On the genesis of the concept of number in children. Operational concept of intelligence The main stages in the development of a child's thinking

.Piaget.

;

(from 2 to 7 years old) and (from 7 to 11 years);

period of formal operations.

Definition of intelligence

Intelligence

The main stages in the development of a child's thinking

Piaget identified the following stages in the development of intelligence.

1) Sensory-motor intelligence (0-2 years)

During the period of sensory-motor intelligence, the organization of perceptual and motor interactions with the outside world gradually develops. This development proceeds from being limited by innate reflexes to the associated organization of sensory-motor actions in relation to the immediate environment. At this stage, only direct manipulations with things are possible, but not actions with symbols, representations in the internal plan.

Preparation and organization of specific operations (2-11 years old)

· Sub-period of pre-operational representations (2-7 years)

At the stage of preoperational representations, a transition is made from sensory-motor functions to internal - symbolic, that is, to actions with representations, and not with external objects.

This stage of the development of the intellect is characterized by the dominance of assumptions and transductive reasoning; egocentrism; centralization on the conspicuous features of the subject and neglect in reasoning of its other features; focusing attention on the states of a thing and inattention to its transformations.

· Sub-period of specific operations (7-11 years)

At the stage of specific operations, actions with representations begin to be combined, coordinated with each other, forming systems of integrated actions called operations factions(for example, classification

Formal operations (11-15 years old)

The main ability that appears at the stage of formal operations (from 11 to about 15 years old) is the ability to deal with possible, with the hypothetical, and perceive external reality as a special case of what is possible, what could be. Knowledge becomes hypothetical-deductive. The child acquires the ability to think in sentences and establish formal relationships (inclusion, conjunction, disjunction, etc.) between them. The child at this stage is also able to systematically identify all the variables that are essential for solving the problem, and systematically sort through all possible combinations these variables.

The main mechanisms of cognitive development of the child

1) the mechanism of assimilation: the individual adapts new information (situation, object) to his existing schemes (structures), without changing them in principle, that is, he includes a new object in his existing schemes of actions or structures.

2) the accommodation mechanism, when an individual adapts his previously formed reactions to new information (situation, object), that is, he is forced to rebuild (modify) old schemes (structures) in order to adapt them to new information (situation, object).

According to the operational concept of intelligence, the development and functioning of mental phenomena is, on the one hand, the assimilation or assimilation of this material by existing patterns of behavior, and on the other, the accommodation of these patterns to a specific situation. Piaget considers the adaptation of the organism to the environment as a balancing of subject and object. The concepts of assimilation and accommodation play the main role in Piaget's proposed explanation of the genesis of mental functions. In essence, this genesis acts as a successive change of various stages of balancing assimilation and accommodation. .

Egocentrism of children's thinking. Experimental studies of the phenomenon of egocentrism

Egocentrism of children's thinking- a special cognitive position taken by the subject in relation to the surrounding world, when objects and phenomena of the surrounding world are considered from their own point of view. The egocentrism of thinking causes such features of children's thinking as syncretism, the inability to focus on changes in the object, the irreversibility of thinking, transduction (from particular to particular), insensitivity to contradiction, the cumulative effect of which prevents the formation of logical thinking. Piaget's well-known experiments are an example of this effect. If, in front of the child's eyes, equal amounts of water are poured into two identical glasses, then the child will confirm the equality of volumes. But if in his presence you pour water from one glass into another, narrower one, then the child will confidently tell you that there is more water in the narrow glass.

There are many variations of such experiences, but they all demonstrated the same thing - the child's inability to focus on changes in the object. The latter means that the baby fixes well in memory only stable situations, but at the same time the process of transformation eludes him. In the case of glasses, the child sees only the result - two identical glasses with water at the beginning and two different glasses with the same water at the end, but he is not able to catch the moment of change.

Another effect of egocentrism consists in the irreversibility of thinking, i.e., the inability of the child to mentally return to the starting point of his reasoning. It is the irreversibility of thinking that does not allow our child to trace the course of his own reasoning and, returning to their beginning, imagine the glasses in their original position. The lack of reversibility is a direct manifestation of the child's egocentric thinking.

Stage of specific operations

Stage of specific operations(7-11 years old). At the stage of specific operations, actions with representations begin to be combined, coordinated with each other, forming systems of integrated actions called operations. The child develops special cognitive structures called factions(for example, classification), thanks to which the child acquires the ability to perform operations with classes and establish logical relationships between classes, uniting them in hierarchies, whereas earlier his abilities were limited to transduction and the establishment of associative links.

