Ulrich Müller > 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

“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

“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

“Piaget subscribed to the ordering and organizing function of the mind, but he believed that the forms and categories are not a priori but undergo development as a result of the subject's interaction with the world (OI, pp. 376–395).”
― 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

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

“For Piaget, the differentiation and coordination of sensorimotor schemes leads to the construction of increasingly complex relations between objects in the world (OI, p. 211).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“In J. I. Carpendale & U. Müller (Eds.), Social interaction and the development of knowledge: Critical evaluation of Piaget's contribution (pp. 67–85).”
― 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

“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

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

“Kant did not explain the origin of these judgments but assumed that they were attained by abstraction from the activity of the soul, which structures, according to eternal laws, its experiences (Kant, 1770/1968, § 8, § 15, corollary).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Needs themselves are not static but become more complex with the differentiation and integration of sensorimotor schemes (OI, p. 170).”
― 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

“Chapman, M. (1988). Constructive evolution: Origins and development of Piaget's thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, M. (1992). Equilibration and the dialectics of organization. In H. Beilin & P. B. Pufall (Eds.), Piaget's theory: Prospects and possibilities (pp. 39–59). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.”
― 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

“Because psychologists generally take knowledge as unproblematic, the complexity of Piagetian theory seems simply superfluous.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself” (CR, pp.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“According to Piaget, infants’ reactions to the bottle or other stimuli cannot be explained by external stimulus-response relations because the stimuli have a meaning for the infants to begin with; without this meaning, it would not be possible to explain why these stimuli become relevant or how the associations could be confirmed or strengthened (OI, p. 127).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“It is important to keep two key aspects of Piaget's account in mind. First, in Piaget's account, there are no innate modules with adultlike competencies that are suddenly switched on, nor is there any special processing mechanism that, out of the blue, comes online (see OI, p. 100; Piaget, 1967/1971, p. 327, fn.).”
― 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

“Unlike Kant, for whom normative categories are a priori and fully formed in their use, for Piaget any framework has a formation in time through its serial use; that is, human development is the successive replacement of frameworks, from simple to complex (Smith, 2006, 2009).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Kant argued that our intuition (i.e., sensibility) and understanding use a priori (i.e., independent of all experience) forms and categories, which are the condition of the possibility for experiencing objectivity. Piaget subscribed to the ordering and organizing function of the mind, but he believed that the forms and categories are not a priori but undergo development as a result of the subject's interaction with the world (OI, pp. 376–395).”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“1. Strictly speaking, the general way of functioning is not hereditary because it is already operative at the level of the genes (Piaget, 1970/1972a, p. 57). Rather, it is a functional a priori that reflects the continuity of life.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Piaget himself was ardent in his opposition to empiricism (e.g., Piaget & Inhelder, 1969/1976).”
― 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

“as Piaget (1970, p. 705) noted, the study of infant development “raises all the main issues in the theory of knowledge.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget

“Social contexts provide ubiquitous cases of the same point: If one bottle of beer costs £1, six individual bottles may cost £6, whereas a six-pack costs £5.”
― 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

“The reactions are primary because they are centered on the infant's body. They are circular because they form cycles of movements that repeat an interesting sensation discovered by chance.”
― Ulrich Müller, The Cambridge Companion to Piaget