychological explanations were inspired
by several scientific disciplines and beside his studies in
psychology and epistemology he published in other fields
such as biology, logic, and sociology. His work derived from
evolutionist approaches rooted in the nineteenth century yet it
is still in line with scientific trends at the end of the twentieth
century.
The core of Piaget’s theory is the conception of mind as an
active system that, like an organism, assimilates external data
into its structures and can adjust to these data. Special
emphasis, in the knowledge process, is placed on the subject’s
activity and the structures through which he or she perceives
and understands things. Thus, the development of knowledge
is viewed as the construction of new structures (rather than the
accumulation of new information) triggered and guided by
internal processes during the subject’s encounter with reality.
Each new stage in this process opens up new possibilities. In
this interactionist conception, structures are neither pre-
determined nor found in the environment and there are
striking similarities between biological evolution, cognitive
development in children, and the development of scientific
thought.
Seven Decades of Scientific Productivity
Childhood and Adolescence (1896–1918)
Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, a small city of Switzerland,
on 9 August 1896. He was the son of an historian and professor
of medieval literature at the university. Of his mother, he wrote
in his autobiography that she was an intelligent and energetic
woman, whose psychological imbalance created problems in
the family. At the age of 11 years, Jean Piaget started classifying
and collecting mollusks with the help of the director of the
natural history museum of his hometown. In his teens, he was
already an acknowledged specialist in the field and started
publishing papers in scientific journals (as of 1911). This
activity led him to decide to study natural sciences at the
university between 1915 and 1918. At the same time, as of the
age of 16 he became passionately interested in philosophy, and
particularly in the theory of knowledge or epistemology. He
soon decided to devote his life to the elaboration of a biolog-
ical theory of knowledge, whose goal would be to explain the
evolution of ideas both in individuals and in the scientific
community. This project was influenced by evolutionary
approaches in the field of biology (Lamarck, Darwin) and in
philosophical works on issues of intelligence (Spencer, Le
Dantec, Bergson). In the following years, Piaget’s professor of
philosophy A. Reymond convinced him of the importance of
a rationalist approach making use of logic and mathematics.
In 1918 Piaget published a philosophical and autobio-
graphical novel (Recherche) describing the crisis he had gone
through because of the conflict he felt between religion and
science, or, in other words, between value and rationality.
Eventually, the search for truth, which is the goal of science,
became the most important value for Piaget. Recherche also
contained the outline of a theory of the evolution of living and
cognitive organizations based on the idea of improving forms
of equilibrium between the whole and its parts. Piaget’s
twofold interest on the one hand in biology and the associated
problems of the organization and evolution of living beings,
and on the other hand in epistemology and related issues
concerning the validity of knowledge and its development,
forms the basis of all his work.
Complementary Studies (1918–21)
Piaget was convinced that a theory of knowledge should be
validated by psychological research, and decided to get
training in scientific psychology as soon as he graduated from

114 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 18 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.61107-8

university with his PhD thesis on mollusks in 1918. He then
spent a term in Zurich, attending courses in psychopathology –
where he encountered psychoanalysis – and in experimental
psychology. He then studied in Paris from 1919 to 1921,
where he attended lectures in psychology (specifically by
Janet), philosophy (with Lalande), and history of science (by
Brunschvicg who had great influence on Piaget’s ideas).
Courses in psychopathology provided him with a clinical
interview method, which he soon used in his discussions with
children. In effect, in parallel with his studies, he worked in the
laboratory of Binet and Simon, standardizing intelligence tests
for children. Piaget was fascinated by the reasoning of the
children who did not yet answer ‘correctly,’ and he discovered
that the study of children’s thinking could be a means to
validate a theory of knowledge. This program, which was to be
the main focus of his work for 60 years, was very similar to the
program designed by James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934), from
whom Piaget borrowed several concepts and the expression
‘genetic psychology.’
