The Transnational Legacy of Jean Piaget: A View from the 21st Century (Latin American Voices) 303138881X, 9783031388811

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Latin American Voices Integrative Psychology and Humanities

Regina Helena de Freitas Campos Érika Lourenço Marc J. Ratcliff   Editors

The Transnational Legacy of Jean Piaget A View from the 21st Century

Latin American Voices Integrative Psychology and Humanities Series Editor Giuseppina Marsico, Universita di Salerno Pontecagnano, Salerno, Italy

Editorial Board Alicia Barreiro, Universidad de Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, Argentina Antônio Virgílio Bastos, Institute of Psychology Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil Angela Uchoa Branco, Institute of Psychology Universidade de Brasília, Brasília, Brazil Felix Cova-Solar, Department of Psychology University of Concepción, Concepción, Chile Maria Virginia Dazzani, Institute of Psychology Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil Gabriela Di Gesú, Universidad de Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, Argentina Ana Maria Jacó-Vilela, Institute of Psychology Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil María Noel Lapoujade, School of Philosophy and Literature Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico Maria Lyra, Graduate Program in Psychology Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil María Elisa Molina Pavez, School of Psychology Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile Susanne Normann, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Julio Cesar Ossa, Fundación Universitaria de Popayán, Popayán, Colombia Gilberto Pérez-Campos, Psicología, School of Higher Studies Iztacala Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Tlalnepantla, Estado de México, Mexico Lilian Patricia Rodríguez-Burgos, University of La Sabana Chía, Colombia Mónica Roncancio-Moreno, Psychology Department Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Palmira, CAUCA, Colombia Lívia Mathias Simão, Institute of Psychology Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo - SP, Brazil Luca Tateo, Dept of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University, Aalborg Øst, Denmark Jaan Valsiner, Dept of Communication & Psych Aalborg University, Aalborg Øst, Denmark Floor van Alphen, Department of Basic Psychology Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

In the last decades, Latin America has been a productive and fertile ground for the advancement of theoretical and empirical elaborations within psychology, social and human sciences. Yet, these contributions have had a hard time to be internationally recognized in its original contribution and in its transformative heuristic power. Latin American Voices – Integrative Psychology and Humanities intends to fill this gap by offering an international forum of scholarly interchanges that deal with psychological and socio-cultural processes from a cultural psychological perspective. The book series seeks to be a solid theoretically-based, though still empirical, arena of interdisciplinary and international debate, as well as a worldwide scientific platform for communicating key ideas of methodology and different theoretical approaches to relevant issues in psychology and humanities. It will publish books from researchers working in Latin America in the different fields of psychology at interplay with other social and human sciences. Proposals dealing with new perspectives, innovative ideas and new topics of interdisciplinary kind are especially welcomed. Both solicited and unsolicited proposals are considered for publication in this series. All proposals and manuscripts submitted to the Series will undergo at least two rounds of external peer review.

Regina Helena de Freitas Campos Érika Lourenço  •  Marc J. Ratcliff Editors

The Transnational Legacy of Jean Piaget A View from the 21st Century

Editors Regina Helena de Freitas Campos School of Education Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Érika Lourenço Department of Psychology Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Marc J. Ratcliff FPSE Universite de Geneve Geneva, Switzerland

ISSN 2524-5805     ISSN 2524-5813 (electronic) Latin American Voices

ISBN 978-3-031-38881-1    ISBN 978-3-031-38882-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38882-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Foreword by William B. Gomes

Psychology is one of the most fascinating fields of human knowledge that, although very popular, remains a little-known science. The difficulty in accessing what psychology offers lies in the difficulty to move along the contributions of its great thinkers, and to understand the comings and goings of scientific formulations. The tendency is to imprison ourselves in a point of view, to take it as a radical foundation, retaining only a fraction of what psychology may offer. Even so, we can make good, though somewhat restricted, applications. These considerations somehow appear between the lines in the chapters of this book with papers presented at the International Jean Piaget Colloquium in Brazil and Latin America, held in the 38th Helena Antipoff Annual Meeting. The event was supported by the Helena Antipoff Center for Research and Documentation, the Federal University of Minas Gerais, the Jean Piaget Archives, and the University of Geneva. The activities took place remotely, coordinated from the city of Belo Horizonte – MG, Brazil, from March 29 to 31, 2021. The book is organized into four parts: Part I: Jean Piaget as a Builder of an International Network in Psychology, Education, and Peace Promotion in the Twentieth Century; Part II: Dialogues, Conflicts, and Controversies Concerning Piaget’s Research in History and Present Days; Part III: Presence of Piaget’s Work in Brazil, as a Researcher and Educational Leader; and Part IV: Concluding Remarks – Piaget in the Twenty-First Century. A cast of renowned professors from different countries, specialists in Piagetian studies, sign the 19 chapters that make up the work. The chapters are preceded by an informative introduction that outlines the main points of each contribution and by an enlightening and encouraging conclusive synthesis, regarding the relevance and applicability of Jean Piaget’s theory. Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was an example of how to move fruitfully between different concepts, dealing with evidence and theoretical refinement. This timely book, The Transnational Legacy of Jean Piaget: A View from the 21st Century, takes up again the relevance of his contemporaneity and the historicity of his participation in the beginnings of scientific psychology in Brazil. A scientific psychology that arrived in Brazil thanks to the efforts of educators, capable of dialoguing with European and North American psychologists, adding their interpretations and practices that were synthesized as the New School. vii

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Piaget’s epistemological legacy points to the pertinence of relations between areas of knowledge, methodology, theoretical formalization, and the pertinence of contextualized applications. All these aspects are clearly presented and analyzed in the various chapters of the book. Piaget was a researcher who knew how to move between philosophy, logic, and mathematics. He found that to understand, describe, and analyze child development, he needed a new method. In part, this method stemmed from his observation of the procedures used by psychometrists in the construction of their instruments, and the fluctuating attention of psychoanalysts when listening to their patients. History shows that psychologists, when rooted in certain positions, they may trample steps, and exclude possibilities. A classic example is the legacy of the pioneer Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), in which qualitative research for the study of people’s psychology was neglected in favor of experimental research of consciousness psychology. It took many years for mainstream psychology to understand that qualitative and quantitative criteria have always been present in the history of the discipline. Piaget, in his epistemological sensitivity, understood that the reversal between qualities and quantities add new elements to research and a more reliable understanding of the object. He showed in his practice that a scientific investigation requires different methods to arrive at sturdy conclusions. As it is known, scientific research begins with the researchers’ intuitive disturbances (abduction). After defining the problem, they invent a case (induction) to obtain data (quantities) or taken (qualities). More sophisticated quests often deal with these two features to get robust results. These data/taken are scrutinized by mathematical and/or logical resources (deduction). Then they come to the conclusions. However, this research will only meet all the epistemological requirements if it goes through all the proposed referrals with different methods (adduction). To enunciate the steps of the well-known scientific method, I resorted to the terminology of Charles Peirce (1839–1914). It will come as no surprise to state that Piaget had the same understanding of method, and, like Peirce, he remained attentive to semiotic and communicational processes. Contributions of great thinkers should not be taken as definitive but provisional ones. Yet, this was an insistent point defended by the pragmatism of William James (1842–1910), one of the first authors to bring a comprehensive overview of the nascent scientific psychology, at the end of the nineteenth century. Theoretical provocations are expected and will certainly be followed by debates. Polarities fertilize the debate and will always be among us. Different voices will raise new questions, driving the search for new paths and finding different alternatives. In science, it is common for studies to move through models and theories. What is a research model? Models are incomplete attempts to approach an object. And what is a theory? A normative criterion for choosing or selecting contexts of judgment. Certainly, models may have greater or lesser success impact in their endeavors, and theory normative criterion may be undermined by flaws in its composition. Important debates will always be opportune and current, others will be lost in the exercise of oppositions. Among the concepts debated and well articulated in this book are the positions of Piaget and Leo Vygotsky (1896–1934) regarding the course of human

Foreword by William B. Gomes

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development whether by continuities, stages, or dialectics. Once again, we are faced with reversible concepts that characterize facets of human development. In fact, identity, transitivity, and opposition are part of our human ability to seek and make meaning. The concept of empathy is among the most surprising discussions that this book offers us. What is the issue? Is empathy a result of social learning or human functional capacitation? This discussion highlights the meaningful investment of Brazilian educational administrators in the past, particularly the original thinking of the Russian-Brazilian psychologist Helena Antipoff (1892–1974). In fact, Helena Antipoff, the author that inspires and subsidizes this series of meetings, marks one of the best initiatives to establish in Brazil an adequate and modern system of education, which began with the training of elementary school teachers. At the same time, it reveals the pioneering Brazilian educators’ and psychologists' historical links to renowned psychologists from Europe and the United States. The educational renewal in Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century occurred through the confluence of ideas coming from the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, with names such as Édouard Claparède (1876–1840), Pierre Bovet (1878–1965), and Adolphe Ferrière (1879–1960), and from the University of Columbia  Teachers College, with John Dewey (1859–1952), William Kilpatrick (1871–1965), and Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949). Curiously, Brazilian educators came to North American authors through French translations. These are historical aspects that invite us to pay more attention to the greatness of Brazilian beginning psychology. The reception of Piaget’s books in the English-language literature is a contentious issue for historians and exemplifies the coming and going of scientific trends. At the center of the debate is the absence of Piaget among the authors who contributed to the 1946 and 1956 editions of the Handbook of Child Psychology. He participated with a chapter in the 1931 and 1933 editions but did not appear in the 1946 and 1956 editions, only to reappear in the 1970 edition. A fine question for historians, but for the moment it is enough to say that Piaget was a thinker ahead of his time, going beyond conventional research methods and anticipating new trends such as studies in moral judgment, embodied cognition, and sociopsychology. In addition, he was a thinker concerned with peace and harmony among nations. Thus, it is no surprise to find Jean Piaget among the first names in the lists of the most cited psychologists of the twentieth century. Congratulations to the editors Regina Campos, Érika Lourenço, and Marc Ratcliff for providing us with this rich and fruitful legacy. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Porto Alegre, Brazil

William B. Gomes

Series Editor’s Preface

Piaget Overseas The Transnational Legacy of Jean Piaget: A View from the 21st Century, edited by Regina Helena de Freitas Campos, Érika Lourenço and Marc J. Ratcliff, represents the quintessential expression of one of the main scope of the Latin American Voices Book series to provide a scientific platform for communicating key ideas of methodology and different theoretical approaches to relevant issues in psychology and humanities. This volume is about the original way in which Piaget’s theory has been received in Latin America over the last decades and how his theory has fertilized new and original streams of investigations. The volume offers, indeed, many insights of Jean Piaget’s work that are usually overlooked, for example, the education and UNESCO period, the dialogues with Habermas and Wallon, the controversies in moral development theory, just to mention a few. The spectrum of topics covered by the book is quite diverse and it includes some interesting reflections, for instance, of Piaget’s censorship during the dictatorial regime in Argentina (1976–1983). All this would be already enough for making this book an interesting publication, worth to be read by specialist and scholars on Piaget’s work and by an interdisciplinary audience specialized on history of psychology, sociology and education. However, as for other volumes into this series (cfr. Garcia 2022; Fossa 2021), the value of the books goes far beyond the History of Psychology and tries to hatch the Piaget’s legacy for the twenty-first century. Why do we still need to study Piaget today? This is the core question of the book. The editors convincingly answered this way in their final chapter: In the twenty-first century, we must face many crises such as overpopulation, climate crisis, global warming, etc. Climate change has devastating effects. By the end of the century, the number of people who will flee their territories and try to enter the European Union will triple. Natural disasters will come with more force and frequency. At the same time, the world population is increasing. Overpopulation and migration will bring serious social problems, such as instability of housing and xi

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food, increased unemployment, and social inequality. Even if all efforts to reduce global warming have satisfactory effects, new ideas are necessary, and a lot of creativity is needed to face the threats seriously. To help face all these problems, it is necessary to expand our knowledge about the thought processes and encourage the development of scientific thinking. And that’s what Piaget did (Chap. 19, this volume). As one of the most relevant thinkers in the fields of epistemology, psychology and educational sciences, Piaget is considered as an inspiring source for continuing building a more democratic and inclusive society in Latin America. The reader of this book will be introduced to the terrific role of Piaget ideas in addressing the current issues in education and human sciences that are at the core of the Sustanaible Developmental Goals. In this time of brutality and ignorance, where science is easily dismissed in favor of commonsense knowledge if not of fake news, keeping the rigor of Piaget’s work is a must. Giuseppina Marsico June 2023

References García L.  N. (2022). Communist psychology in Argentina. In Transnational politics, scientific culture and psychotherapy (1935–1991). Springer. Fossa, P. (2021). Latin American advances in subjectivity and development. In Through the Vygotsky Route. Springer.

