Qiáng 墙 -pared o muro

After receiving his doctorate in 1918, Piaget undertook what we would today call a postdoctoral fellowship in Zurich. There, he met the leaders of the dissident Swiss school of psychoanalysis (including Carl Jung and Oskar Pfister), as well as Eugen Bleuler. And from them he learned clinical interviewing. But he soon became “restless”

(as he put it in an autobiography published thirty years later), and so abandoned the post after little more than a semester (Piaget, 1952a, p. 244). He then undertook a second postdoc in Paris, where he first began working with children at Alfred Binet’s former

laboratory-school at Grange-aux-Belles in Paris (P. Harris, 1997; Vidal, 1997b).²⁷ He held this post until his return to Switzerland in 1921.

Piaget’s job at the Binet Lab was to standardize British intelligence tests for use with French populations. This took advantage of the advanced statistical training from his background in Natural History (Vonèche, 2003, p. 6). But boredom, curiosity, and a lack of direct supervision led him to apply his new clinical skills (set out in Piaget, 1920a, 1920b). And this pushed his work in an unexpected direction.

As is well-known to all those who have read a textbook description of Piaget’s origin story, his interest was not at all in the content or organization of the intelligence tests themselves (as perhaps it should have been). Instead, he was interested in whatever-it-is that produces the results that are then measurable by intelligence tests. This he later explained, with the benefit of thirty-years’ hindsight:

I engaged my subjects in conversations patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning process underlying their right, but especially their wrong answers. I noticed with amazement that the simplest reasoning task… presented for normal children up to the age of eleven or twelve difficulties unsuspected by the adult. (Piaget, 1952a, p. 244)

In other words, he found that children’s reasoning is fundamentally different from adults’

reasoning. Or, put another way, some of what adults consider obvious is literally

unthinkable earlier on. This at-the-time-unexpected finding then became the focus of his

27 One sometimes reads that Piaget “studied with” or “worked with” Binet. This is an error:

although Piaget was indeed hired to do work with intelligence tests at Grange-aux-Belles, they never actually met. Binet died in 1911, when Piaget was 15 (Wertheimer & Maserow, 1980). See Piaget (1975) for his reflections on Binet’s contributions (also Nicolas et al., 2013).

research.

Piaget thus began cataloguing the difficulties that normal children have with different kinds of questions, as well as the patterns in their speech as they talked about them. Yet note the similarity to his earlier studies in Natural History, when he spent his time cataloguing alpine snails: what do you find when you look?

In other words: despite the use of the psychological subjects, this was still a biological project.²⁸ We can make this clearer—and highlight the foreignness of it—by posing a purposefully distant-sounding version of his hypothesis: Do different children, at different ages, respond as if they belong to different “species”? (Or, following

Haeckel and consistent with Hall: Does development from child to adult recapitulate the evolution of the human species from ape to man?)²⁹

This early approach—which we might call “transitional,” because Piaget did indeed eventually get to psychology-proper (Vidal, 1997b; see also Appendix A)—is something that I have begun reconstructing using the collection of snail shells at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (Burman, 2010). But to discuss that work in detail here would pull us badly off track, given our goals, so we will leave it aside for now and return to it in a future article.

Suffice it to say that Piaget appealed to a combination of methods drawn from natural history and psychoanalytic interviewing (or, as he put it, “psychiatric”

28 Mitchell Ash (2003) notes that, following Ribot, the early French view of psychology was that it was properly an outgrowth of biology—rather than of philosophy (p. 254). Given this, Piaget’s proposed application of biological methods makes more sense as “psychology” in the way that we mean it. To see that difference as a similarity, we need only translate through the different national contexts.

29 This characterization, it seems to me, is accurate only for Piaget’s earliest work (see also Vonèche, 2003, pp. 4-5). For more on Haeckel and Hall, see Green (2015a).

interviewing) as a result of his suspicion that the found-difference between adult- and child-reasoning might generalize; that groups of children answer certain kinds of

questions in quite dramatically different ways that would nonetheless be formalizable in Natural Historical terms. His attempts to demonstrate with rigor that this was the case, perhaps to avoid a repeat of his ejection from his first discipline,³⁰ then afforded the myriad experiments that collectively constitute the empirical evidence for his “standard”

stage theory of development: that the “sensorimotor” reasoning of infancy gives way to the “preoperational” reasoning of early childhood, followed by the “concrete operational”

reasoning of late childhood and the “formal operational” reasoning of adolescence.³¹ But it’s the larger program that he continued to develop, especially after he returned to his earlier interests when it was shown in the early 1960s that he hadn’t been entirely wrong about speciation in the mid- to late-1910s (discussed in Chapter VI).³²

Thus, Piaget’s project was not initially a psychological project in the way that we mean the term. And it did not end up as a psychological project (see Appendix A). We simply call him a psychologist because he created several methods now used by

psychologists, and eventually ascended to a Chair in Psychology (see e.g., Papert, 1999;

30 I was once told by a former student of Piaget’s that his prolificacy was the result of religious inspiration; that he felt “called” to do this work, but also that he was unable to talk about this calling out of a fear that the admission would lead to his work’s dismissal. Although I have no additional evidence for this, it does seem to merit some further examination. Perhaps there will be some mention of the family’s religiosity in his wife’s papers, now held at the Piaget Archives in Geneva but still unprocessed.

31 That this got attached to the narrow age-ranges associated with North American school grades is almost certainly a result of reading the translations of Piaget’s works through the influence of Lewis Terman and his attaching “mental age” to the results of intelligence tests (see P. D. Chapman, 1988b). This is sufficiently important to merit its own discussion, however, and so will be examined in a future work (as a sequel to Nicolas et al., 2013).

32 As it turns out, too, “the species problem” is not so clear-cut as is implied by most discussions of this aspect of Piaget’s program. Richards (2010) reports that more than twenty competing species concepts are used in grouping individuals as belonging to a meaningfully-identifiable collection.

Vonèche & Vidal, 1985; Voyat, 1977; also Chapter 3). Given the extent of his impact on the discipline, this appellation is perhaps also obligatory as an honorific (cf.

"Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards," 1970). But recognizing this alone is not sufficient to produce a depth of understanding that could make new opportunities

accessible. Indeed, it is quite possible that there is nothing more of value to be found in Piaget’s explicit discussions of child psychology (but see Ratcliff & Burman, 2015;

Conclusion). Those looking for inspiration, and new opportunities, therefore need to delve deeper. (Or, if you prefer: because the low-hanging fruit have all been plucked, we need new tools to help us reach higher [cf. Blumenthal, 1998, pp. 78-80].)