The Early Psychological Research (1921–29)
In 1921, Claparede offered a position in his Institute for
educational sciences (known as the Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Institute) in Geneva to Piaget, who was to conduct most of his
professional life in this institution. What he found there were
stimulating intellectual atmosphere and students willing to
assist him in his work. Together with them the young researcher
started a series of studies of children’s reasoning and soon
published his first books: The Language and Thought of the Child
(1923); Judgment and Reasoning (1924); The Child’s Conception of
the World (1926); The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality
(1927) (the titles given here and in the remainder of this text are
the English translations of the French originals; the years are
those of the original publications). The striking facts he
discovered about the use of language, the nondifferentiation of
concepts and the explanations of physical phenomena in chil-
dren, as well as the detailed analyses and the synthetic catego-
rization of these behaviors, brought Piaget almost immediate
international fame. These studies showed that young children’s
thinking is structurally and functionally different from that of
older children and adults. Young children lack a true logic of
classes and relations, they have difficulties viewing reality from
an objective viewpoint, and they lack moral norms, which
command compliance on the basis of a feeling of necessity.
Children’s thinking tends to be egocentric, that is, they have
difficulties in looking at things in perspective. In these early
works, the passage from egocentric thought to a logical and
more objective form of thinking was explained by a social
factor: cooperation, or exchange between individuals who
consider themselves as equals.
During this period, Piaget was involved in many activities
beside his research. He taught child psychology at the J.-J.
Rousseau Institute, philosophy and history of science at the
University of Neuchâtel (1925–29), was for a few months
psychoanalyzed by Sabina Spielrein, a pupil of Freud, and
continued to study the evolution of mollusks. In 1923 he
married a student at the Geneva Institute. Piaget and his wife
Valentine spent much time minutely observing their three
children who were born between 1925 and 1931. These
Piaget, Jean (1896–1980) 115
observations were the basis of several books published in the
following years.
Administrative Responsibilities, Professorship and New
Directions of Research (the 1930s)
In 1929, Piaget was appointed professor of history of science at
the University of Geneva, where he subsequently became
professor of sociology (1939) and of experimental psychology
(after the death of Claparede, 1940). He also played an
important administrative role at the J.-J. Rousseau Institute as
associate director (1929), then as codirector (since 1932),
reorganizing the Institute and establishing links between the
Institute and the University. At the same time, and until the
1960s, he was director of the Bureau International de l’education
and managed to convince the governments of many countries
to join that organization.
Piaget’s most important activities continued to be research
and writing. During these years, he accumulated data on chil-
dren’s reasoning. However, apart from his book on moral
judgment (1932) – simultaneously in French and in English –
which was the sequel to the psychology books published in the
1920s, his major publications dealt with infant cognitive
development. The choice of this topic stemmed from Piaget’s
conviction that logic has its roots in actions and also from his
deep interest in the issue of the origins of knowledge. The
Origins of Intelligence (1936) and The Child’s Construction of
Reality (1937) contained extremely original observations and
explanations of infant behaviors, and departed radically from
Piaget’s earlier writings as far as the explanatory model was
concerned. Piaget discovered behaviors that had previously
been overlooked, for example, the failure of babies younger
than 9 months of age to look for an object hidden in front of
them. Replications of these observations and experiments
many years later around the world have confirmed these find-
ings that had resulted from the observation of his three
children.
In view of theory building, Piaget analyzed the elements of
knowledge, the ‘schemes’ of actions, which become more
differentiated and coordinated as development progresses.
They evolve into increasingly complex and better-adapted
forms of behavior, from automatic ‘reflexes’ to intelligent
activities. This development is a special case of the relationship
between the organism and the environment, in other words of
biological adaptation. It results from the interaction between
the subject of knowledge, who assimilates reality to his or her
structures, and the object of knowledge, which may elicit an
accommodation of these structures. Cognitive development is
viewed as an evolving equilibrium between assimilation and
accommodation. In The Child’s Construction of Reality (1937),
Piaget studied the growth of the practical knowledge of object
permanence, space, time, and causality in infants. He intro-
duced a new and abstract explanatory notion: the mathemat-
ical concept of ‘group,’ which several authors in the social
sciences considered as an interesting model at the time. Piaget
applied it to the organization of spatial knowledge in infants
and was convinced that it could be used to explain the logic of
school-age children. To this end, from 1937 onwards, he
worked for 3 years on this model, expressing it in algebraic
formulae.