Contents

1

Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Regina Helena de Freitas Campos, Érika Lourenço, and Marc Ratcliff

Part I Jean Piaget as a Builder of an International Network in Psychology, Education and Peace Promotion in the Twentieth Century 2

 Why Piaget Enchants Me? The Importance of Piaget’s Theory����������   13 Silvia Parrat-Dayan

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 How to Create a Research Method: Piaget From Neuchâtel to Paris 1920��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 André Elias Morelli Ribeiro

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 “The Ascent from the Individual to the Universal”: Piagetian Theory Applied to Intergovernmental Cooperation in Education������   43 Rita Hofstetter and Bernard Schneuwly

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 Piaget and Education: A Contemporary View��������������������������������������   63 Marilene Proença Rebello de Souza

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 Peace Education and Integral Ecology: Inspiration in Piaget at the Legacy of Pierre Weil������������������������������������������������������������������������   75 Maurício Andrés Ribeiro

Part II Dialogues, Conflicts and Controversies Concerning Piaget’s Research in History and Present Days 7

 How Does an Author Become a Classic? Exploring the Reception of Piaget in France During the Interwar Period with a New Methodology ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   91 Marc J. Ratcliff xiii

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Contents

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Future Directions: Beyond a “Psychosociology” Integrating Piaget and Habermas������������������������������������������������������������������������������  119 Milton N. Campos

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Piaget-Wallon Debate on the Origin and Development of Symbolic Thought������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  141 Dener Luiz da Silva

10 Helena  Antipoff’s Education and Work in Intersection with Piagetian Notions and Curriculum Internationalization Concepts����  157 José Marcelo Freitas Luna, Adriana Fernandes de Oliveira, Carlos Alberto Duarte da Nóbrega, Christiane Heemann, Jonatas Marcos da Silva Santos, Juliana Fagundes Jacinto, Leda Maria Simon, Lucas Abib Hecktheuer, and Marlene Eggert 11 Piaget  x Antipoff: Child Justice and Morality Under the Mediation of Kant������������������������������������������������������������������������������  171 Sérgio Faleiro Farnese, Regina Helena de Freitas Campos, and Marilene Oliveira Almeida 12 Jean  Piaget’s Historical-Critical Method Applied to an Epistemological Research on Carl Rogers��������������������������������������������  191 Paulo Coelho Castelo Branco and Ricardo Lincoln Laranjeira Barrocas 13 Piaget’s  Reading Perspectives in Argentina: Censorship Effects During the Last Military Dictatorship��������������������������������������������������  203 Patricia Scherman and Laura Vissani Part III Presence of Piaget’s Work in Brazil, as a Researcher and Educational Leader 14 Variations  of the Pedagogical Collaboration Settled Between the International Bureau of Education and Brazil: The Role of International Agents (1925–1952)����������������������������������������������������������  219 Clarice Moukachar Batista Loureiro 15 Appropriations  of Jean Piaget’s Ideas by the Culture of the Print Media in Minas Gerais State/Brazil (1930–1940): Understanding Children’s Thinking for the Improvement of Education ��������������������  239 Raquel Martins de Assis 16 Self-Government  and Group Work in Search of a Democratic Education – Dialogues of Helena Antipoff with Jean Piaget����������������  255 Adriana Otoni Silva Antunes Duarte and Regina Helena de Freitas Campos 17 The  Appropriation of Jean Piaget’s Work in Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s: The Production of Styles in Singular Networks��������������  273 Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira

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18 The  Reception of Piaget’s Ideas: Assimilations and Contemporary Views in Brazil������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  293 Mário Sérgio Vasconcelos and Leonardo Lemos de Souza Part IV Concluding Remarks – Piaget in the Twenty-First Century 19 Why  Piaget in the Twentieth First Century?����������������������������������������  311 Regina Helena de Freitas Campos, Érika Lourenço, Silvia Parrat-­Dayan, and Marc Ratcliff Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  319

Chapter 1

Introduction Regina Helena de Freitas Campos, Érika Lourenço, and Marc Ratcliff

This book The Legacy of Jean Piaget: A view from the 21st Century is the result of the International Colloquium Jean Piaget in Brazil and Latin America, held during the 38th Annual Helena Antipoff Meeting, with the support of the Helena Antipoff Documentation and Research Center, the Federal University of Minas Gerais, the Jean Piaget Archives, and the University of Geneva. The colloquium had the purpose of remembering Piaget’s works as a psychologist, epistemologist, and educational leader within the context of the development, circulation, and internationalization of knowledge produced in these scientific and philosophical areas since the 1980s. The Helena Antipoff Annual Meeting is a regular event of the Helena Antipoff Documentation and Research Center (CDPHA), situated in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Since its creation in 1979, the CDPHA has been dedicated to preserving the memory and disseminating the work of the psychologist and educator Helena Antipoff (1892–1974), as well as researching the history and current developments in the field of educational sciences, especially in educational psychology. In recent years, the event has also hosted periodic meetings of the inter-institutional network of researchers linked to the Brazilian Society for the History of Psychology and the Iberoamerican Network of Researchers in the History of Psychology. As a graduate from the first course offered by the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute (1912–1914), and having worked as assistant of Édouard Claparède at the University of Geneva Laboratory of Psychology between 1926 and 1929, the Russian-Brazilian psychologist and educator Helena Antipoff  had the opportunity of collaborating with Jean Piaget in works done during the late 1920s by both researchers. In this R. H. de Freitas Campos (*) · É. Lourenço Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil M. Ratcliff University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. H. de Freitas Campos et al. (eds.), The Transnational Legacy of Jean Piaget, Latin American Voices, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38882-8_1

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position, she observed the first theoretical elaborations made by Piaget on child development. In the late 1920s, at the university, she participated in Claparède’s research focused on the intellectual processes leading to the genesis of the hypothesis in human cognition. The research, developed by Claparède in the context of his functional approach to the psychology of intelligence, was published in 1933 in the periodical Archives de Psychologie (Claparède, 1933). The report was dedicated to Antipoff, who had insisted with the author to publicize its results, considered relevant for the understanding of human thought. The same publication is cited by Jean Piaget in his book The Birth of Intelligence in Children (Piaget, 1936) as an important contribution to the scientific understanding of the origins of intelligence in humans, starting from babies’ action on the world, and to the elaboration of his theory of assimilation (Piaget, 1936, p. 372). After being a direct participant in the discoveries performed by the two pioneers in the scientific study of child development, Antipoff migrated to Brazil, in 1929, where she became one of the most important protagonists in the establishment of psychology as a field of knowledge and as a profession, and a leading researcher in the psychology of intelligence and education. Throughout her career, as a researcher, university professor, and educational leader, she continued to explore the ways opened by her Genevan colleagues and to spread the knowledge about Claparède’s and Piaget’s theories. Taking into account her role in the diffusion and internationalization of their works in Brazil and Latin America, as a leading interpreter of the Genevan school, the Colloquium was organized and included the presentation of works done by Antipoff under the inspiration of Piagetian recommendations in psychology and education (see Chaps. 7, 10 and 12). This book is a celebration of this lasting collaboration between Belo Horizonte and Geneva in the areas of psychology and education. The programs of the two events – the 38th Helena Antipoff Annual Meeting and the Jean Piaget International Colloquium in Brazil and Latin America  – were designed with the purpose of contributing to strengthen the ties of academic and scientific collaboration between researchers in the history and contemporary situation of psychology and the sciences of education inspired by the constructivist approach, exploring especially the articulations between the works of Jean Piaget, Helena Antipoff, and other Brazilian, Latin American, and Swiss researchers linked to the Genevan tradition. The theme of the 38th Helena Antipoff Annual Meeting and Jean Piaget International Colloquium in Brazil and Latin America – circulation and internationalization of scientific knowledge and practices in psychology, the human sciences and education – historical and contemporary issues – refers to contemporary debates that require innovative reflections on the field, in a critique of the present, and the need to understand the historicity of these disciplines and their international circulation.

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Organization of the Book The book is organized in three main themes, stemming from the collaboration of our colleagues from Geneva, Argentina, and Brazil who participated in the colloquium: the building of Piaget’s influence, from the local to the universal, in the process of internationalization of education from the twentieth century onwards; dialogues, conflicts and controversies concerning Piaget’s research, in history and present days; and the reception of Piaget’s work in Brazil, including memories and testimonies of Piaget’s presence as a researcher and educational leader.

