Piaget on Reasoning: A Methodological Critique and Alternative Proposals

Abstract

Piaget's study of intellectual processes has led him to conclude that, at around 7 years of age, the average child reaches a stage of development marked by the ability to use certain logical operations in his thinking. In this paper, I shall discuss Piaget's findings and his methods in this area and shall present for consideration an alternative view of the facts. Piaget's comments on this stage are presented in his book on the development of intelligence (1946c); his position is set forth in more detail in his studies of the development of concepts of quantity, time, movement, and speed (1946a, 1946b; Piaget and Inhelder, i94i), of operations of measurement and of geometric concepts and relations (Piaget, Inhelder, and Szeminska, 1948; Piaget and Inhelder, 1948), and of concepts of number and of class (Piaget and Szeminska, 1941; Inhelder and Piaget, I959). These studies, of course, comprise only a part of Piaget's work. The present discussion will not be relevant to his ideas about development in the first two years of life (1936, 1937a, 1945) nor to his many experiments on perception in children. Although parts of this treatment are relevant to his work on adolescent reasoning (Piaget and Inhelder, 1953; Inhelder and Piaget (1955), none of the special problems raised by this work will be discussed. While the segment of Piaget's work under consideration is almost always concerned with fundamental, and usually neglected, problems, his methodology is vulnerable from several points of view, and its flaws often serve to prevent a clear formulation of his research problems. My primary purpose in examining Piaget's methods is to achieve a clear restatement of the basic problems in a manner which does not presuppose Piaget's Weltanschauung. In the pages to follow, I shall address a number of questions of method. At the most general level I shall compare certain elements of Piaget's theory and research strategy with those of modern behavior theory. At a somewhat more specific level, I shall question the adequacy of verbal methods in investigating the processes Piaget has treated. Third, I shall be concerned with