Name: 2017 Personality 06: Jean Piaget & Constructivism
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T05:47:39.000Z
Duration: 1 h 45 min 26 s
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Adverbs of manner

this one's particularly complicated so because with Piaget you enter a whole

new domain of of axiomatic thinking that's the right way to think about it

say each of these people that were discussing each of these theories comes

out the construction of the world from a different perspective and it's it's

really fundamentally different it's different way deep down at the level of

fundamental assumptions and so Piaget who's a who's probably the world's most

famous developmental psychologist but although he didn't consider himself a

developmental psychologist he considered himself a genetic epistemology and what

that meant was that he was interested in Paestum ology which is how knowledge

structures work and genetic means formulation of and so he was interested

in how children formulate their knowledge structures in the world and he

was a constructivist because he believed that human beings construct the they

don't only construct the representations of the world and it's deeper than that

it's more like they construct the world itself now it depends to some degree on

what you think of as the world and of course that's so there's a reality

definition issue that's nested at the bottom of this and it's a very complex

one and so I'm going to have to walk you through it piece by piece now Piaget was

a genius he was he wrote a paper I believe on mollusks when he was ten and

had it published in a scientific journal and he was offered the curatorship of a

museum as a consequence of that and his parents had to write the museum

directors and tell them that he couldn't curate the museum because he was only

ten and so that gives you some idea about Piaget and he's published many

many many books and many of them haven't been translated into English yet and so

he was quite the he was quite the you know large intelligence creature and he

studied all sorts of things so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about

constructivism I'm gonna start with a quote from Piaget and it's uh it's he's

some book some of his books I found quite straightforward and some of them

very difficult and I think it's often because of the quality of the

translation this happens to be a relatively difficult section I don't

think it's translated that well but whatever we're going to go through it

I'll explain it to you a little bit so Piaget said the common postulate that's

assumption of various traditional epistemology

theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge itself is a fact

and not a process and then if our various forms of knowledge are always

incomplete and our various science is still imperfect that which is acquired

is still acquired and can therefore be studied statically hence the absolute

position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types

of knowledge possible under the converging influence of a series of

factors we're tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process

more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempts to hold fast

dissolves once again in the current of development it is the last analysis of

this development and of it alone that we have the right to state it is a fact

what we can and should then seek is the law of this process quotes we are well

aware on the other hand of the fine book by kuhn on scientific revolutions now

there is an awful lot of information in that paragraph so we'll unpack it a

little bit before we go on now one way of looking at science is that it's a

collection of facts right that's that's what Piaget is stating to begin with and

that we assume that the facts that science has gathered are facts and

Static but if you observe them across time what you find is that scientific

facts tend to shift and transform because scientific theories that are

applicable in one century let's say turn out to be less applicable in the next

now there's been a lot of argument and discussion about this because the fact

that facts change seems to indicate that they're not so self-evidently fact and

there are people and perhaps Kuhn would be among them who believe that science

consisted of the juxtaposition of paradigms so those are sets of axioms

within which something operates and the paradigms he considered them often in

commensurate you couldn't move from one to another because the axioms were

different there was no necessary no what what might you say there was no

necessary means of communication between them but and and and Piaget knew of

Thomas Kuhns work that's the scientists structure of scientific revolutions

which was published in 1962 it's a classic text in the philosophy of

science and and what Piaget soon more was more like a I would say

more like a classic view of science where so for example when Newton came up

with Newtonian physics there was a set of propositions upon which Newtonian

physics was based and then when Einstein transformed those propositions what

happened was that Newtonian physics became a subset of Einsteinian physics

and so the way that Piaget looked at the development of factual ideas at least in

part was that you'd come up with a set of ideas that were facts and then that

would be superseded by a different theory within that within which that

original theory would be nested and so that what happens that each theory in

some sense although it transforms it becomes more complete as the scientific

progression continues now Kuhn didn't precisely believe that although exactly

what Kuhn meant by a paradigm shift because Kuhn originated that term isn't

clear but he didn't seem to actually believe that science had this capacity

to present a series of facts and then alter the underlying presuppositions and

then to nest that within a broader series of facts like you would assume if

you were thinking about the relationship between Newton and Einstein

so Newtonian physics is a subset of einsteinium physics so now that's kind

of how Piaget thought about how human beings developed knowledge he believed

that we came up with well let's say you wanted to chop down a tree that might be

a good example I mean you could use a dull axe made of bronze and it's like

well that would chop down the tree it'd be a lot of work though and then maybe

you replace that with a sharp steel axe that's designed like a wedge so that you

can really hack down a tree with it or maybe you replace it with a saw and so

the it's not like the bronze axe could chop down the tree but the steel axe can

do a better job in the saw can do even a better job and so the way that Piaget

thought about the transformation of human knowledge structures from from

infancy onward essentially was that infants would produce a representation

of the world that was sort of low resolution but quite tool like it would

work in the world but then as they progressed the nature of those tools

would become refined that sometimes transform completely so some sometimes

imagine that a child would use in a sense a low resolution picture of

something and then they would increase its resolution

as they filled in the details that would be assimilation that's the page idea

notion of assimilation you're using the same basic theory but filling in the

details and then now and then you'd have to switch to another picture entirely

and that would be more like accommodation that's where you'd have to

transform your internal structures completely in order to properly

represent an act within the world and so that's the basic difference between

accommodation and assimilation so assimilation is like micro alterations

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2017 Personality 06: Jean Piaget & Constructivism

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