Aspects of Piagetian Influences, from the Local to the Universal Part I opened with a very interesting report of memories of Piaget as a researcher and professor, made by one of his brilliant followers, Silvia Parrat-Dayan, who had the opportunity of interacting with her master as a doctoral student during the 1970s in the International Center for Genetic Epistemology established in Geneva. In her paper, Parrat-Dayan reminded some of the most relevant theoretical contributions of Piaget for the understanding of human development, and also his friendly reception of pupils, praising their refreshing look at the research data. Concepts of assimilation, accommodation, methodology, constructivism, interactionism, and equilibration are revisited, and how Piaget honored students’ creativity, encouraging new looks at research results prior to knowledge of established interpretations, and the pleasure of being surprised by scientific findings. The praising of curiosity led Piaget to create his own research method, combining the art of making questions developed by intelligent testers and the deep listening to the subject’s associations and interpretations developed by psychoanalysis. The process of creating the clinical method is explained in detail by André Morelli, professor at the Fluminense Federal University, in Brazil. In his paper, Morelli covered the very first steps of the encounters of Piaget with philosophy, logic, and mathematics, followed by interaction with techniques of psychological evaluation developed by psychologists and psychiatrists in France, leading to his own epistemological insights. The fertility of the research method then put into practice in the first studies of child development made by Piaget during the 1920s prepared the next step of his career, when he assumed the direction of the International Bureau of Education, in 1927, and initiated a new role as an international leader in education. The next paper, a result of research done by our colleagues Rita Hofstetter and Bernard Schneuwly in the research group on the social history of education of the University of Geneva (ERHISE), showed us the relationship between the research done on the moral development in children and the approach he adopted at the IBE to international cooperation in education, linking individual morality based on reciprocity and the cooperation between countries. As director of the International Bureau of

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Education, whose explicit purpose was to promote the collaboration between the nations in the area of education and peace, our author had the opportunity to contribute to the diffusion of an international agenda for education as a right and as a means to emphasize human values. To remember this part of Piaget’s work is very important for present international issues, focusing on cooperation between countries on environmental and peace issues. The authors emphasized the model of international understanding promoted by the IBE, based on the principles of reciprocity, neutrality, and objectivity, aiming at the establishment of an international community praising political universalism. Also the role of education in this process was highlighted by Piaget. The next two papers explored the approaches and developments of these two roles assigned to the IBE as an international education center: the internationalization of educational procedures aiming at the establishment of an agenda for child development and youth education based on raising consciousness of the need for cooperation and mutual understanding, and the need to work for the promotion of peace among nations. These two purposes are highlighted in the papers written by Marilene Proença Rebello de Souza, psychologist and educator, who is a professor at the University of São Paulo, where she directs the Institute of Psychology, and by Maurício Andrès, architect and specialist in environmental issues linked to UNIPAZ, the Holistic Peace University located in Brasília, the Brazilian capital, with the support of the local government. Souza analyzed the relevance of Jean Piaget’s writings on education, taking as a basis the synthesis of the principles defended by the author in a collection of papers entitled “Where is education going to?”. The texts were written by Piaget after the onset of the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and translated into Portuguese, in Brazil, in 1977. In this publication, Piaget worked on the fundamental aspects of education as a means for the promotion of scientific thinking and of human rights. Souza surveyed the different themes explored in Piaget’s works (development, logic, free schooling, equality, morals, learning methods, uses of practice, objectives of freedom, solidarity and respect, reaction to intolerance, sense of responsibility, training of educators, etc.) of where education is going in a key that is both contextual and contemporary, with a critical look at descendants who tend to emphasize the psychologization of educational issues stemming from social inequality in present times. Andrès explains the foundation of the International Holistic University of Brasilia (UNIPAZ), established in 1987 by a Piaget student, Pierre Weil, who was a professor of psychology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Born in Strasbourg in 1924, Weil had the experience of war and ethnic conflicts in Europe. He migrated to Brazil in the 1950s and dedicated his career to the integration of science and the humanization of social relations. Unipaz was an established synthesis of Weil’s ideals. Andrès Ribeiro’s article highlighted the relationship between Piaget and Pierre Weil in the making of a holistic project working for peace, ecology and the unity of peoples. They had several points in common, but one has the impression that in Weil’s case, there is a kind of transposition of the Piagetian spirit, in its rigor and fruitfulness, into a problematic adapted to the crises of the contemporary world,

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and even more so because the contemporary climate crisis puts humanity as a whole into question. The text is written in part in the form of a testimony by one of Pierre Weil’s collaborators, who narrated their lives, crises, training, work, ideals, and the stages of a path of multiple encounters, a path in which Piaget’s shadow is designed. Even if for Piaget the purpose of the relationship with the world was cognitive, it was not disembodied and Piagetian theory must be seen from this point of view as defining the epistemological conditions of truth in the sense of the forms of communication that allow us to live together. Both seek to understand the processes of destruction of the planet, with the idea of ​​being able to identify its genesis in order to find solutions and reverse the situation. We can clearly see the Piagetian rigor in the work, which thinks in processes and not in results. In quest for active wisdom, the two were inspired by Eastern thought, particularly Indian, Tibetan, and transpersonal experiences. Closing the first part of the book, Ratcliff presented a well-founded inquiry on the theme of the reception of Piaget’s works in France in the field of the humanities during the interwar period, between 1921 and 1941. Using qualitative and quantitative analyzes, the article showed that both the methodological and the epistemological approaches used by Piaget were widely spread in the French scientific community at the time, with an emphasis in the areas of philosophy, psychology, education, and medicine, each area in a different rhythm, thus contributing to his works becoming a classic from an early age. Some surprises emerged from the careful analysis of quantitative data exploring different textual genres and constructing a complex picture of the reception of Piaget’s works much more extended across disciplinary fields than expected, and also including the participation of the reader in the process of reception. The application of the model presented by Ratcliff would be interesting in studies of the reception of Piaget’s theory in other parts of the world.

 ialogues, Conflicts and Controversies Concerning Piaget’s D Research, in History and Present Days The second part of the publication presented articles that illustrated some of the dialogues, conflicts and controversies concerning Piaget’s thought and works, in history and present days. These articles provided evidence of how Piaget’s intellectual endeavors were being understood by contemporary scholars working in interdisciplinary research related to his work in fields such as communication theory, psychology, and philosophy. The first article, written by Milton N. Campos, who teaches communication theory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and at the University of Montréal, in Canada, integrated contributions of Piaget and Habermas for communication and ethics, as well as those of Grize, to propose a renewed understanding of psycho-­ sociology. The author related the social constructivist approach of Serge Moscovici and Denise Jodelet to its sources in Piagetian thought on the opposition between

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coercion and cooperation in human interaction, with the purpose of arriving at a more contextual understanding of cognitive and social representations. This approach, named “ecology of meanings” by the author, also based on Grize’s concept of “common sense,” would help in promoting a “de-transcendentalization,” “de-epistemologization,” and “de-disciplinarization” of knowledge through communication, aiming at understanding the ethical-moral dimension of interactions from a sociocultural perspective. Also related to the problem of mental representations in Piagetian thought is the next article, written by Dener Silva, professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology in the Federal University of São João Del Rei, in Brazil. It is an interesting and well-documented study of the long controversy that opposed Piaget and the French psychologist Henri Wallon on the issue. For both authors, according to Silva, symbolic or semiotic functions were at the base of representative thought. Although they used the concept with similar meanings, they diverged on the issue for its origin and development. While Wallon proposed a dialectic interpretation of the relationship between motor acts and symbolic or representative thought, emphasizing processes of opposition and affiliation, Piaget insisted on the genetic continuity between motor and representational acts, ruled by the functional invariants: adaptation, organization and equilibration. Silva stated that explaining both authors arguments and their developments is important to understand the ideas about the representational level advanced in that period of the history of psychology, with a deep influence on the subsequent evolution of the discipline. The following articles depicted the dialogues between the works of the Russian-­ Brazilian psychologist Helena Antipoff and Jean Piaget. The article written by the Research Group on Linguistic Studies of the Vale do Itajaí University, Santa Catarina, Brazil, honors Helena Antipoff, studying the influence of Piaget and the School of Geneva on Antipoff and its inclusive research and evaluation program. The article showed how she took into account, in her theory of intelligence, the contributions of Brazilian diversity and multiculturalism. In doing so, she questioned the hierarchical modalities that often accompany the use of tests by psychologists, keeping up with the spirit of the Genevan school, whether with Piaget as shown in the article or with Claparède, who advocated a tailor-made pedagogy, adapted to the child. The interpretation through the concepts of glocal and domestic internationalization aimed to restore its mode of operation, in the first case articulating the global to the local, and in the second case working the international at home, what economists call the pull factor. The article by Farnese, Campos, and Oliveira discussed the controversy between Piaget and Antipoff about the child’s sense of justice, a kind of return from Brazil to Geneva. It begins with a biography of Antipoff; the controversy was analyzed from the point of view of the critique of practical reason, which postulated an a priori sense of duty. At the end of the story, it seems that everyone won, these are different points of view, but they can be reconciled between philosophy and psychology. In fact, the experimental devices were diverse, Antipoff’s observations being focused on storytelling to her own child. The issue was to observe the expression of compassion, empathy, and anger in the child at an early age, leading to a sense of justice and

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relative equity. Antipoff stated that probably these sentiments were innate, following Kant’s ideas, while Piaget criticized her interpretation stating that at that age (3–8 years-old), the child had already received influences from the environment. The next paper, written by Paulo Castelo Branco and Ricardo Barrocas, professors at the Institute of Psychology at the Federal University of Ceará, analyzed Piaget’s contribution to the methodological development of epistemological research in psychology through the historical-critical method. The authors presented an example of the use of the historical-critical method in the analyses of the approach to human interaction developed by Carl Rogers’ in his client-centered therapy, between 1945 and 1963, as a synthesis between functionalism, psychoanalysis and a quasi-experimental design. The paper highlighted the possibilities and limits of the historical-critical method, stating its usefulness to study the connections between different scientific approaches stemming from diversified sources, as well as to understand the process of creativity in science. Closing Part II, a fine contribution of our Argentinian colleagues Patricia Scherman and Laura Vissani, from the Institute of Psychological Investigations of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, is presented. It is an impressive exposure of how the Argentinian military dictatorship exercised the authoritarian control of cultural and educational institutions, with a deep impact on the profession of the psychologist in the country. One of the worst consequences of authoritarian governments was their need to control ideas through the persecution of individuals and the denial of liberty of thought, provoking much suffering, suffocating creativity and social ideals concerning the flourishing of human best qualities. Sherman and Vissani showed, in their paper, how the military initiatives had a direct impact on the reading of Piaget’s works in their country, for their relationship with trends toward social transformation and the conception of an active, autonomous subject supported by Piaget’s theorizing, in opposition to the transcendent and passive moral subject supported by conservative thinking.

 resence of Piaget’s Work in Brazil, as a Researcher P and Educational Leader Part III of the book explored different aspects of the reception and appropriation of Piaget’s works and ideas in the Brazilian context. Since the 1920s, a group of progressive educators from several Brazilian regions and states were involved in actions aiming at the expansion and modernization of the country’s educational system. With this purpose in mind, they were articulated with the New Education movement, and with publications by educational leaders in Europe and in the United States that were soon translated into Portuguese. In Europe, their main references were the intellectuals linked to the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, in Geneva – Édouard Claparède (1876–1840), Pierre Bovet (1878–1965), Adolphe Ferrière (1879–1960), among others. In the United States, the reference was the University

