The Cambridge Companion to Piaget Quotes

“It is important to recall at the outset that by a cognitive equilibrium (which is analogous to the stability of a living organism) we mean something quite different from mechanical equilibrium (a state of rest resulting from a balance between antagonistic forces) or thermodynamic equilibrium (rest with destruction of structures). Cognitive equilibrium is more like what Glansdorff and Prigogine call ‘dynamic states’; these are stationary but are involved in exchanges that tend to ‘build and maintain functional and structural order in open systems’ far from the zone of thermodynamic equilibrium” (Piaget, 1977/2001, pp. 312–313).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Intelligence exhibited by human beings originates and perpetuates itself “neither with knowledge of the self nor of things as such but with knowledge of their interaction, and it is by orienting itself simultaneously toward the two poles of that interaction that intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself” (CR, pp. 354–355).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“in the same sense in which Kant held that the empirical sciences depend on some mental abilities – intuition and categories”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Piaget used to subdivide each level into several substages, the sequence of which he held to be irreversible, too.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Is it possible that a contingent genesis can lead to necessary knowledge?”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“It is no coincidence that he referred to Kant as “the father of us all” (Piaget, 1965/1971, p. 220).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Through the application of morphisms, objects are said to be enformed: “the active imposition of a form on an object by the knowing subject. In a derived sense, the same word designates…the fact that some knowledge content is subsumed under a well-defined form” (Piaget et al., 1990/1992, p.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Near the end of his career, Piaget began to use the mathematical concept of morphisms derived from category theory”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“From the 1940s to 1970s, Piaget used algebraic or set theoretical concepts to describe this organization of operations, which he called “groupings”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Because Piaget used mathematical models to describe the organization of thought, this change in emphasis is reflected in his use of different mathematical formalizations.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“In contrast to empiricist theories, in which knowledge is derived from perception, Piaget emphasized the role of action and operations (transformation) in the construction of knowledge.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“The central goals of Piaget's theory were to describe and explain the fecundity and rigor of thought (Piaget, 1936/1952, pp. 417–419; see Chapman, 1988, p. 144). Fecundity refers to the continuous construction of novel forms of thought in the course of development. Rigor refers to the reversibility (i.e., systemic coordination) and deductive necessity of thought (see Chapter 3, this volume).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Piaget's view of infants as active agents that confer increasingly complex meanings on the things interacted with has yet to be fully assimilated in developmental psychology and in philosophy.6”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Second, there is no structure independent of activity and vice versa: “The essential is, therefore, not the scheme in so far as it is a structure, but the structuring activity which gives rise to the schemes” (OI, p. 350).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“First, higher mental functions are grounded in and emerge out of a practical, prereflective form of intelligence.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Gallagher, 2005;”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Contemporary causal representational approaches to infant development, such as Baillargeon's, represent, in this respect, a step backward because they ignore epistemological questions and are unaware of their own epistemological commitments.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Furthermore, biological functioning, sensorimotor intelligence, and rational thought are based on the same self-organizing processes (i.e., functional invariants).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“In Piaget's developmental epistemology, sensorimotor intelligence serves as a bridge between biological functioning and rational thought. On the one hand, the beginning of sensorimotor intelligence, the system of reflexes, is linked to the morphological and anatomical structure of the organism. One the other hand, sensorimotor intelligence already entails a logic of action and meaning implications and thus the seeds of what later will become rational thought and necessary knowledge (OI, p. 418).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“In Piaget's developmental epistemology, sensorimotor intelligence serves as a bridge between biological functioning and rational thought.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Unfortunately, Baillargeon (2008) is not aware of the epistemological commitments resulting from her theory. For example, Baillargeon does not address how her theory avoids the symbol-grounding problem (i.e., the problem of explaining how representative items can have meaning)”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“For example, Baillargeon does not address how her theory avoids the symbol-grounding problem (i.e., the problem of explaining how representative items can have meaning)”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Baillargeon's theory conceptualizes the mind as passive and relations between infants and the world as external, whereas Piaget's theory conceptualizes the mind as active and the relation between infant and world as internal.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“(for a more detailed treatment, see Müller & Newman, 2008; Müller & Overton, 1998a, 1998b; Müller et al., 1998a).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“contemporary neonativism is rooted in an epistemological framework entirely different from Piaget's epistemological framework.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“The issue is not whether Piaget's observations and experiments can be replicated; the issue is whether Piaget's method of assessing infant competencies (i.e., his reliance on sensorimotor action such as manual search) systematically underestimated infants’ competencies.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“The major thrust of the criticism leveled against Piaget's theory of infant development comes from the neonativist enterprise that argues that core knowledge and the abilities to represent and reason about physical reality (e.g., objects, causality, space) are innate (see Bremner, 2001; Cohen & Cashon, 2006, for reviews).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Piaget also did not provide a detailed analysis of how communicative interaction leads to symbolic representation.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“However, the construction of the social world does not receive the same level of attention in Piaget's work on infancy as the construction of the physical world.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Many aspects of Piaget's theory of infant development have been severely criticized. I briefly cover three lines of criticism: (a) Piaget did not properly explain the process of interiorization and the emergence of symbolic representations, (b) Piaget largely ignored the importance of social interaction for the development of knowledge, and (c) Piaget severely underestimated infants’ abilities.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget