JAC Volume 14 Issue 1

I would like to call attention to David Russell’s characterization (JAC 13, 173-97) of Piaget as a “dualist” who advocates the existence of “biologically-determined stages of cognitive development” (in a manner similar to Freud) and of “natural” as opposed to “social” growth (in a manner similar to Rousseau). This characterization goes completely against my own reading of Piaget, whom I take to be advocating that development is the result, and only the result, of the “interaction” of the structuring tendencies of the human organism with its social and physical environment. The mechanism of this growth is essentially “pragmatic” for Piaget, who hypothesized that development is the ongoing reconstruction of experience brought on by the frustration of previously constructed cognitive and behavioral patterns from achieving their expected ends—much as Dewey proposed in Human Nature and Conduct. The child finds a learned pattern of understanding to be inadequate to achieving anticipated ends and must reconfigure his or her prior and present understanding in order to act. The resulting cognitive structures, far from being biologically (or, for that matter, socially) determined, are artifacts of the interaction of organism and environment. Piaget writes,

The structures are not preformed within the subject but are constructed gradually as needs and situations occur. Consequently they depend partly on experience.... In short, the dualism of subject and object is brought back to a simple progressive differentiation between a centripetal pole and a centrifugal pole in the midst of the constant interactions of organism and environment. (Origins 416)

This is a “transactional” view if there ever was one.

The point of Piaget’s hypothesizing six stages of cognitive development was not to imply that they are inherent in the human organism itself or that they unfold “naturally” (that is, in and of themselves), as Russell suggests, but that they describe an inevitable sequence of steps of “interactive” develop­ment. This sequence seemed to Piaget to constitute a “law” of human cognitive development, the sanction for which he could never quite pin down, though he certainly did not seek it in a conventional biological or psychologi­cal analysis of the human organism or psyche apart from its environment.

Rather, he concerned himself primarily with a logical and mathematical analysis of cognitive development conceived as an evolving series of interac­tions between individuals and their physical and social surroundings.

I think it would be unfair, in this regard, to hold the search for universal patterns of human development against Piaget but not against Vygotsky. Although Vygotsky gave more attention to the social origins of thought than did Piaget, he nevertheless postulated laws of human development that transcend the particularities of social context: for example, that the uncon­scious operation of a function precedes consciousness of that function which in turn precedes deliberate control of that function (Thought 90-93). Vygotsky’s “law” may seem commonsensical and logical (it’s clearly ideological), but that’s the point; Piaget’s analysis of the six stages was chiefly formal and logical, not “biological” or “psychological” in any conventional sense, and it had social and ideological components as well. Indeed, his life work might well be characterized as the attempt to reveal the formal properties of cognitive development conceived as a process of ongoing organism-environ­ment interactions (even while acknowledging the limits of formalization per se [Structuralism 32-44]).

Russell’s calling Vygotsky’s analysis of Piaget “brilliant” is, in my opin­ion, irresponsible, for he gives no explanation or evidence to back it up. It is one thing to state that Vygotsky saw Piaget as “being essentially Freudian” (though even that is a considerable exaggeration ofVygotsky’s criticism), but something else altogether to label such an analysis “brilliant” without any apparent examination or defense of the analysis itself. Russell does not even cite a single work or passage by Piaget in this regard. In fact, in a brief monograph entitled “Comments on Vygotsky’s Critical Remarks Concerning The Language and Thought of the Child, and Judgment and Reasoning in the Child,” Piaget admits that he “accepted [Freud’s] oversimplified se­quence [of the ‘pleasure principle’ preceding the ‘reality principle’] too uncritically,” but goes on to say that he never in fact “separated need and pleasure from their adaptive functions” as Vygotsky claims he did (4-5).

In a similar manner, Russell cites Vygotsky’s disagreement with (what Vygotsky took to be) “Piaget’s characterization of students’ acquisition of scientific concepts as the replacement or suppression of natural spontaneous concepts” (189), the idea being, I presume, that Piaget was setting up a false dualism between students’ “natural” and “social” development, wherein the teacher’s job became that of supplanting the natural with the social. In the first place, such a characterization would put Piaget not in line with but in direct opposition to Rousseau, who prescribed that education ought to develop the “natural” self to the point that it was incapable of being corrupted by society. But, more importantly, this characterization charges Piaget with a dualism to which he was in fact strongly opposed. Piaget took for granted that “natural” development, far from standing in opposition to “social” development, was necessarily social—social interaction being a natural, spontaneous activity of human beings. In fact, Piaget chastises Vygotsky himself for oversimplifying the complexity of the interactions between spontaneous and scientific concepts by giving inadequate attention, among other things, to the need for teachers to utilize children’s spontaneous concepts and tendencies in the teaching of scientific concepts (“Comments” 9-11). ¹

From my own limited reading of the two psychologists, I get the impression that Vygotsky partly misread Piaget, that he partly lacked the opportunity of reading Piaget’s later works² (many of which dealt both directly and indirectly with Vygotsky’s criticisms), and that he partly disagreed with Piaget. Piaget says as much himself in the monograph. But I would not presume to say that such is definitely the case without further study and a carefully formulated argument.

The irony is that Russell, who (correctly) laments that Dewey has often been miscast as an educational romantic, turns around and does the same thing to Piaget, without giving any reason for doing so other than that Vygotsky (might have) characterized Piaget that way. It seems to have been popular among composition theorists for some years now to compare Piaget to Vygotsky and to find Piaget wanting, but I have yet to see a thorough analysis of the question in the composition literature. Vygotsky’s work is generally regarded as being highly inventive and astute (Piaget certainly thought so), but it does not seem to have occurred to many people that his characterization of Piaget might have been flawed in places, as Piaget himself claimed. (And I see no reason for Piaget to misrepresent himself in this regard.) Often overlooked as well are the aspects of Piaget’s work that Vygotsky admired.

Research on this question is sorely needed. As a start, I invite people to read the aforementioned monograph, then to study Piaget a good deal more closely before making unsupported claims about the alleged inadequacies of his work compared to Vygotsky’s. The conclusion may still be that Vygotsky was more on the right track, but let’s not jump to that conclusion without a closer analysis of what Piaget himself actually wrote, as opposed to what others, including Vygotsky, have written about him. I think in Piaget we may find not the behaviorist or the romantic that he is sometimes paradoxically characterized as being but a transactionalist whose voice is very pertinent to the present attempts to find a non-foundational basis for and approach to teaching composition.

Rhode Island College
Providence, Rhode Island

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Works Cited