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of Columbia Teachers College, where John Dewey (1859–1952)  and William Kilpatrick (1871–1965) were promoting the idea that formal education was an important institutional tool for the spread of democratic and humanistic ideals. The New Education movement in Brazil was named New School movement, its focus being the better organization of public schools. The movement set the stage for and expanded collaboration with Geneva and Columbia. Brazilian educators were educated in both centers and, returning to the country, promoted a wave of educational reforms in several Brazilian states and invited foreign specialists like Helena Antipoff to continue their initiatives. The first paper, written by Clarice Loureiro, a member of the ERHISE team at the University of Geneva, explained the participation of Brazilian educators in the network organized around the institutionalization of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) by the Rousseau Institute in 1925, in Geneva. The IBE was, since its inception, an institution whose purpose was to serve as a world center for information, coordination, and research in education. The connections between the IBE and the Brazilian educational leaders Laura Lacombe, Lourenço Filho, and Helena Antipoff are explored, within the context of the trends toward the internationalization of education during the first half of the twentieth century. The presence of Piagetian recommendations for national systems of education and the IBE’s efforts to spread ideals of promoting democracy and peace through educational networks is emphasized. Also Raquel Assis approached the appropriation of Jean Piaget’s ideas in the influential Revista do Ensino de Minas Gerais as an example of how the ideas of the Swiss psychologist attained Brazilian educators through the mediation of Helena Antipoff. Works by Piaget were cited in the sections on Intelligence, Language and Children’s Drawing, based on the books “Le langage et la pensée chez l’enfant” (1923) and “Le jugement et le raisonnement chez l’enfant” (1924). The differences between child and adult thought and the relevance of social interaction for mental development are emphasized, a direction much present in Antipoff’s works. Another direction in education underlined by Antipoff in her work was the recommendation concerning the use of teamwork and self-government in educational activities, in the direction proposed by Piaget as head of the IBE. The paper surveyed the contents of teacher education programs offered at the Institute for Higher Studies in Rural Education in Ibirité, Minas Gerais, headed by Helena Antipoff between the 1940s and the 1970s. The sources for the research were collected in journals written by students who participated in the courses, found in the archives of the Helena Antipoff Museum, as well as interviews with former participants. The results provided evidence of how students’ freedom, activity, and interest were encouraged, aiming at the development of mutual understanding, taking into account the other’s point of view and promoting conflict resolution through consensus and shared decision-making. An interesting testimony of the presence of Piaget’s ideas and works in Brazil is provided by Arthur Arruda, professor of history of psychology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Relying on autobiographical experiences of studying psychology in the Institute of Psychology and at ISOP (Higher Institute of Career

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Guidance) in the 1980s (until 1992), Arruda depicted the twofold legacy of the works of Jean Piaget through the texts, lectures, and guidance offered by Antônio Gomes Penna (1917–2010) and Franco lo Presti Seminério (1923–2003), pioneers in the study of Piaget as a psychologist and epistemologist in Rio de Janeiro during the 1970s. The text aimed at describing the modes of production of a network stemming from the works of the two characters, approaching the difference between the primary and secondary mechanisms of authorial production through the lens of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. Closing Part III, a very informative work on the reception of Piaget’s thought and works in Brazil is presented, done by Mário Vasconcelos, a reference of studies of Piaget in the country, and his colleague Leonardo Lemos de Souza, professors of Psychology at the State University of São Paulo in Assis, São Paulo. The article provided a panorama of the evolution of models, uses and different interpretations; works and authors of notes, contexts, relationships with other fields, notably pedagogy, are surveyed; the progressive institutionalization plus the arrival of the Vygotskian movement; the academic implantation and the iron years, when a national education law was based on a superficial interpretation of genetic psychology. After the redemocratization, from the 1980s onwards, a more precise version of constructivism was introduced, notably under the impulse of Emilia Ferreiro, but which again gave rise to a series of different interpretations, as is usual when ideas circulate in diversified cultural contexts. The chapter provided a good comparison between the effects of the two theories, Vygotski and Piaget, on the world of teaching, highlighting the passage from a genetic epistemology to a constructivist one, especially in the educational field. Statistics on the importance of education and moral judgment taken by Piaget in Brazil are also provided, with a survey of the emergence of transversal themes, ethics, pluriculture, environment, health, and sexual orientation in the more recent period. The final chapter examined how the Piagetian contributions to the understanding of cognitive processes in children and the impact of his views on psychology, education and other scientific fields are now part of the academic culture in Latin America and the Iberic world. The article comments how Piaget’s works were evaluated during the 1970s, from a critical point of view, in the works of the Venezuelan historian of Psychology, Alberto Merani. It surveys also how genetic epistemology is now part of the background of many contemporary works in the areas of cognitive and moral development. Interesting articulations are being proposed between the Piagetian approach to cognitive development, which emphasizes the subject’s activity and interests, and the psychoanalytical view on motivation. The debates concerning the similarities and differences between Piagetian and Vygotskian concepts relevant for the understanding of the relationship between mental development and education are also inspiring many researchers. This collective work examined Piaget’s legacy between the West and the Latin American world from many points of view. These historical researches and testimonies dealt with the construction and circulation of pedagogical, psychological and humanistic ideas in the twentieth century, particularly between Brazil and Europe. In our collected work, many directions were followed. Some authors surveyed the

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tensions between thinkers, but also connections, emulation and synergies, others examined the social and cognitive processes at work in the construction of knowledge, while some others experimented with new methodologies or formulated the conditions for utopia. But, all in all, many followed the meanders and the somehow unexpected course of Piaget’s progressist ideas that have contributed to modernization processes in the domain of educational sciences, in Brazil and in other circles.

References Claparède, Édouard (1933) La genèse de l’hypothèse. Archives de Psychologie, vol. XXIV, p. 1–155 Piaget, Jean (1936) La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant. Neuchâtel, Deláchaux et Niestlé

Part I

Jean Piaget as a Builder of an International Network in Psychology, Education and Peace Promotion in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 2

Why Piaget Enchants Me? The Importance of Piaget’s Theory Silvia Parrat-Dayan

Introduction We all know that the work of Jean Piaget is important. In spite of the many attacks and going beyond the rumours, 40 years after the author’s death, Piaget’s theory continues to be present in the psychology of cognitive development, and it is indispensable and essential. Piaget leaves us a complex body of work, difficult and not always well-known. He did not leave us a finished monument, but one that is open to multiple paths for the study of behaviour. The curious thing is that the theory did not advance beyond itself. It is either ignored or forgotten or applied. But it does not seem to have evolved. It is important to remember the general principles of this theory, which allowed the author to organize, within an abundance of cross-crossing themes, a consistent body of thought. Piagetian theory is, without doubt, a revolutionary theory. Why? Because it tries to resolve epistemological problems, and also because it invents a psychology which is very different from the psychology of its time. Piaget differs from his contemporaries in that the psychologists of the 1920s, for example, were interested in language from the point of view of statistics. For Piaget, however, language is considered an instrument of thought and communication. In this way, he surprises us with his creative force. Nevertheless, the exercise I would like to undertake here is that of explaining why this theory is important for me, what I learned from Jean Piaget. I shall not dwell on the multiple criticisms that have been raised against Piagetian theory. I would like, however, to highlight the concepts that have been fundamental for me and also to think through for what reason this theory has provoked such a profound change in my manner of thinking, not only in facing up the problems of psychology but also to face any problem in life. S. Parrat-Dayan (*) Archives Piaget, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. H. de Freitas Campos et al. (eds.), The Transnational Legacy of Jean Piaget, Latin American Voices, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38882-8_2

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Claire Meljac (2011) states that Piaget’s theory seeks out conflict and its solution, as it is a theory that navigates between the curiosity of the hypothesis and the security of the deduction. Conflicts, resolution of conflicts, curiosity and certainty ... interesting! There are many scholars who present Piaget as a psychologist of children. Some say that it is the concept of stage that characterises Piaget’s psychology. Others say that he was a great pedagogue. Or an interesting biologist. He presented himself as an epistemologist interested in knowing how to build knowledge. Jean Piaget was all this and much more. Piaget had a tremendous passion for the origin and evolution of knowledge, his project already being epistemological in the 1920s. He wanted to understand why and how knowledge is built up, thus determining the important and complex relationships between the subject and the object. In 1955, Piaget set up the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology (CIEG), a meeting place for specialists from different sciences, mathematicians, physicists, logicians, psychologists. The purpose of the centre was to study the processes of building scientific knowledge from an experimental perspective. What would be the conditions for knowledge? How is science made possible? Two years after attending the Piaget Educational Sciences Institute, I joined the CIEG.  Every week, on Monday morning, we were able to watch an initiation into interdisciplinary research.

Interdisciplinarity Interdisciplinarity is to start off with a concept on which I am going to dwell. For me, a revolution. It was in the 1970s that I was confronted in the CIEG with Interdisciplinarity. Representatives of different disciplines were there discussing the same theme to find common solutions. Piaget was convinced that the contribution that each specialist could give to his discipline was indispensable for a complete study of knowledge. Mathematicians, logicians, sociologists, physicists, philosophers and ourselves, the experimental psychologists. At the beginning of the year, Piaget proposed a general epistemological project in which the different specialists would have to respond, each from his own ideas and disciplines, to the problem raised by himself. We, psychologists, would have to find experimental situations that would permit the study of the epistemological ideas presented. Thus, all of us, different but all together, we tried to resolve the same problem! I had never seen or participated in courses organized in this way. For me, personally, this organisation, years later, facilitated my entry into another discipline for carrying out research. In this way, I became interested in the history of infancy and, more specifically, in the history of a concept (maternal practices), that even not being part of the concepts studied by Piaget could, probably, have originated in the deepening study that I was making of Piagetian theory. My impression is that this theory allowed me to reconstruct myself in another field of knowledge where the theoretical instruments that I had at my disposal were fundamental.

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This observation alone shows us that Piaget was not the abstract psychologist that so many people believe him to have been. All progress in scientific knowledge consists in going beyond the phenomenon and searching for the necessary coordinations existing behind the observables, the explanatory relationships and not simply facts and laws. The moment we go beyond the observable, searching for the necessary coordinations, we are going beyond the frontiers of the science considered and penetrating the domain of the neighbouring sciences. By means of genetic epistemology, Piaget wanted to make an analysis of the structures and processes of knowledge from the beginning, aiming at discovering the genesis and evolution of the different notions of the child’s thinking. The whole Piagetian body of work is to converge in a constructivist theory, according to which the large categories of knowledge, these being space, time, causality and the structures of reason, are not programmed in a hereditary fashion, neither are they learned through the reading of experience. They are built within the child, and throughout the history of science, through the action that the subject exercises on reality.

Constructivism Constructivism, one more fundamental notion for me. For Piaget, the pieces of knowledge are neither preformed in the object, nor constructed a priori inside the subject. Knowledge is the result of an interactive meeting of the mental structures of the subject with the intrinsic properties of the object. Mental development is a true creation of new factors, which does not happen in any fashion, but in an order that goes from the simple to the complex. Constructivism is a fundamental concept of this theory: how are the pieces of knowledge born? What is the role of the object and of the subject in this original construction? Piaget differentiates physical knowledge existing in reality, for example the colour of an object and the logical-mathematical knowledge in which the properties are introduced, invented by the subject. For example, one cannot see the correspondence between number and object. The cardinal number is not inside the object. It is invented or reinvented by the subject. To know how many objects we have on a determined table, we have to make a correspondence between number and object: count each object. This means we cannot forget even one of them; we cannot count twice nor repeat the word two, for example, twice. In a serial order, we can enunciate one number word and only one for an object. For example, the word “two” will be attributed to one object, the word “three” to another. The cardinal number that we obtain through this correspondence is not inside the object, but was invented by the subject. This correspondence transforms physical reality into equal units. This means to say that one object is worth one, without taking account of the differences. The objects as objects are equivalent, under the unique property of their being objects. Each object becomes a unit equivalent to

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another in the class constructed with the property of ‘being an object’(Parrat-­ Dayan 2016b). To say it again, the pieces of logical-mathematical knowledge are constructed by the subject, and it is for this reason that we talk of constructivism. The numbers are the product of a mental construction within the subject. This mental construction comes from the activities of the subject, but from what type of activity? Correspondence term by term, between elements of two collections. It is always the subject that transforms the objects into equivalent and replaceable entities, that orders them without repetition or omission, that fits them one with the others, that equalises the interval differences that separate them.