116 Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)
Although Piaget was now a famous author who had
received an honorary degree from Harvard University in 1936,
his two books on infant cognition were not translated in
English until the 1950s. They contained too many abstract
considerations and microanalyses and were definitely ahead of
their time. A third book, also based on the observation of
Piaget’s own children, was written during this period and
published later: Play, Dream and Imitation (1945). It dealt with
imitation in infants and the origins of symbolic thought in
young children. Intellectual activity as well as play and imita-
tion were defined in terms of equilibrium or disequilibrium
between assimilation and accommodation.
The Mature Years: The Advent of Structural Analysis (1940s)
During this and the following period, Jean Piaget was prodi-
giously productive, thanks to a strict and very regular work
regime. In the mornings he would teach, discuss research with
his large team of coworkers, and perform his administrative
duties. Piaget would then spend the rest of the day mostly by
himself. In the early afternoon, while thinking about the topics
of his current writing, he would stroll or ride a bicycle in the
countryside near Geneva. During the rest of the afternoon he
would write, which was the best way for him to elaborate his
ideas. Even when traveling or attending conferences he would
not let a day go by without writing a few pages. Although he
loved classical music he almost never went out in the evenings
to movies, theaters or concerts. Both in summer and in winter,
his love of nature led him to repeated sojourns in the moun-
tains of the Valais, where he both hiked and worked.
The logical model of ‘grouping’ of mental operations, which
he had recently developed, and which accounted for the
organization of inferences in overall structures, inspired much
research and writing. It permitted Piaget not only to describe
the limitations of young children’s reasoning as he had done
in his first books, but also to explain the sudden, stable, and
rather generalized intellectual progress due to the advent of the
elementary logic, of ‘concrete operations.’ Between 1941 and
1948, his work resulted in six books: The Child’s Construction
of Quantities (with B. Inhelder, 1941), The Child’s Conception of
Number (with A. Szeminska, 1941), The Child’s Conception of
Time (1946), The Child’s Conception of Movement and Speed
(1946), The Child’s Conception of Geometry (with B. Inhelder and
A. Szeminska, 1948), The Child’s Conception of Space (with B.
Inhelder, 1948). These books study the elementary mastery of
basic scientific concepts. This mastery, which usually emerges
between the ages of 6 and 8 or 9 years, was explained in terms
of the underlying ‘grouping’ structures that organize mental
operations. This type of structure entails the reversibility of
thinking, for Piaget an essential feature of natural logic. In
contrast, younger children think that the number of a set of
objects or the quantity of a substance change when spatial
transformations occur, and that the duration of a movement
corresponds to the distance covered, without taking into
account the relative speed of the moving objects. These young
children have difficulties comparing the number of elements in
a subclass with the number in the superordinate class. As to
space, geometrical capacities like inverting a spatial order,
constructing a straight line with vertical sticks using a sighting
method, and drawing the horizontal line of the water level in
a tilted glass also usually emerge after the age of 7 years. The
basic concept studied in each book was analyzed and defined
in the light of children’s answers. For example, number was
analyzed in terms of a synthesis between logical classification
(class inclusion) and the seriation of asymmetrical relations
(ordering by increasing or decreasing size); time was defined
as the coordination of movements, in which the ability to
consider speed played a fundamental role, and so forth.
Piaget also published a Treaty of Logic (1949) and with his
coworkers he studied perception in children in the laboratory
of experimental psychology. These studies, which attracted
Piaget’s attention to the phenomenon of regulation, were to
provide the subject matter of a much later book. The same
holds true for the papers in sociology which were published
during this decade and collected in a book called Sociological
Studies in 1965.
The second World War rendered contact with foreign
colleagues difficult, but Piaget was invited in 1942 to give
a series of lectures in Paris at the ‘College de France’ (published
in The Psychology of Intelligence, 1946). The abstract nature of his
explanations struck many listeners as much as the brilliant
analyses inspired by various scientific disciplines. After the war,
UNESCO entrusted Piaget with several missions.