The limitation of this stage is that operations can be performed only with concrete objects, but not with statements. Operations logically structure the external actions performed, but they cannot yet structure verbal reasoning in a similar way.

J. Piaget “Psychology of the intellect. The genesis of the number in a child. Logic and psychology»

1. Main provisions of the theory Zh.Piaget.

According to Jean Piaget's theory of intelligence, human intelligence goes through several main stages in its development:

Continues from birth to 2 years sensorimotor intelligence period;

from 2 to 11 years - the period of preparation and organization of specific operations, in which sub-period of pre-operational representations(from 2 to 7 years old) and sub-period of specific operations(from 7 to 11 years);

lasts from 11 years to about 15 period of formal operations.

The problem of children's thinking was formulated as qualitatively unique, having unique advantages, the activity of the child himself was singled out, the genesis was traced from "action to thought", the phenomena of children's thinking were discovered, and methods for its research were developed.

Definition of intelligence

· Intellect is a global cognitive system consisting of a number of subsystems (perceptual, mnemonic, mental), the purpose of which is to provide information support for the interaction of the individual with the external environment.

· Intelligence is the totality of all cognitive functions of an individual.

  • Intelligence is thinking, the highest cognitive process.

Intelligence- flexible at the same time stable structural balance of behavior, which in essence is a system of the most vital and active operations. Being the most perfect of mental adaptations, the intellect serves, so to speak, as the most necessary and effective tool in the interactions of the subject with the outside world, interactions that are realized in the most complex ways and go far beyond the limits of direct and instantaneous contacts in order to achieve pre-established and stable relationships. .

Propositional, or formal, operations (from 11-12 to 14-15 years). The last period of operational development begins at the age of 11-12 and leads to a state of equilibrium at the age of 14-15, when the logic of an adult is formed in the child.

At the fourth stage of operational development, a new property appears - the ability to think in hypotheses.

Such hypothetical-deductive reasoning is characteristic of verbal thinking, characteristic, among other things, from the point of view that it creates the possibility of accepting any data as something purely hypothetical and constructing reasoning in relation to them.

Imagine, for example, that a child is given the following series of nonsensical sentences from the Ballard test to read: things. If this child is at the level of concrete thinking, then he will begin to criticize the initial premises: bulbs are not unpleasant, it is wrong not to love them, etc. But if he is at the level we are considering, then he accepts these premises without discussion and simply points to the tension between I love them and the bulbs are unpleasant.

The subject of this level operates with hypotheses not only in verbal terms. This new ability profoundly affects his behavior in laboratory experiments. When he is given one of the devices that my colleague B. Inelder used in her study of physical inference, he acts with it in a completely different way from the way the subject acted at the level of concrete thinking. For example, when a pendulum is given and it is allowed to change the length and amplitude of its oscillations, its weights and initial impulses, then subjects aged 8 to 12 simply randomly select facts, classify them, build series and establish correspondences between the results achieved. Subjects between the ages of 12 and 15 try, after a few trials, to formulate all possible hypotheses about the factors to be taken into account, and then order their experiments as a function of these factors.

This new attitude gives rise to a number of consequences. First, in order to establish or verify the actual relationships between objects, thought no longer moves from the actual to the theoretical, but immediately starts from the theory. Instead of precise coordination of facts relating to the actual world, hypothetical-deductive reasoning builds conclusions from possible positions and thus leads to a general synthesis of the possible and the necessary.

Jean Piaget, Psychology of the Intellect / Selected Psychological Works. Psychology of intelligence. The genesis of the number in a child. Logic and psychology, M., Education, 1969, p. 587-588.

Philosophy of Science. Reader Team of authors

JEAN PIAGET. (1896-1980)

JEAN PIAGET. (1896-1980)

J. Piaget (Piaget)- Swiss psychologist, founder of the Geneva School of Genetic Psychology and Epistemology. The main works are devoted to the origin and development of intelligence and worldview. Based on the analysis of mental operations in children, he created a periodization of the development of thinking (the so-called operational concept of intelligence): He was a professor at the universities of Neustal (1926-1929), Geneva (since 1929) and Lausanne (1937-1954); founder of the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Paris; director of the Institute J.-J. Rousseau (since 1929) in Geneva.

