Indeterminacy and the Role of the Archive: The Eight Extensions of Piaget’s Sociological Studies

Abstract

What a text means in translation is accepted, canonically, to be indeterminate. Authors can provide additional constraints to interpretation by taking care to explain some of the original context. But this requires making judgments about what counts, and readers can’t generally do that of sources except in retrospect. So the solution to the problem is taken to be “to become bilingual,” and basically do the translation work oneself. This means immersing in that foreign culture for long enough that its ways of being, and ways of meaning, become one’s own. When the subject of one’s interest is the undiscovered country, however, this goal remains forever inaccessible. That’s just not somewhere you can go and report back from. The true meanings of deceased authors are therefore forever inscrutable. Except, of course, in cases where historical traces can stand in their stead. Interactions with archival sources are thus offered as a new solution to the problems of indeterminacy and inscrutability: archives provide anchors to stabilize the received meaning of historical texts by offering evidence of what those involved in their production intended them to mean. Here, that is demonstrated with reference to (1) the difficulty of translating Jean Piaget’s (1896–1980) collection of essays entitled Sociological Studies and (2) the broader misunderstanding of Piaget’s sociality in relation to the popularity of its critique by Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934). We then find, in the process, new ways to consider a consistently thorny question: what is the means by which one attains truth? Here, we therefore articulate and illustrate the “Interpretation Game” by providing access to a curated selection of archival texts drawn from several collections never before considered in relation to the question of the meaning of “Piaget” as a holophrastic utterance. The result is then also a new look at Cold War-era developmental psychology, social psychology, educational theory, and genetic epistemology (the study of the construction of knowledge).