Interactionism One cannot understand constructivism without interactionism. For Piaget, the child is not a passive subject who receives influences from the environment and responds as a function of these influences. The child is not a miniature adult whose task would be to add the organs of knowledge. The child not only responds to the stimuli from the environment but also restructures them. Even if at the beginning there exists a certain structuring, the child will create new instruments of knowledge that he did not possess before. How? By means of a continuous interchange with the environment. Thus, for Piaget, knowledge exists neither in the subject nor in the object. In Piaget’s theory, it is impossible to dissociate the object from the subject, because the subject is defined in relation to the environment and the environment only possesses meaning when it is interpreted by the subject. Because of this, we talk of interactionism. His position is neither empiricist nor nativist, but interactionist.

Assimilation and Accommodation But development is not an addition of internal and external factors. On the one hand, because intelligence is not a measurable quantity, it is a structure; therefore, what comes from inheritance and what comes from the environment are not fixed components that determine the intellectual result, without presenting an influence of one on the other and without relation to the subject’s structures. Finally, in Piaget’s theory, the environment is not a stimulus that provokes a response, but it is the child that will search for the data in the environment. This being so, the facts can either assimilate themselves to existing structures or become modified by a process of accommodation to the objects of the environment. It is the process of equilibration that permits the integration of ever more complex factors. This process ensures the coordination between different developmental factors.

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As its development progresses, the child assimilates the objects to schemas which, in this way, are conserved. An object that it is not possible to assimilate, immediately establishes a perturbation. Regulatory mechanisms then appear that will try to compensate the perturbation. The most efficient way of compensation is that which makes the perturbing object assimilate itself, which requires a modification of the schemas (differentiation, integration, establishment of new relationships, etc.), thus obtaining a re-equilibration. Thus, progress from one stage to another is the necessary result of a historical process of interaction between the subject and the object. Assimilation and accommodation are for me other fundamental notions. How to assimilate new information that comes from outside, from the world, from things, from the others? All information will incorporate itself into a structure. In this way, the child transforms the external world into forms that he or she already knows. It is assimilation, a process also manifested in the adult. This process is accompanied by accommodation. In this case, it is the subject that is transformed to adapt itself to the characteristics of other subjects and objects. The baby that takes hold of a doll behaves as if it was holding its bottle, for example, an object he is already familiar with. This is assimilation. Accommodation occurs when the child adapts his gesture to the object, to its weight, its shape, etc. When reality does not correspond to expectations, a conflict is established that can lead to a reorganization of the situation. These concepts are explained clearly in the book The birth of Intelligence in the Child (1936), one of Piaget’s books that I liked most, where he explains very well that the change can come from this confrontation between the internal and the external, and also from a reciprocal assimilation of schemata, in other words, from an internal confrontation. Many people do not know this! Although it is set out in the book on the birth of intelligence in the child. When this concept is integrated into the conceptual field of a subject, we can try to comprehend better the other, as all types of discussion among adults function under this scheme. To understand the functioning of the subject in this way allows us to see better what the thought structure of the other person is and ask questions that can lead to better comprehension.

Action Action, a concept that has not always been well understood. The subject has an active role in the production of knowledge. Activity does not mean to become agitated. It is a creative action in the sense that it adds something to reality, in the sense that it transforms or modifies the representation. Knowledge is manufactured by the subject. It is not a mirror that reflects reality. The subject constructs knowledge as a function of the reality upon which he/she acts and, in this way, causes transformations in reality. The subject does not copy reality. In addition to this, the subject constructs himself/herself through action.

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At the start, the action manifests itself in the objects present; therefore, it can exercise itself on symbolic objects or on sign systems. In this way, it becomes interiorised, the operation being this, an interiorized action, reversible and integrated into a system of sets or a structure, which reveals its meaning. Another characteristic of Piagetian thought, which explains the richness and fertility of his observations, is the need to have an explicit theory that guides and gives meaning to the observations. Piaget innovates again. He thought that in order to know the child, it is not sufficient to observe her behaviour attentively and describe it in minute detail. For Piaget, it is the psychologist who constructs his reading of the child. With what instruments? Theoretical instruments. Here, as we have said, Piaget is situated at an equal distance from both idealism, which will prioritise the norms, and empiricism, which prioritises the facts. Situated between these two positions, he becomes a constructivist. This epistemological perspective is in agreement with his methodology, because he does not seek to obtain results, but questions the mechanisms of development.

Method The method is another concept that I learned from Piaget. The method is learned in doing research. To know how to interrogate as a form of thinking. A clinical method and research. It was at Piaget’s side that I learned to observe and interrogate children. To observe the total behaviour of the child, and not only what he might reply to diverse questions. When one interrogates a child, it is necessary to know how to make the questions pertinent as a function of how the child comprehends the meaning of the question and the problem of the experimenter. This implies that the experimenter should have so much flexibility, that he can actually change the problem. It is about establishing a dialogue between the child and the experimenter, where the experimenter, who wants to research a particular problem, leaves a lot of freedom to the child, so that she can express her thought without getting lost and respond without focusing on the problem under study. It is, thus, a guided dialogue without the researcher being a guide. And furthermore, the researcher can change. In this way, ideas arise from the child as well as from the experimenter. We could say there exists a co-construction between two subjectivities. For this, it is probably necessary to consider the child as a real interlocutor. Piaget insists on the need for free conversation with the child on critical points. When the child no longer knows how to reply, when she changes her opinion, when she imagines other hypotheses, Piaget will pause and concentrate on this articulation of thought. He will circle this important point. But as the method is also critical, it is a question of defining the criteria for explaining to the child and leading her to a critical point, where she starts to think about the things that she had not imagined before. We can see that the psychologist supposes that the subject tells us the real reason for things, which means that subjectivity can be considered a real value, which is quite a bold step. That is, in dialogue with the child, she ends by

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saying what she really thinks. Psychoanalytic theory, as we know, sees the problem differently. This type of talking to the child is the clinical method. In parallel, Piaget points out that what was interesting in talking to children was to see the errors that they committed, much more than being present at the arrival point of the correct reply. Furthermore, the experiments always demonstrated that the children’s errors did not occur by chance, but were systematic. The clinical method is indispensable in this theory. A difficult method, in spite of its appearance, and about which not much has been written. I learned the clinical method in Geneva. I had hardly arrived at the institute when I became part of a research group on learning. I had a very sensitive advisor who transmitted to us what she was doing, without giving us much explanation: Monique Chollet. In addition to interrogating the children calmly and lovingly, she was also extremely patient, as I neither spoke nor understood the French language very well at that time, above all the French spoken by children. Monique Chollet left me the time and suggested that I compare my notes with the notes of other two students who were with us. I learned quickly and was soon asking questions. I learned progressively, incorporated and assimilated the clinical method. I learned to utilize the method and was always sure I was doing what had to be done. A pleasant feeling that left me very sure of myself. Sometimes, in the daily round, when I want to understand what another adult is saying, I use the clinical method spontaneously. In this way, the person manages to explain better what he or she wants to say. I learned to interrogate myself, and search for what is behind certain conducts to understand their meaning. Piaget taught me to have ideas and to know that they do not always correspond to the desired reality. And it is for this reason that it is always necessary ‘to see’, interrogate the children and ‘see’. And it is for this reason that before we start an experiment, we, the researchers, carry out what we can qualify as experiments ‘to see’ what would allow us to continue in the direction imagined or change direction. And the children always searched for new ideas. And, of course, we had to watch out for everything! To have new ideas and to search for them interrogates our creativity, a concept inherent to Piaget’s theory. Finally, the clinical method should show the deforming part and the constructive part of the processes of assimilation and accommodation for each level of knowledge, which allows us to see what the current state of knowledge is. We know that in Piaget’s theory it is important to study and explain the mechanisms of development, as well as analyzing their genesis. The clinical method allows us to reach these objectives as it does not impose a rigid experimentation scheme. To discover what one does not know, it is still necessary to have a flexible method and not rigid questions (Parrat-Dayan 2016a). Piaget also taught me that when the results were interesting, one could become profoundly satisfied. I could see this already a few months after I was introduced to it. To illustrate this idea, I would like to relate an episode that became engraved on my memory. Some months after having gone through Piaget’s general course, which in that year was on the psychology of intelligence, I enrolled to present the results of a piece of research that I was doing. Every year Piaget delivered a course on

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different themes, a course that he delivered during the whole school year. In the middle of the year, Piaget introduced a seminar to which all the students were invited. The purpose of this seminar was for the students to be able to formulate questions that had arisen over the whole course, as well as presenting, spontaneously, the results of the research that they were undertaking. One can already see that as soon as we had started to attend the theoretical courses, the students were already immersed in the world of research, and this was very characteristic of the Genevan school. In this case, I had to present an experiment on causality that I was doing with a professor I thought very highly of: Jacques de Lannoy. It was an experiment on causality: ‘the transmission of energy between two connected pendulums’, an interesting, but difficult, experiment  (see Piaget 1971). Evidently, I had prepared my talk very well with the help of Professor J. de Lannoy and with the help of all the students of physics that lived, as I did, on campus. That is, I knew everything that had to be said, but when the moment arrived, with Jean Piaget there and a full auditorium, I got stage fright for probably 1 min, I didn’t know what to say. A silence that seemed to me endless. Suddenly I had the idea of asking the auditorium the same questions I had asked the children. The adults’ replies were fanciful and wrong. It was not the result expected. But Piaget’s face changed. He opened up with a smile. In this way, I learned that unexpected results can be much more interesting than those we can imagine. Above all, I learned that an intellectual experience can proportion happiness. So, much more sure of myself, I succeeded in reporting my experience, and that provoked many questions. At the end, Piaget insisted on talking about the satisfaction that he had felt in having heard me. A good start in the Piagetian school! I believe that in everyday situations, when I’m trying to understand what another person wants to say to me, I behave in the same way: I listen, understand, ask questions to see if I have understood or whether it is necessary that the other person reformulate or change the question. Because of this, I think that Piaget transformed my way of thinking, of interrogating the world and the ‘others’. To think is to have original ideas, but it is also being attentive to the other person, who can point out new elements for us. By means of this method, Piaget succeeded in studying important notions that go beyond the thinking of a child. Creativity and pleasure are elements of a good piece of research that can transform this activity into a true passion that will always remain so. Therefore, when some say that Piaget never became interested in affection, I very much doubt it! Affection is the driver of research, and he transmitted this! If he did not study this problem in detail, this was because he had a passion for other aspects of human conduct. All this reminds me of a phrase that researchers – including myself  – used to say frequently: experimenting is great fun, and I enjoyed myself a lot interrogating the children. That experimenting was “fun” does not mean to say that we did not work or we sometimes went through difficult moments, when we did not know how to interpret or classify behaviour. That experimenting was considered to be “fun” stresses the pleasurable activity that constitutes research, which causes me to mention another element of the theory. The presence of the other. The other is fundamental in this

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theory. To be able to count on the other and not on the I means to be able to accept a different point of view and to possess elements to organize or re-organize your own thinking. This implies great trust in the other, and great responsibility of the other, again an important concept in the theory. Of course, the evolution of society changed this practice greatly, so that 20 years later, nobody questioned anybody any more about anything and only showed their results once they had been published. During the Piagetian epoch, mutual help and cooperation were the rule. And more, the other was pleased to intervene, help, propose and discuss.