Achieving the Ultimate Goal of His Work: The Elaboration
of a Genetic Epistemology (1950s)
In the 1950s, while continuing his work in genetic psychology
with the help of his coworkers, Piaget devoted much of his
effort to the foundation of a genetic epistemology, i.e., the
study of the basic concepts and processes of the development
of scientific knowledge. This used to be a topic of philosophical
study but now became an object of scientific analysis. Actually,
Piaget had indeed pursued epistemological issues throughout
his entire previous work while ostentatiously focusing on the
explanation of children’s thinking. Now he wished to discuss
questions of knowledge per se as they were raised in the
sciences (but continued to use the study of children’s cognitive
development for this purpose). In 1950, Piaget published three
volumes of an Introduction to Genetic Epistemology. The book
begins with a general introduction defining genetic episte-
mology and its method and stating the main issues. Piaget
develops an idea he had already expressed in earlier writings,
that of a ‘circle of sciences’: physical reality is explained by
mathematics, mathematics is the product of mind, which is
a result of biological evolution, and organisms are closely
connected with physical reality. The book deals in great detail
with the epistemology of mathematics and physics, and in
lesser detail with the epistemology of biology and the social
sciences.
To make progress in the domain of genetic epistemology,
Piaget founded the International Center for Genetic Episte-
mology, which was a working group comprising researchers in
psychology and scientists from various disciplines (mathe-
matics, physics, logic, etc.). The Center was launched in 1955
after obtaining, with difficulty, the necessary funding. A new
series of books, which contained the results of the studies
conducted at the Center for genetic epistemology, appeared
from 1957 onwards. About 40 volumes were published in the
series until the death of Piaget in 1980.

During the 1950s, when Piaget held a position as professor
at the University of Paris (1952–63), his psychological research
in Geneva continued to progress and resulted in three books
with B. Inhelder: The Development of Elementary Logical Structures
(1959), a sequel to the studies of concrete operations; The
Origin of the Idea of Chance (1951) and The Growth of Logical
Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (1955). The latter book
provided a new description and definition of the highest stage
of logical development: the formal operational stage achieved
between the ages of 12 and 15 years. The formal model of the
INRC group, derived from Klein’s mathematical group,
provided an account of the new possibilities of reasoning
which were available to adolescents. It involved a greater
number of combinations of operations than the grouping
structures (in particular a ‘double reversibility’ of thought).
Moreover, the experiments by Inhelder showed how the
understanding of physical phenomena developed in children
and how, through the use of an adequate interview procedure,
adolescents could rediscover fundamental scientific laws on
their own.
The Last Two Decades (1960 to 1980): The Pinnacle of Fame
Only in the late 1950s was Piaget’s work rediscovered by
English and American psychologists, although he already had
been a most respected professor and researcher in the French-
speaking countries, and a well-known author in many other
countries. During the following two decades he was among the
most cited psychologists and best known scientists in the
world. Most of his books were translated from French into
foreign languages (a total of 24 different languages). From the
end of the 1950s onwards, he received an increasing number of
honorary degrees each year. When he died, he had received over
30 honorary degrees and several prestigious awards. However,
these honors and the travels they involved did not prevent
Piaget from continuing his work.
Until the beginning of the 1970s, studies of genetic episte-
mology mainly focused on problems related to logic, language,
space, time, and causality. The latter topic – strangely neglected
for several decades – proved difficult to study and remained on
the program of the Center for Genetic Epistemology for several
years in succession. On the whole, these books, while discus-
sing issues specific to each science (e.g., the relative importance
of time and speed in judgments about duration, or the possi-
bility of geometrical intuition) validated the constructivist
conception of Piaget’s epistemology. Effective forms of
knowledge are neither innate nor drawn from the observation
of the environment. They derive from the interaction of active
individuals with their environment. A consequence of this
position (summarized in the short book Genetic Epistemology,
1970a) is that the rate of intellectual development can be only
moderately accelerated by education. The goal of education,
according to the few texts devoted by Piaget to this topic (for
example a long article in 1965) is to favor children’s intellectual
activity and their discovery ofrelationships and abstract
concepts.
