Correspondence Between Evert Willem Beth and Jean Piaget (1951–1955)

Abstract

Today’s logic has gradually moved away from a natural logic and the scientific community largely accepts logical pluralism. At the same time, psychology has more or less abandoned his references to classical logic in order to theorize its experimental results. Finally, the demand for collaboration between the two disciplines is becoming more and more up to date, without to be realized. As part of an effort to understand the scope of such cooperation, the present study assessed Piaget’s and Beth’s attempt in the early 1950s to bring psychology and logic together by using the approach of genetic epistemology. The edition of their correspondence gave us an insight in the circularity of Piaget’s historical account of genetic epistemology with respect to logic: Piaget observed empirically an isomorphism between the ‘pre-propositional logic’ of the general coordination of actions and a certain part of formal logic. He then established the psychological development of this part of formal logic. But, in fact, the study of the pre-propositional operations expected to be the basis of some intuitive simple logical structures was itself governed by a complex logical structure. The implications of these results for developing a pragmatic version of epistemology are discussed in this paper.