The Part-Whole Relationship My doctoral thesis (Parrat-Dayan 1978) arose out of research that I had done about the estimation of half distance. A work in perception that Professor Jacques Vonèche had asked me to do. Starting from this theme, my thesis became a genetic study of the notion of half. It was a way of studying the part-whole relationship, a problem that permeates the whole of Piagetian psychology. I defended the thesis in 1978. It was curious to see that at the time, different authors studied different notions to say that they were more precocious (perhaps ‘primal’?) than Piaget had said and shown  – see, for example, Gelman (1969), McGarrigle and Donaldson (1975), Light et al. (1979), Bovet et al. (1981), Parrat-Dayan (1978) and Parrat-Dayan & Bovet (1982). Contrary to these studies, my thesis shows that the notion of half is simple in appearance, but in reality presents difficulties up to 10 and 11 years of age. So that unlike the works that try to show the precociousness of complex notions, I show the difficulty that some apparently simple notions present. My hypothesis was that the relationship between the part and the whole is a relationship that becomes transformed gradually as a function of the meanings that the child assigns. The meanings can be in relation to a more or less complex problematic situation, to the specific materials utilized to ask questions, to the reading or representation that the child makes of the problem, to the action of the child on the material and to the result of the action on the material that may modify the representation of the problem. Children do not react in the same way when faced with a continuous material, such as spaghetti can be, or a discontinuous material, for example a number of apples. At the start of the experimentation, I interrogated the children with continuous and discontinuous material, as in the Piagetian experiments. I did not consult any other bibliography. Piaget had said that in starting a piece of work you go in with your own ideas and that later you search other bibliographies. This was what I did. And it was very fruitful because after many interrogations with the children I found that in the spontaneous geometry book on the child, Piaget had spoken about the half and experimented in a different way. The results were different. If I had read this book of Piaget before, I would perhaps have repeated the experiment and found the same results. The fact of inventing the experiment allowed me to find different results and analyse the problem in a different manner. It allowed me to see at what

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level the experiment in Piaget’s book was situated and why the different manner of interrogating placed the child at another level of the problem. Another Piagetian idea was to research, once the experimentation had finished, if the same problem researched with the children was placed in the context of history. In this way, I succeeded in seeing, for example, that the Egyptians frequently had mathematical procedures identical to those of the children, but the difference was that the adults of ancient Egypt succeeded in getting the correct reply, but the children didn’t – which was surprising.

Final Considerations Piaget had an attitude of respect, and of intellectual respect in relation to the child. He considered the child a human being who has things to say. So, he listened to the child with much attention, because he thought that what the child said made sense. Piaget listened to the child not with the floating attention of psychoanalysis, but with a creative attention. The child at his side revealed the process of construction, of the construction of new things, of the new. We can say that Piaget’s always renewed and enriched question was always formulated to comprehend the mechanisms of the progress of knowledge. For Piaget all construction arrives at a level of organization, but it is always relative because it is always active. All new construction incites to action and is the cause of new constructions, following a process that never ends, it has no end. For Piaget, to discover new facts was happiness, and this happiness was the driver of his research. Piaget studied the creation of the new, and in this way he himself invented and created his theory. This is the reason why Piaget taught us that the human being is not a passive victim either of chance or of necessity. He is an inventor and the inventor of his own future. Why did Piaget’s theory enchant me? The word enchant has the meaning of finding marvellous, fascinating. But it also has the meaning of bewitching. Is it possible to conciliate these two meanings?

References Bovet, M., Parrrat-Dayan, S., Deshusses-Addor, D. (1981). Peut-on parler de précocité et de régression dans la conservation ? I.  Précocité. In Archives de Psychologie (Vol. 49(191)). Médecine et Hygiène. Gelman, R. (1969). Conservation acquisition: A problem of learning to attend to relevant attributes. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 7, 167–186. Light, P., Buckinghan, N., & Robbins, A. (1979). The conservation task as an interactional setting. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 49, 304–310. McGarrigle, J., & Donaldson, M. (1975). Conservation accidents. Cognition, 3, 341–350.

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Meljac, C. (avec coll de E. Shoov) (2011). Piaget: Un inconnu. Érès «Contraste», 34-35, 31–53. https://doi.org/10.3917/cont.034.0031. Parrat-Dayan, S. (1978). Etude génétique de la notion de moitié [Thèse de Doctorat]. Université de Genève. Parrat-Dayan, S. (2016a). Conversaciones libres com los niños. El método clínico piagetiano. Relación entre teoria y método. In S.  Frisancho Hidalgo (Ed.), Ensayos constructivistas (pp. 51–76). Fondo Editorial: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Parrat-Dayan, S. (2016b). Sujeto-Objeto-Experimentador. Estrategias de intervención em situaciones causales. In S. Frisancho Hidalgo (Ed.), Ensayos constructivistas (pp. 91–111). Fondo Editorial: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Parrat-Dayan, S., & Bovet, M. (1982). Peut-on parler de précocité et de régression dans la conservation? II. Précocité, suite. In Archives de Psychologie L (195th ed.). Médecine et Hygiène. Piaget, J. (1936). La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant. Delachaux et Niestlé. Piaget, J. (1971). Les explications causales. Presses Universitaires de France.

Chapter 3

How to Create a Research Method: Piaget From Neuchâtel to Paris 1920 André Elias Morelli Ribeiro

Introduction On the one hand, there are many histories of psychology that await researchers and historians to gain written form. On the other hand, other stories have already been taken up several times, with different sources and points of view. If the richness of a life could be measured by the capacity of reinvention of narratives, so that it would show a singular combination between history never written and history multiple times narrated, certainly Piaget would also be in this criterion among the most remarkable. It is from reading about his life that the present investigation emerged, interested in better understanding the creation of the clinical method in its early years (Ribeiro & Souza, 2020a, b; Bond & Tryphon, 2009; Mayer, 2005; Ducret, 2004; Duveen, 2000; Franco, 1997; Bang, 1966). The interrogation of the past can be reinvented and can find new nuances, richness, and contradictions if the initial problems are relocated. In this sense, the central problem that motivates the following lines is: how does one construct a research method in psychology? In the specific case, how did Piaget create his clinical method? These are daring questions and perhaps impossible to answer completely, but the resumption of the problem can help investigations by launching reflections on corners that have been little analyzed. The research described in this chapter is not entirely new. The multiple questions and answers outlined here are largely drawn from previous works (Ribeiro, 2018; Ribeiro & Souza, 2020b), as well as incorporating elements of another work This chapter was originally written in Portuguese and translated into English with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content. A. E. M. Ribeiro (*) Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio das Ostras, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. H. de Freitas Campos et al. (eds.), The Transnational Legacy of Jean Piaget, Latin American Voices, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38882-8_3

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(Ribeiro & Souza, 2020a). This chapter also presents unpublished data that provide new reflections on the thought and work of the Swiss master in epistemology. In summary, this chapter can be divided into two parts. The first traces a narrative line, based on both primary and secondary literature on Piaget. The second part is based on documents and primary sources. The overall goal is to assist in understanding how Piaget moved from his interest in lake slugs to the formulation of the preamble to his clinical method. This happened through the multiple and dialectical encounter between different elements, including biology, philosophy, different techniques of psychological research, and Piaget’s unique talent, all data that together allow us to approach the understanding of how Piaget formulated his method. The period covered by this narrative goes from his childhood until October 1920, the moment of autonomization of his psychological research, still without the creation of the clinical method. Piaget was the target of much criticism, much of it unfair, and also of tributes and recognition that did not do him justice. At this particular point, history comes to our aid, as it allows the creation of narratives that do not merely intend to pay homage to human, nor merely criticize a scarecrow created by shoddy workmanship, but to rescue his/her force, whatever it may be. I argued in another paper (Ribeiro, 2018) that the Piagetian clinical method had the advantage of having started very open, despite closing a little over time, because the subsequent data that it obtained necessarily passed through the sieve of his consolidated work, which is perfectly fair considering the constructivist character not only of his theory but also of his thought, which was always willing to review and reconsider positions already taken (Bringuier, 1978). It is immediately apparent that, to answer the initial question proposed, it is necessary to go back to a time when such a thing as genetic epistemology did not exist, in the early 1920s, not for a false purity of ideas later contaminated, but to observe the forces that, colliding and adding up, bore fruit in a theory that left a canton of small Switzerland to the four corners of the world. The construction of the narrative that follows, for the sake of originality of stories already often told (Ducret, 2010; Ratcliff, 2010; Müller et al., 2009; Kohler, 2008; Vidal, 1994; Kesselring, 1993; Ducret, 1990; Bringuier, 1978; Piaget, 1983, 1980), starts from the selection of three moments in Piaget’s life, namely, his encounter with philosophy at the lake of Annecy in France; his contact with logic and mathematics in Neuchâtel; and his encounter with experimental psychology – mainly Burt’s intelligence test – and Parisian psychiatry of the 1920s. Every historical narrative is constructed to maintain its internal coherence and its relationship to the events it describes, which may suggest to the reader a linear drive toward a goal. But this is only an effect of the narrative construction and not the author’s objective. The choice of these moments has nothing teleological, but rather the highlighting of three aspects whose amalgam allowed the creation of the clinical method: the adoption of certain philosophical positions, with emphasis on nominalism, resolving the familiar dualism; the migration from nominalism to realism from logic, which allowed the acceptance of an experimental psychological model; and the French experimental model of psychology, also combining research techniques from psychiatry. This does not exclude other research possibilities, does not annul

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the importance of other events, and, finally, cannot explain the creation of the method, but synthesizes important clues. For each of these moments, contexts, events, and determinants in the composition of the principles of the clinical method are presented, focusing mainly on the events of the third moment. At the end, it is concluded about his intellectual path until the end of 1920, where it is suggested that the contact with Burt’s intelligence test allowed Piaget to find the path that would lead him to the clinical method, in a conclusion similar to that previously presented (Ribeiro & Souza, 2020a), with the addition of a new methodology and new data. The third part is based both on the literature already published on the subject and on primary sources, which are generically referred to in this paper as “protocols.” Most of the conclusions, data, presentations, and general analysis of the documents from these sources are taken from another work (Ribeiro, 2018), but complemented with unpublished research. These documents are part of the Piaget Archives collection (Ratcliff & Burman, 2015), retrieved in 2017 and 2020 by the author. The documents used in this chapter can be divided into two types. The first refers to the protocols themselves and are notes of interviews that Piaget conducted with children and adolescents in Paris and Geneva between January 1920 and October 1922. These are manuscripts in which Piaget recorded children’s responses to questions and tests, made additional notes on his own reflections of the assessment and research situations, and marks of other kinds. Details about these documents can be found in other papers, mainly Ribeiro (2018), although Ratcliff and Souza have also published papers based on these documents. The second type refers to the contents of an envelope with the title “test de raisonnement,” located in the Piaget Archives in January 2020. Analysis of the contents revealed that it was a series of handwritten syllogisms, translations, and adaptations of items from Cyril Burt’s intelligence test (1919, see also Piaget 1980) and others apparently created by Piaget himself, for a phase of his research, which Kesselring (1993) called by logical-psychological parallelism. The data from these research works were published by Piaget on more than one occasion (Piaget, 1967, 1922, 1921a, b, also cited in many others). This second type of documentary source allowed a much greater understanding of the documents of the first type, the protocols, so that the data presented here are an expansion of earlier research, published at a time when these papers were not known.