During the 1960s Piaget returned to his earliest field of
interest: biology. He published a paper on the evolution of
mollusks and about the reproduction of the ‘sedum’ plants,
which he grew in his garden and observed carefully. In his book
Piaget, Jean (1896–1980) 117
Biology and Knowledge (1967) he developed his ideas on biology
and the parallel between biological and cognitive develop-
ment. Simultaneously, he published three books on
psychology. They dealt with the ‘figurative’ aspects of knowl-
edge, whose function is to provide a kind of copy of things: The
Mechanisms of Perception (1961), The Child’s Mental Imagery
(1966), and Memory and Intelligence (1968). These books
showed that figurative aspects are progressively subordinated
to the subject’s operations: some optical illusions decrease with
perceptual activity, and with the advent of logical thinking
(concrete operations), mental images can adequately represent
transformations, while memory of organized material
improves. Intelligence is not captured by representation, i.e.,
a system of images or linguistic symbols; rather intelligence
consists in operating on elements of reality or symbols and
thus transforming them.
In the 1970s, after Piaget’s retirement as professor at the
University of Geneva (1971), he continued his work with
a large team of researchers at the Center for Genetic Episte-
mology. Most of his publications dealt with processes of
cognitive development. For over 20 years, his main aim had
been to demonstrate that efficient forms of knowledge result
from structures that organize mental operations, and that
these structures, which become increasingly complex over
time, are rooted in biological organization. The time had come
to deal with the processes involved in the construction of these
structures, a topic that Piaget had neglected since the 1930s,
except for a few epistemological papers written in the 1950s.
During the last decade of his life, between the ages of 75 and
84 years, Piaget developed concepts that had been introduced
earlier but needed fuller consideration and a precise defini-
tion: equilibration, reflexive abstraction, generalization, the
opening up of new possibilities, and so on. These concepts are
highly interesting and very original ideas, difficult to oper-
ationalize, but with deep and general explanatory value.
Unfortunately, Piaget was so eager to continue his work that
he changed the focus of his research and his writing nearly
every year, although these complex concepts would deserve
more sustained treatment.
Reflexive abstraction is the process through which some-
thing new is abstracted from experience. What is abstracted
is not a property of the external world, but derives from the
organization of the subject’s actions or operations. Equilibra-
tion is a self-regulation process, which is specific to living
organizations. At the cognitive level, it is a reaction to an in-
tellectual perturbation (such as a contradiction) which regu-
lates the cognitive system and, in an attempt to compensate
the perturbation, creates improved forms of knowledge. For
his eightieth birthday in 1976, a kind of dissertation defense
was organized: Piaget defended the theses developed in
The Equilibration of Cognitive Structures (1975) before a ‘jury’
composed of famous scientists who represented different
disciplines. In this last period, Piaget’s work also dealt with
the grasp of consciousness, contradiction, and dialectics. He
explored the relevance to the explanation of cognition of the
mathematical concept of morphism and of the idea of logic
of meaning. The last work was conducted in collaboration
with R. Garcia who was also coauthor of Psychogenesis and
History of Science (published posthumously in 1983). Piaget
also dealt with problems of biology. His post-Lamarckian
118 Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)
ideas attributed some importance to aspects of experience in
the evolution of species (for example in Behavior, a Motor of
Evolution, 1976).
Factors of Scientific Creativity
Piaget died on 16 September 1980, leaving behind a life’s work
of unusual scope, in terms of depth, originality, interdisci-
plinary relevance, and volume. The explanation of his excep-
tional scientific productivity is not only the conjunction of
a brilliant mind with a great capacity for work, but also the
stimulation of reflection by the results of constantly renewed
research. It was also due to Piaget’s sociability, which enabled
him to easily convince others to work with him; and to a strong
sense of a mission to which everything else was subordinate.
According to Piaget, having a theory to contradict was
a powerful stimulus. The dominant empiricist conceptions in
psychology – neoassociationism – and logical positivism in
philosophy played this role well into the 1960s. Since the mid-
1960s, Piaget was busy developing arguments against the
relatively widespread idea, prevalent since Chomsky published
his work, that important aspects of knowledge are innate.
