Judgement and Reasoning in the Child

by Jean Piaget

1972 LITTLEFIELD ADAMS & CO. SOFTCOVER

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sequel to The Language and Thought of the Child, which it continues and refers back to continually, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child begins with a study of the use of the word "because" ("parce que"), the corollary to the study of "why" which ended the first book, and various words equivalent to "although". Piaget says that children under 7-8 use "because" correctly when it is a question of motivation (e.g. "because my Daddy won't let me" -- his example) but misuse it when it is a question of causal explanation or logical justification; "donc" (therefore) appears only about 11-12, because it involves formal logical thought; and the words meaning "although" are also first correctly understood at that age because they implicitly involve general propositions.

The second and third chapters deal with formal reasoning and relations, and argue that children in the ego-centric stage before 7-8 have difficulty understanding relations (his experiments were on "brother" and "sister", "left" and "right", and relations of part and whole) because they involve looking at them from the perspective of the other as well as the self, and because they require synthesizing details rather than juxtaposing them. Piaget also argues that while children begin to use deductive reasoning from 7-8, they can only reason from premises that they actually believe; it is only from 11-12 that they become able to reason from purely hypothetical or arbitrary premises, and thus that is the age where they are capable of formal reasoning.

The fourth chapter continues the argument by considering what he calls "logical addition" and "logical multiplication", or what English speakers call "union" and "intersection" of sets. (Throughout the book French technical terms seem to be translated literally rather than by the corresponding English technical terms. There are also many cases where a sentence seems to say the opposite of what the context calls for, as if a "not" has been added or left out, which occurs too consistently to be typos and probably is a problem with the translation.)

The last chapter is a summary of both books, which was very welcome given how complex his arguments are.

[Aaron Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

The study of logical justification showed that if the child is unable to give a logical reason for his judgment, even when this judgment is true in itself and correctly introduced in the context, this is because he is not conscious of the motives that have guided his choice. Things happen then more or less as follows. In the presence of certain objects of thought or of certain affirmations the child, in virtue of previous experiences, adopts a certain way of reacting and thinking which is always the same, and which might be called a schema of reasoning. Such schemas are the functional equivalents of general propositions, but since the child is not conscious of these schemas before discussion and a desire for proof have laid them bare and at the same time changed their character, they cannot be said to constitute implicit general propositions. They simply constitute certain unconscious tendencies which live their own life but are submitted to no general systematization and consequently lead to no logical exactitude. To put it in another way, they form a logic of action but not yet a logic of thought.


What then gives rise to the need for verification? Surely it must be the shock of our thought coming into contact with that of others, which produces doubt and the desire to prove. If there were not other people, the disappointments of experience would lead to overcompensation and dementia. We are constantly hatching an enormous number of false ideas, conceits, Utopias, mystical explanations, suspicions, and megalomaniacal fantasies, which disappear when brought into contact with other people.