First Moment: The Lake of Annecy and Philosophy Piaget’s family life was divided between an ardent Protestant mother, described as intelligent but demanding, and a historian father, described as meticulous and critical (Piaget, 1980). This family duality laid the groundwork for a fundamental conflict in young Jean: the relationship between religion and science. But the boy was not alone, for such duality was an essential issue for his Neuchâtel and Geneva.

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John Calvin, a leading reformer and creator of Calvinism, moved to Geneva in 1536 when, by a unanimous vote of the city’s General Council, the citizens of Geneva endorsed the decrees of the Protestant Reformation (Berchtold, 1963), accepting, with a brief tiff with their prophet, a severe code of conduct that came to characterize the city. Calvinism and Protestantism then became one of Geneva’s modes of cultural delineation, running through the way of thinking and being of its citizens. In Neuchâtel, the Protestant reformation was led by Farel. Despite this moral rigidity, Franco-Swiss Protestantism has, in its essence, a liberal character acquired from the nineteenth century onward, mainly in its doctrinal points. This liberal Protestantism strives to adapt its religion to the development of secular science, society, and philosophy, while maintaining individual freedom of conscience above religious authority (Vidal, 1994). Strongly influenced by the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, religious dogmas were considered only expressions of religious intuition, which favored the development of a religiosity that was both subjectivist and immanentist (Vidal, 1994). Accompanying this was a strong morality, proper of Calvinism and even of Kantian thought, which saw an intimate relationship between religion and morality. The relevance of religion is highlighted right at the beginning of the argument because it is known that Geneva psychology was also crossed by this issue. Théodore Flournoy, founder of the first psychology laboratory in the city (Ratcliff, 2018), Édouard Claparède, founder of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute (Hofstetter et al., 2012), and Pierre Bovet, who presided over the institution until 1933, were all Protestant militants, dealing in different ways with the transcendental question and the relationship between science and faith, besides other issues in the same sphere. Their religious beliefs were reflected even in their psychological productions and scientific positions, which is relevant to understand that the main consequence of liberal Protestant thought in the psychology of Swiss Romandy is the rejection of all external authority over consciousness by the sovereignty of individual experience (Vidal, 1994), a replication of Luther and Calvin’s rejection of papal authority. This Protestant view of the world did not miss Piaget’s. As a preadolescent he began to collaborate in the activities of the director of the Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel, Pierre Godet, being paid for his work with specimens of lake slugs, a hobby that he kept alive. His first teacher, who did not know Darwin, maintained his work out of a conviction of religious conscience: he was a Lamarckist, which, at that time and place, implied a belief in a transcendental order of species that would be known through a perfect classification (Bénnour & Vonèche, 2009). A Protestant believer, Godet saw nature as a book written by God, reading it from the organization of living things, whose understanding would function as a divine revelation, incorporating both a moral and spiritual vision into the naturalist’s work (Kohler, 2008). This way of understanding the species led Piaget to imitate his father in his systematic work, besides pleasing his mother in her religious affliction, momentarily placating the conflict between faith and religion that was being born in the young Piaget. It was with Godet that he learned the naturalistic observation for the first time, besides developing his classifier look, with the objective of executing the

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correct taxonomy of the species. Moreover, it was possible to absorb Godet’s scientific vision, incorporating the Lamarckian model in his understanding of nature. This was the work that provided Piaget with the data for the production of the many adolescent works in the area of malacology, published in academic journals (Piaget, 1980). Piaget summarized this experience thus: The fact that it was so early an experiment with these two kinds of problematic approaches [publishing materials in malacology and learning about science as advocated by Godet] constitutes, I am sure, the hidden force of my last psychological activity. However, instead of quietly pursuing the career of a naturalist, which seemed so normal and so easy to me after these happy circumstances, between the ages of ten and twenty I suffered a series of crises, due both to family conditions and to the intellectual curiosity characteristic of that productive age. But, I repeat, I was able to get around them all thanks to the mental habits I acquired in my previous contact with zoological science (Piaget, 1980, p. 128).

The problem at home was religion, which his father did not adopt, but fervently accepted by his mother, who was apparently neurotic (Piaget, 1980). Piaget could not reconcile his growing experience with science, biology, and the Protestant faith of his home and town. Piaget reports in his autobiography (1980) that he saw an insurmountable incongruence between biblical content and an honest, critical attitude toward history. Looking for answers and with an attitude of constant investigation – because being a French-Swiss Protestant, he was liberal in a certain way – he came in contact with the work La philosophie de la religion fondée sur la psychologie et l’histoire, by Auguste Sabatier, available in his father’s library, which brought a new spice to his inquiries. Sabatier, Schleiermacher’s French-speaking successor, operated a split between Christian morality and its symbolic expression in the form of dogmas, so that he considered faith, ultimately, as a psychological phenomenon (Vidal 1994). This is a rather liberal position, where biblical authority needs to pass through the filter of reason for understanding historical and social contexts presented and traversed in the sacred text, placing faith as a matter of experience and dogmas as evolving symbols of an unattainable transcendence. Separated from a naturalistic understanding, Sabatier’s proposal comforted the young Piaget, who could get on with his biology, relieved of the dualism that ruled his own house. In other words, he did not need to adopt the sacred text as a necessary reference for the understanding of nature that fascinated him, but rather as the limited and evolving expression of something unattainable in itself, whose understanding in truth would grow as scientific reason developed. Not only could he pursue his natural studies, but they would also represent a way to approach God, certainly a relief to his tormented heart. Even though he was avid in the collection of mollusks and the scientific production in malacology, philosophy was already seducing the young man, but a philosophy that integrated with his restlessness really took place because of the action of Samuel Cornut, Piaget’s godfather. Cornut was impressed by the exclusively naturalistic vocation of his godson, so he invited him to visit the lake of Annecy, with the proposal of looking for mollusks. Being the second largest lake in France, with a rich biodiversity, besides its natural beauty, the proposal of visiting Lake Annecy

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was certainly very attractive to a convinced collector of animals and aspiring naturalist. However, in addition to helping enrich Piaget’s collection, Cornut also had other plans. Walks around the lake to collect specimens and admire the landscape were accompanied by explanations of the ideas contained in the book Creative Evolution, by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. This was an event that deeply marked Piaget. Fighting against associationism, psychological determinism, and against the experimental psychology of his time – the book was published in 1907 – Bergson affirms human freedom by denying the use of the parameter of quantity in psychological measurement, thus affirming the qualitative character of consciousness and positioning himself in favor of a mind-body dualism. In biology, Bergson denies adaptation as the engine of evolution, since it would explain evolution only from its external conditions. The philosopher then declares the élan vital (vital elan), which launches life in diverse evolutionary directions, saving the explanation of certain identities at different points in evolution for the existence of a principle of life. Bergson also pointed out that adaptation was not able to explain the creative diversity of life. Evolution would be, for Bergson, the act by which life divides and bifurcates, so that the history of life is not linear, but multiple and conflicting, whose unity is the force of its multiplication. Although this was not Bergson’s understanding, Piaget saw in this creative potency of life the very God he feared to displease, a fear which in turn displeased his own father. God being the supreme creator, and life the creative potency, as a good Protestant Christian that he then was, Piaget brought both perceptions together in a profound catharsis, which rose overwhelmingly in his mind. Piaget could see the origin of all things toward the same source, a God who orders and organizes the multiplicity and evolution of life, which favored, to the heart of the young naturalist, a perception of union between biology, or science, and religion. The reconciliation between the two domains of his home and his country does not exhaust Bergson’s relevance for Piaget. With the creative evolution, he understood that the standard science is a science of laws, oriented toward a geometric order following a mathematical generality (Vonèche, 1997), which led to a disappearance of the problem of genres (Piaget, 1983, p. 73). Piaget then started to work with new projects that brought him closer to the philosophy that had affected him so much, as in his text Esquisse d’un Néopragmatisme, where he shows his belief that life can organize itself from a logic different from mathematics, an idea he inherited from Bergson, who affirmed the difference between the vital elan and matter. From the same time, in La Vanité de la Nomenclature (Vidal, 1994; Piaget, 1983), Piaget rejects taxonomy as inherent to living beings, taking it as a convention, a mere topography of plants and animals, in a nominalist-based argument. In this work, Piaget positions himself against an idea of evolution based on species to remain in a vision of great evolution, as Bergson had taught, where species are not a reality. This is the moment of a nominalist Piaget, which does not match with his future work. Such positioning will change radically with the second moment: his encounter with Prof. Arnold Reymond, who introduced him to logic.

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Second Moment: Reymond, Mathematics, and Realism Despite the strong impact on his spirit, Piaget only effectively read Bergson’s Creative Evolution months after his visit to Lake Annecy and was disappointed by the reading (Piaget, 1980). This did not prevent him from remaining in his projects derived from Bergsonian philosophy; however, he added other readings and studies to his repertoire, including Kant, Spencer, James, Janet – whom he called his master in psychology, Comte, Le Dantec, Boutroux, Lachelier, and Lalande. A third project of this period is worth mentioning: Realisme et Nominalisme Dans les Sciences de la Vie, a work in which Piaget intended to create a science of genres that would ground the Bergsonian dualism between the mathematical order and life. The question of genus is essential in biology because, as Mayr (1998) explains, the classification of genera allows the organization of biology in its different areas and provides the heuristic or explanatory value for the different branches of the discipline, besides guiding the entire phylogeny. It is an aspect of the philosophy of biology – and ultimately a philosophy of life – whose eventually triumphant model would determine the entire view of the field of life studies on teleology, the systematic relations among living beings, their origin, the fields of study of life sciences, the techniques to be employed, the modes of interpretation that can be adopted, among several other things essential to these sciences. With Godet’s death, his teacher Arnold Reymond enters the scene as an important presence, becoming his new master. A former theologian, doctor in theology, but who had renounced the pastorate for a matter of conscience, Reymond is described by Piaget (1983) as possessing a great philosophical and intellectual capacity, knowledgeable in mathematics, philosophy, logic, and history of sciences. He was a professor at the University of Neuchâtel, but his duties included teaching also at the gymnasium, where he taught philosophy, but greatly expanded the subjects with a program rich in readings and themes. As he had few students, Reymond developed proximity to them, taking them to his home and discussing philosophical issues in small circles, where Piaget stood out (Schaller-Jeanneret, 2008). In presenting his proposal for the science of genera to his master, Raymond pointed out to him that the problem guiding the project was close to Aristotle’s problem of classes and that his logic fitted easily into the Stagyrian’s logic (Piaget, 1983). To recapitulate the issue, based on Bergson, Piaget claimed that the logic of life was different from mathematics, embracing the science of genera as a proposition toward a new way of looking at life and its classification. Now, the classification of living things into groups or genera goes back to Aristotle, who classified them between terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial animals, while plants were divided into herbs, shrubs, and trees. Aristotle also created a descending hierarchy of living beings according to their capacity and degree of development, which begins with the human being and has in the testaceans  – amoebae with involucre  – the lowest level.

