Biology and Knowledge: An Essay on the Relations between Organic Regulations and Cognitive Processes

by Jean Piaget, Beatrix Walsh (Translator)

English, French (translation)

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy

384 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1971

About the author

Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980) was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental theorist, well known for his work studying children, his theory of cognitive development, and his epistemological view called "genetic epistemology." In 1955, he created the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva and directed it until his death in 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget was "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing."

Reviews

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a re-read of a book I read over thirty years ago. This work by Piaget was recommended as a path to move beyond the sterile nature vs. nurture debate that social science struggled with at the time (heavily biased with nurturism, and challenged by E.O. Wilson's sociobiology theories). Piaget is not the easiest to read and, at least with the translation, is not a prose stylist. However, he offers fresh perspectives on the biological origins of cognition and argues that the human mind of today can be traced back to the beginnings of life. Upon this re-read, I would add for emphasis the following as particularly central: (1) adapatation is an accommodation of an existing structure to a new situation (hence, looking backwards, one can trace the mind back to the beginnings of life itself); (2) departing from strict mutationist theory that has the origin of variation occuring within individual genomes, Piaget sees a far more primary role coming from genetic recombinations occuring through trans-individual genetic pools, which suggests that the pool for creative solutions to environmental challenges may be far greater than what mutationists have indicated; (3) the combination of these two ideas accounts for progressive equilibriations (progressive construction, with one structure building upon another structure through time, drawing from the richer pool of "transgenomic" influences); and (4) Piaget makes a distinction between affective (energy) and cognitive (structures), focusing primarily on the latter, yet he makes numerous references to the "organizational" property of life itself that impels the organism to adapt by re-organizing its structures (systems and sub-systems that function wholistically to adapt the organism). What that organizational property may or may not be, Piaget is notably silent, yet on the surface, all of life would not be possible without this key feature, whatever it may be. Off hand, the "organizational property" seems to reside at the juncture between energy in its inorganic form and in its organic form so that, perhaps, one could say that in the beginning there was (directed) energy that created structures within life forms, and subsequently, structures built upon each other leading progressively, up to man and his or her fabled cognitive capacity. Clearly, this is not Piaget's emphasis, yet one wonders whether the cognition and behavioral and structural structures would exist at all were it not for the directive life force that seems to be inherent in life's organizational property ("whatever that may be.").

[Salvatore Familia]

Psychologist, philosopher, and authority on human intellectual development, Jean Piaget was trained as a biologist and has always looked at complex behavior as continuous with the most elementary forms of biological organization. Here he discusses the nature of intelligence and of knowledge in the light of contemporary findings in biology.

Interpreting the three forms of knowledge -- innate knowledge, knowledge gained through experience of the world, and logicomathematical knowledge -- from the point of view of the biological sciences, Piaget contends that the "bursting" of instinct in man has resulted in a cognitive evolution so complete that logicomathematical knowledge can be explained only by returning to the necessary biological framework. This work is one of the first to attempt such an explanation.