The Importance of Piaget’s Work for the Social
Sciences
Piaget’s theory is exceptionally comprehensive, as it gives
a detailed account of cognition from birth to adolescence, and
also deals with scientific knowledge in adults. It contains an
incredible wealth of experimental data covering these periods
in life, especially the age range from 5 to 9 years. It deals with
fundamental problems often ignored in other psychological
theories, such as the relationship between biological activity
and cognition, the relative role of the subject and the envi-
ronment, and the connections between different aspects of
cognition such as perception, reasoning, and memory. In some
respects Piaget’s work was ahead of its time and it could
therefore easily establish connections with emerging disci-
plines such as cybernetics (since the mid-1940s) and, later,
artificial intelligence. The concepts of self-regulated systems
and of feedback specific to cybernetics were involved, less
explicitly, in the Piagetian ideas of reversible structures (present
in his work at least since 1937) and of the regulation of
cognitive activities (frequently referred to by him in the early
1940s). The artificial intelligence programs which expressed in
symbolic language the expertise involved in the mastery of
a task bear some resemblance to the Piagetian concept of
repeatable action schemes and recall Piaget’s attempts to
formalize mental structures. Moreover, the multidisciplinary
approach known as cognitive science, which emerged in the
1980s, is completely in line with Piaget’s approach, with its
links between biology, psychology, logic, and physics.
One aspect of Piaget’s work, genetic epistemology, which is
focused on scientific knowledge as investigated through studies
of children, has had little impact outside of Geneva. By
contrast, Piaget’s psychological work has definitely influenced
subsequent orientations and research in the social sciences.
Since the 1920s, Piaget’s findings about the reasoning
of children had considerable influence on child psychology.
The influence was strong in the 1960 and 1970s, in particular
regarding the four successive stages of cognitive development,
(sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and
formal operational). In fact, Piaget’s idea was not to define
general stages of child development, but necessary steps in the
integration of new forms of knowledge. His detailed findings
concerning the emergence of new capacities, such as the search
for hidden objects in babies, conservation of quantity in
school-age children, and combinatory operations in adoles-
cents remain useful landmarks of psychological development
although they cannot be used as psychometric tests. During
the same two decades, various experiments in education were
directly inspired by aspects of the theory, namely the role of
the child’s activity and the importance attributed to general
structuring abilities rather than specific learning. However,
mainstream psychology and education, especially in English-
speaking countries, often remained impervious to Piaget’s
influence, except for the growth of cognitive developmental
psychology.
Cognitive developmental psychology became a productive
subdiscipline of psychology, especially since the beginning of
the 1970s. Practically every developmental psychologist in
the world at that time had at least some knowledge of Piaget’s
work and the very idea of studying cognitive development
using a cross-sectional method was inspired by the work
previously undertaken in Geneva. Piaget’s writing often
played the same role of a ‘theory to contradict’ that associa-
tionism or nativist conceptions had played for Piaget. Many
authors in developmental psychology launched their careers
by conducting experiments that were designed to prove Piaget
wrong. Because his constructivist conceptions grant a limited
role to social influence, and in particular to education, they
were unacceptable to many. Much research has been per-
formed especially in the USA to show that cognitive compe-
tencies existed in children well before the ages indicated by
Piaget. In order to demonstrate this, the problems presented
to the children were modified and compared to those pre-
sented by Piaget himself. The race for early competencies in
the 1980 and 1990s gave rise to the idea that many cognitive
capacities were innate. In the end, Piaget’s conceptions were
not followed, but thanks to his work a whole field of
psychology developed.
Piaget’s work paved the way for the cognitivist revolution in
psychology, from the mid-1960s onwards. Psychologists had
become interested in mental states, a taboo for many decades
due to the predominant behaviorist conception. The new
generation of psychologists could read in Piaget’s work detailed
studies of mental states that had been conducted over a period
of several decades.
At the end of the twentieth century, Piaget’s theory had
indirect descendants in the fields of child psychology, cognitive
science, and developmental psychology. Ideas of specialists in
educational science are more directly inspired by Piaget’s work,
especially in French-speaking countries and in Latin America.