Piaget's first books were published in the 1920s: Speech and Thinking of a Child (1923); "The Judgment and Inference of a Child" (1924); "The child's idea of ​​the world" (1926); "Physical Causality in the Child" (1927). The 1930s are considered to be the time when Piaget's theoretical position changed; it was at this time that he approached the formulation of the basic principles of the operational concept of intelligence, deducing "operation" as the main determinant of intellectual development. This theory is expounded in his work The Genesis of Number in a Child (1941). His concept was given a detailed justification in the book The Psychology of Intellect (1946). Piaget is also famous as a philosopher of science, who chose the child as an "instrument" for the study of cognition; as a scientist who already in 1920 grasped the basic intuitions of cybernetics; an epistemologist whose annual theoretical seminars brought together scholars from all over the world.

L.T. Retunsky

Excerpts from articles:

"Psychology of Intelligence"

"Genesis of number in a child",

"Logic and Psychology" - are given according to the edition:

Piaget J.Selected psychological works. M., 1969.

Intelligence and biological adaptation

Every psychological explanation ends sooner or later by relying on biology or logic (or sociology, although the latter itself, in the end, faces the same alternative). For some researchers, the phenomena of the psyche are understandable only when they are associated with a biological organism. This approach is quite applicable in the study of elementary mental functions (perception, motor function, etc.), on which the intellect depends in its origins. But it is completely incomprehensible how neurophysiology will ever be able to explain why 2 and 2 make 4, or why the laws of deduction are necessarily imposed on the activity of consciousness. Hence another tendency, which is to regard logical and mathematical relations as irreducible to any others, and to use them for the analysis of higher intellectual functions. It only remains to resolve the question: can logic itself, understood as something beyond the limits of experimental psychological explanation, nevertheless serve as a basis for interpreting the data of psychological experience as such? Formal logic, or logistics, is the axiomatics of states of equilibrium of thinking, and the real science corresponding to this axiomatics can only be the psychology of thinking. With such a formulation of problems, the psychology of the intellect must, of course, take into account all the achievements of logic, but the latter can in no way dictate their own decisions to the psychologist: logic is limited only to what poses problems for the psychologist.

The dual nature of the intellect, both logical and biological, is what we should start from. (p. 61)

<...>Intelligence is a certain form of balance, to which all structures that are formed on the basis of perception, skill and elementary sensory-motor mechanisms gravitate. Indeed, one must understand that if the intellect is not a capacity, then this denial entails the need for some kind of continuous functional connection between the higher forms of thinking and the totality of the lower varieties of cognitive and motor adaptations. And then the intellect will be understood as precisely that form of equilibrium towards which all these adaptations gravitate. This, of course, does not mean that reasoning consists in coordinating perceptual structures, nor that perception can be reduced to unconscious reasoning (although both these propositions could find some justification), since a continuous functional series does not exclude any difference, not even the heterogeneity of its constituent structures. Each structure should be understood as a particular form of equilibrium, more or less constant within its own narrow field and becoming unstable beyond it. These structures, located in series, one above the other, should be considered as a series built according to the laws of evolution in such a way that each structure provides a more stable and more widely spreading balance of those processes that arose even in the depths of the previous structure. Intelligence is nothing more than a generic name denoting the highest forms of organization or balance of cognitive structuring.

This way of reasoning leads us to the conviction that the intellect plays a major role not only in the human psyche, but in general in his life. A flexible and at the same time stable structural balance of behavior - this is what intelligence is, but in its essence it is a system of the most vital and active operations. Being the most perfect of mental adaptations, the intellect serves, so to speak, as the most necessary and effective tool in the interactions of the subject with the outside world, interactions that are realized in the most complex ways and go far beyond the limits of direct and momentary contacts in order to achieve pre-established and stable relationships. . However, on the other hand, the same way of reasoning forbids us to limit the intellect to its starting point: the intellect is for us a definite end point, and in its origins it is inseparable from sensory-motor adaptation as a whole, just as outside it - from the lowest forms of biological adaptation. (p. 65-66)

There is, however, no doubt that all interpretations of intelligence can be divided, based on one essential feature, into two groups: 1) those that, although they recognize the very fact of development, cannot consider intelligence otherwise than as some kind of initial data , and thus reduce all psychic evolution to a kind of gradual awareness of this initial given (without taking into account the real process of its creation), 2) those interpretations that seek to explain the intellect in terms of its own development. At the same time, we note that both directions are working together to find and analyze new experimental data. It is precisely for this reason that all modern interpretations of the intellect must be distinguished according to the extent to which they all tend to illuminate one or another particular aspect of the facts to be interpreted; the line of demarcation between psychological theories and philosophical teachings must be seen in a different attitude to experience, and not in the initial hypotheses.