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Aristotelian classification was much discussed over the centuries, mainly for its hierarchical sense, which was sometimes related to God and the divine order of things. Taxonomy gained a new look in the seventeenth century with Gaspard Bauhin and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who organized botanical treatises based on a morphological classification. The taxonomic classification of living beings reaches its current format with Karl von Linnée who, in 1770, instituted a growing classification, starting from specimens and organizing them into increasingly larger groups, that is, increasingly complex classes that systematized the others. Mayr explains: There are several inconsistencies in Lineu’s attitude toward the higher categories. Genus represents his essentialist thought par excellence, and all genera are separated by marked discontinuities. His attitude towards classes and orders, however, is mainly nominalistic. For them he assumes Leibniz’s motto that nature makes no leaps. The more plants we know, the more the gaps between higher taxa will be filled, until the boundaries between orders and classes can finally disappear. His adherence to the principle of completeness is proven by his assertion that all plant taxa have relationships on all sides (Mayr, 1998, p. 205).

In other words, Lineu did not see the realism of his classification of living beings, and perhaps he would have agreed with Piaget on this point. It was only with Darwin’s theory of evolution that the realism of species classification became relevant to biology, because the theory of evolution provides an explanation for the Linean hierarchy, placing phylogeny as a means of explaining the evolutionary sequence of living things (Mayr, 1998). Faced with this observation and with the understanding of Reymond’s notes on his student’s science of genera and the problem of classes in Aristotle, Piaget became convinced of the realism of both logic and biology (Kesselring, 1993), thus abandoning nominalism and Bergsonian duality, placing logic and biology within the same circle of problems. The debate with Roszkowski and the doctrine of Weismann – who claims the impossibility of the influence of somatic plasma on genetic plasma – also contributed to the abandonment of nominalism at this point. Thus, Piaget could employ logic in the study of living beings, so that he obtained his doctorate in zoology, aiming, soon after, also at a degree in philosophy (Piaget, 1980), thus embarking on a philosophy of biology. The shift from nominalism to realism was not the only one related to Piaget’s relationship with Reymond. Studies in epistemology were also initiated by the Neuchâtel professor, drawing the young man’s attention (Piaget, 1983). As he already possessed a scientific mentality, Piaget imagined advancing knowledge in epistemology of biology using the knowledge in biology already available, which would also require a foray into experimental psychology – a chair non-existent at Neuchâtel, so the subject was also taught by Reymond. Piaget saw in the organism a permanent structure, which receives influences from the external environment capable of modifying it, but not of destroying it. Knowledge proceeds in the same way, as it is assimilated into the subject’s structures. The knowledge, analogous to what happens with the biological organism by means of self-regulation, would have normative factors that would lead it to equilibrium (Piaget, 1983). The idea, which seems today quite clear in his thought, demanded from Piaget a scientific analysis within psychology to be confirmed.

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For Reymond, however, the experimental part was unnecessary. The relations of knowledge with organic life could be deduced by pure reasoning, using as a warning the difficulties that Claparède faced for having embarked on the area (Piaget, 1983). After a time of reflection, Piaget rejected this purely rational path and accepted experimentation and the scientific method as necessary for epistemological inquiry. Being brand would persist throughout his career, criticizing and being criticized for this stance. A third fruit of the relationship between Reymond and Piaget was obtained by the updating of another of Piaget’s inquietudes about a subject outside the field of biology, namely sociology. The dispute between Émille Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde about the reality or not of society as an organized whole (Piaget, 1980) had already awakened Piaget to the problem of the relation between the part and the whole. Still on this subject, in another field, it was Reymond who pointed out to his pupil that biological species could be seen as totalities whose coherence would be determined by the relation between its parts (Burman, 2016, see also Ratcliff, 2016), an idea and problem then that became central to Piaget. This insight, to use the reference to a line of psychology that Piaget says he might have followed had he known it, is described thus in his autobiography: I suddenly began to understand that at all stages (that is, of the living cell, organism, species, society, etc., but also with reference to states of consciousness, concepts, logical principles, etc.) the same problem of relationship between the parts and the whole lies. Thus, I became convinced that I had found the solution. There, at last, was the intimate union I had dreamed of between Biology and Philosophy, an access to Epistemology which seemed to me, then, really scientific. (Piaget, 1980, p. 132).

We then move on to a stage where a problem of both a logical and a biological, psychological, and social nature becomes central for Piaget, from that moment on again until the end of his life, but with various reformulations: the problem of the part and the whole, their relations, their composition, their principles, their workings, etc. The first formulation of a thesis on the issue appeared in Recherche (Piaget, 1918), a work that did not please Reymond and deeply shook the relationship between the two. His proposal, at that time, involved notions about the existence of mechanisms of preservation and alteration of the whole and the parts, both individually and among themselves, in a theoretical proposal that he re-presented in his autobiography (Piaget, 1980) and already with structuralist tones (Piaget, 1970). Going back to papers and notes of that time, Piaget (1980) states that he understood at that moment the existence of a normative obligation of the structure and modes of balance when assimilating new data, with actions that would come from the parts and the whole. These relations would vary according to the functioning of each structure. Thinking in terms of psychology, Piaget’s proposal involved the existence of normative states of consciousness, of a logical or moral nature, in search of constant equilibrium. The lower forms of equilibrium would involve nonnormative states of consciousness, such as perception or events of a purely organic nature (Piaget, 1980).

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A. E. M. Ribeiro

As Ducret (1990) highlights, already in 1914, Piaget affirms the existence of mechanisms of reception of external data suffering a conscious synthesis that migrates to unconsciousness, returning to consciousness as an evolution. The dynamics of a migration of ideas from consciousness to unconsciousness and back to consciousness, either within associationism or in models of synthesis, were already present in several researchers of psychology, and it is possible that it was Janet’s concept of conduct that allowed Piaget to migrate the functioning structure of assimilation and adaptation of biological bodies to thought, supported also by the realism of logic in biology. In the field of psychology, Piaget had already made readings of James and Ribot, but it was Janet the most remarkable name for his thought in the formation of his understanding about psychology (Ducret, 1990; Fedi, 2007). For Janet, according to Piaget’s understanding (Piaget, 1983), thought, inner reflection, is internalized social conduct, so that conduct includes both thought and consciousness, which seems to have constituted a structural link between the somatic plasma and the moral plasma. Furthermore, Janet draws on the idea of hierarchical structured and psychogenetic mental systems capable of elaboration and synthesis (Piaget, 1950, p. 137), which aligns with Piaget’s early ideas, fitting very well with assimilation and accommodation. Thus, the relationship of the parts and the whole finally seemed the central idea that could unify sociology, biology, and psychology in the problem of knowledge, which would allow a scientific study and approach to epistemology. But still there was a lack of a method and, consequently, of data that would allow Piaget to make well-founded statements. It is when Piaget goes in search of a method.

Third Moment: Piaget in Paris After obtaining his doctorate, Piaget went to Zurich in search of an experimental psychology, a model of systematic and controlled experimentation that he could use in his research, whose focus was the structures of the whole and its parts (Piaget, 1980). Unhappy with the approaches he was learning in the city – although he may have taken advantage of certain aspects of his stay there (Ribeiro, 2018) – Piaget goes to Paris with the suggestion of Oskar Pfister, a place where a new experimental psychology was being developed. He arrived in the city in mid-1919 and soon became close to the characters involved in local psychology and psychiatry. The French psychological movement has many nuances and particularities (Nicolas, 2002; Vieira & Ribeiro, 2020); Piaget studied at the Sorbonne, where he came into contact with many notable figures of psychiatry and psychology, such as Piéron, Dumas, and Delacroix (Piaget, 1980), besides Janet himself (Fedi, 2007). Psychology was not his only interest, since Piaget studied logic with Lalande and Brunschwicg, a very complete training and attuned to his interests.

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An opportunity to do research obtained by his compatriot Pierre Bovet to work in a psychology laboratory became, unexpectedly, the turning point in his research and his life. It was the laboratory of experimental psychology  – or experimental pedagogy – in the school of the 10ème arrondissement of Paris. The laboratory had been founded by Binet himself in 1905 who, already deceased, was under the supervision of Théodore Simon (Ouvrier-Bonnaz, 2011). However, Simon did not attend the laboratory, so Piaget, who arrived at the site perhaps in December 1919, enjoyed a certain freedom of research, relying on the support of the school director, Victor Vaney. Piaget’s task was clear: to standardize Cyril Burt’s intelligence test, developed in London, for French children. Burt’s test (1919, see also Burt, 1922) consisted of 50 syllogisms, numbered from 1 to 50, divided into age groups according to the degree of difficulty. For each age group, children were expected to be able to answer all the syllogisms in their age group and to present difficulties for the syllogisms of the next age group. The method of syllogisms in Burt’s test basically consists of presenting one or several assertions accompanied by a question concerning the assertions, whose answer can be deduced from the initial set. Some questions are quite simple, such as: “All wall-flowers have four petals: this flower has three petals. Is this a wall-­ flower?” (Burt, 1919, p. 73). But others may have several lines and involve a complex series of premises, characters, events, among others. The topics are varied: geography, crime detection, simple calculations, geometric shapes, elimination of alternatives, syllogistic deduction, causal reasoning, reasoning from the particular to the general, among others (Burt, 1919). The tests are numbered. The protocols created by Piaget from this period reveal that he devoted great effort to the use of Burt’s test. One can find 74 interviews with children conducted by Piaget using Burt’s test in the period from January to October 11, 1920. Considering the number of handwritten lines, Piaget wrote 1624 lines in interviews with children between 7 and 14 years old (mean age 10.12 years) using the test as a basis. However, although the test has 50 syllogisms, the available sources indicate that Piaget concerned himself with at least 18 of them, translating them into French and investigating their content. No trace has been found for the other syllogisms, which may be deposited elsewhere than in the Archives Piaget. The qualitative analysis of the items of Burt’s test translated by Piaget shows that almost all the syllogisms chosen by Piaget can be transformed into logical or mathematical equations. This was evidenced by the way Piaget notes some children’s answers in the protocols used, as an equation. For example, in item 12 of Burt’s test – 8B for Piaget – the problem formulation is as follows: “Edith is blonder than Suzanne and darker than Lili. Which is darker, Suzanne or Lili?” (Burt, 1919, p. 73). In some of the notes, the transcription of the child’s answer is limited to: Suz