Cognitive development and adolescent disabilities

Abstract

In this presentation I will try to bring together the cognitive development and dynamic orientations as they apply to the exacerbation of chronic disabilities and the etiology of disabilities in adolescents. I am afraid that I will have to use clinical observation and consensual validation as my primary data base as much of what I have to say has yet to be systematically investigated. I hope, therefore, that the presentation may stimulate research as well as discussion. From ancient times, it has been recognized that when children reach the of six or seven years, they also attain the age of reason, i.e., the syllogistic reasoning elaborated by Aristotle. It was not until Piaget's groundbreaking work on adolescent thinking (1) that a higher order of reasoning was given a developmental time tag. Piaget made clear that the propositional logic made prominent by Boole (2) and others was not attained until adolescence. Propositional logic is as different from syllogistic logic as algebra is from arithmetic. Algebra raises arithmetic to a higher power that is at once broader and more abstract. The equation (proposition) (a + b) 2 = a 2 + 2ab + b 2 holds true for whatever numbers are substituted for the letters. Propositional logic thus enables young people to consider possibilities as well as the here-and-now realities. Propositional logic underlies the understanding of historical time and celestial space. It permits young people to understand metaphor and simile (second-order symbols) as well as puns, political cartoons, satire, and allegory. In a very real sense, propositional logic permits teenagers to think in a new key.