Among the "fixist" theories, first of all, we should note those that, in spite of everything, remain true to the idea that the intellect is the ability of direct, direct knowledge of physical objects and logical or mathematical ideas, i.e. knowledge, due to the "pre-established harmony" between the intellect and reality (??). It must be admitted that very few of the experimental psychologists adhere to this hypothesis. But the questions that arose at the boundaries of psychology and the analysis of mathematical thinking made it possible for some logicians, such as, for example, B. Russell, to outline this kind of concept of intelligence and even try to apply it to psychology as such (pp. 72-73).

"Psychology of thinking" and the psychological nature of logical operations

<...>The study of the formation of operations in the child has led us, on the contrary, to the conviction that logic is a mirror of thinking, and not vice versa.

In other words, logic is the axiomatics of the mind, in relation to which the psychology of the intellect is the corresponding experimental science. It seems necessary to us to dwell on this side in somewhat more detail.

Axiomatics is an exclusively hypothetical-deductive science, that is, one that reduces the appeal to experience to a minimum (and even seeks to completely eliminate it), in order to freely build its subject on the basis of unprovable statements (axioms) and combine them with each other in all possible ways and with the utmost rigor. Thus, for example, geometry took a great step forward when, seeking to abstract from any intuition whatsoever, it constructed the most varied spaces by simply defining the primary elements, taken hypothetically, and the operations to which they are subordinate. The axiomatic method is thus predominantly a mathematical method and finds numerous applications both in purely mathematical sciences and in various areas of applied mathematics (from theoretical physics to mathematical economics). Axiomatics, by its very nature, is important not only for proof (although it forms a rigorous method only in this area): when it comes to complex areas of reality that are not amenable to exhaustive analysis, axiomatics makes it possible to construct simplified models of the real and thus provides indispensable means for its detailed study. In a word, axiomatics, as F. Gonset has well shown, is a “scheme” of reality, and by virtue of the mere fact that any abstraction leads to schematization, the axiomatic method as a whole is a continuation of the intellect itself.

But precisely because of its "schematic" nature, axiomatics cannot claim either to form a foundation, much less to act as a substitute for the corresponding experimental science, i.e. science relating to that area of ​​reality, a schematic expression of which is axiomatics. Thus, for example, axiomatic geometry is powerless to show us what the space of the real world is like (just as "pure economics" will never exhaust the complexity of concrete economic facts). Axiomatics could not replace its corresponding inductive science, for the main reason that its own purity is only a limit that is never fully reached. As Gonset said, the most purified schema always retains an intuitive residue (and in the same way, any intuition already includes an element of schematization). This conclusion alone is enough to make it completely clear why axiomatics can never "form the foundation" of experimental science and why an experimental science can correspond to any axiomatics (respectively, of course, and vice versa). (S. 86-87)

Preservation of continuous quantities

All knowledge, whether it be scientific or simply derived from common sense, presupposes, explicitly or implicitly, a system of conservation principles. There is no need to recall how the introduction of the principle of conservation of rectilinear and uniform motion (the principle of inertia) in the field of experimental sciences made possible the development of modern physics, or how the postulate of conservation of weight enabled Lavoisier to oppose rational chemistry to qualitative alchemy. As regards common sense, there is no need to specially emphasize the application of the principle of identity in it: insofar as all thinking seeks to organize a system of concepts, it is forced to introduce a certain constancy into its definitions. Moreover, starting already with perception - this extremely essential scheme of a permanent object, the reproduction of the genesis of which our other work was devoted to - the development of a genuine principle of conservation takes place, however, in its most elementary form. That conservation, which is the formal condition of any experiment, as well as of any reasoning, does not exhaust either the representation of reality or the dynamism of intellectual construction is another matter: in this case, we simply assert that conservation is a necessary condition for all rational activity, and do not concern ourselves with the question of whether this condition is sufficient to understand this activity or to express the nature of reality.

If we recognize the above as fair, then it is obvious that arithmetic thinking is by no means an exception to the general rule. A set (or collection) is comprehended only when its general meaning remains unchanged regardless of changes made to the relation between the elements. The operation inside the same set, which is called the "group of permutations", proves just the possibility of performing any permutation of elements while maintaining the invariance of the total "power" of the set. A number can also be comprehended by the intellect only to the extent that it remains identical to itself, regardless of the placement of its constituent units: it is this property that is called the "invariance" of the number. Such a continuous quantity as length or volume can be used in the activity of the mind only to the extent that it forms a permanent whole, regardless of possible combinations in the placement of its parts. In short, whether we are talking about continuous or discrete quantities, about the perceived quantitative aspects of the sensory world, or about sets and numbers comprehended by thinking, whether we are talking about the elementary contact of numerical activity with experiment, or about the purest axiomatization of any visual content, always and everywhere the preservation something is postulated by the mind as a necessary condition for all mathematical thinking.