Studies in moral development also derive directly from Piaget’s
research in this field. More generally, constructivist approaches
which attribute importance to the activity of the subject, in
applied psychology as well as in other disciplines, usually refer,
albeit vaguely at times, to the work of the Swiss psychologist
and epistemologist.

See also: Binet, Alfred (1857–1911); Cognitive Development:
Child Education; Janet, Pierre (1859–1947); Kant, Immanuel
(1724–1804); Kohlberg, Lawrence (1927–87); Köhler,
Wolfgang (1887–1967); Piaget’s Theory of Human
Development and Education; Scientific Concepts: Development
in Children; Vygotsky, Lev Semenovic (1896–1934).
Bibliography
Bringuier, J.-C., 1989. Conversations with Jean Piaget. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Ducret, J.-J., 1990. Jean Piaget: biographie et parcours intellectuel. Delachaux Nestlé.
Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Gruber, H., Vonéche, J. (Eds.), 1995. The Essential Piaget. Aronson, London.
Inhelder, B., Piaget, J., 1955. De la logique de l’enfant a la logique de l’adolescent.
P.U.F., Paris [English translation, 1972. The Growth of Logical Thinking From
Childhood to Adolescence. Routledge, London].
Montangero, J., Maurice-Naville, D., 1992. Piaget ou l’intelligence en marche.
Vocabulaire et aperçu chronologique. Mardaga, Liége, Belgium [English translation,
1997. Piaget or the Advance of Knowledge. Glossary and Chronological Overview.
Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ].
Piaget, J., 1926. La représentation du monde chez l’enfant. Alcan, Paris [English
translation, 1972. The Child’s Conception of the World. Littlefield Adams,
Totowa, NJ].
Piaget, J., 1932. Le Jugement Moral Chez L’enfant. Alcan, Paris [English translation,
1977. The Moral Judgment of the Child. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK].
Piaget, J., 1936. La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant. Delachaux and Nestlé,
Neuchâtel, Switzerland [English translation, 1970. The Origins of Intelligence.
Routledge, London].
Piaget, Jean (1896–1980) 119
Piaget, J., 1945. La formation du symbole chez l’enfant. Delachaux and Nestlé,
Neuchâtel, Switzerland [English translation, 1962. Play, Dreams and Imitation.
Norton, New York].
Piaget, J., 1967. Biologie et connaissance. Gallimard, Paris [English translation, 1971.
Biology and Knowledge. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago].
Piaget, J., 1970a. L’épistémologié Génétique. P.U.F., Paris [English translation, 1972.
The Principles of Genetic Epistemology. Routledge, London].
Piaget, J., 1970b. Reedited Psychologie et épistémologie. Denoël, Paris [English
translation, 1971. Psychology and Epistemology. Grossman, New York].
Piaget, J., 1972a. Reedited Problémes de psychologie génétique. Denoël, Paris
[English translation, 1973. The Child and Reality: Problems of Genetic Psychology.
Grossman, New York].
Piaget, J., 1972b. Oú Va L’éducation. Denoël-Gonthier, Paris [English translation,
1973. To Understand is to Invent: The Future of Education. Grossman, New York].
Piaget, J., 1975. L’equilibration des structures cognitives. P.U.F., Paris [English
translation, 1985. The Equilibration of Cognitive Structures. The University of
Chicago Press, Chicago].
Piaget, J., 1981. Le possible et le nécessaire, 2 vols. P.U.F., Paris [English
translation, 1987. Possibility and Necessity. University of Minneapolis Press,
Minneapolis, MN].
Piaget, J., Inhelder, B., 1941. Le développement des quantités chez l’enfant. Dela-
chaux and Nestlé, Neuchâtel, Switzerland [English translation, 1974. The Child’s
Construction of Quantities. Routledge, London].
Piaget, J., Inhelder, B., 1948. La représentation de l’espace. P.U.F., Paris [English
translation, 1967. The Child’s Conception of Space. Norton, New York].
Piaget, J., Inhelder, B., 1968. Memoire et intelligence. P.U.F., Paris [English trans-
lation, 1973. Memory and Intelligence. Basic Books, New York].
Vidal, F., 1994. Piaget before Piaget. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.