From a psychological point of view, the need for preservation is a kind of functional apriorism thinking, which means that as thinking develops or historical interaction is established between the internal factors of its maturation and the external conditions of experience, this need appears as necessary.

However, is it to be concluded from this that arithmetical concepts are progressively structured under the influence of the development of these conservation requirements, or is it to be considered that conservation precedes any numerical and even quantitative organization and constitutes not only a function, but also a priori a structure, a special kind of innate idea, necessarily arising from the first acts of the intellect and the first contacts with experience? Psychogenetic analysis must resolve this issue, and we will try to prove that only the first solution corresponds to the facts. (p. 243-244)

Logic and psychology

History and status of the problem

In the 19th century, until Boole, De Morgan, Jevons and others created the algebra of logic and until experimental psychology became a science, there was no conflict between logic and psychology. Classical logic believed that it could reveal the actual structure of thought processes, the general structures underlying the external world, as well as the normative laws of the mind. Classical philosophical psychology, in turn, believed that the laws of logic and the laws of ethics find expression in the mental functioning of every normal individual. Under such conditions, logic and psychology had no grounds for disagreement.

But with the development of the young science of experimental psychology, logical factors were excluded from consideration - intelligence began to be explained through feelings, images, associations and other mechanisms. This caused a completely unfounded reaction: for example, some representatives of the Würzburg school of the psychology of thinking, when analyzing judgments, began to introduce logical relations in order to supplement the action of psychological factors with them.

Logic was thus used to causally explain facts that were themselves psychological. This misuse of logic in psychology has been given the name "logicism," and if psychologists generally distrust logic, it is mainly due to their fear of falling into the errors of logicism. Most modern psychologists try to explain intelligence without any recourse to logical theory.

While psychologists tried to separate their science from logic, the founders of modern logic or "logistics" advocated a separation of the latter from psychology for similar reasons. True, Buhl, the founder of the algebra that bears his name, believed even more that he was describing the "laws of thought", but this was due to the fact that he considered their nature to be essentially algebraic. With the development of deductive rigor and the formal nature of logical systems, one of the most important tasks of subsequent logicians was the liberation of logic from the appeal to intuition, i.e. from any recourse to psychological factors. The presence of recourse to such factors in logic was called “psychologism,” and this term was used by logicians when referring to insufficiently formalized logical theories, just as psychologists used the term “logicism” when referring to psychological theories that were insufficiently tested by experience.

Most modern logicians no longer concern themselves with the question of whether the laws and structures of logic have anything to do with psychological structures. At the beginning of our century, a French follower of Bertrand Russell even argued that the concept of operation is essentially anthropomorphic, but in fact logical operations are purely formal and have no resemblance to psychological operations. As soon as logic reached its complete formal rigor in its development, logicians ceased to be interested in the study of actual mental processes. P. Bernays, for example, believed - and from the point of view of a fully formalized axiomatic logic he is undoubtedly right - that logical relations are strictly applicable only to mathematical deduction, while any other form of thinking is simply approximating.

When we seek to identify entities that correspond to logical structures, we find that in the course of the gradual formalization of logic, four possible explanations were given for this. Each of them should be briefly considered from the point of view of its relation to psychology.

The first explanation is platonism, inherent in the early works of B. Russell and A. Whitehead, which stimulated the work of G. Scholz and remains the conscious or unconscious ideal of most logicians. According to this view, logic refers to a system of universals that exist independently of experience and are non-psychological in origin. In this case, it is necessary to explain how the mind comes to discover such universals. Platonic hypothesis only pushes the problem away and does not bring us closer to its solution.

The second explanation is conventionalism, believing that the existence of logical entities and their laws are determined by a system of agreements or generally recognized rules. However, this explanation leads us to a new problem: what makes these conventions so fruitful and surprisingly effective in their application?

Because of this, conventionalism gives way to the concept well-formed language. This third explanation is advanced by the Vienna Circle, which has been strongly influenced by logical empiricism. This explanation distinguishes between empirical truths, or non-tautological relations, and tautologies, or purely syntactic relations, which, with the help of appropriate semantics, can be used to express empirical truths. Such a theory has undoubted psychological significance; it can be empirically tested. However, in relation to psychology, it causes a number of difficulties.

First, we cannot speak of pure experience, or "empirical truths" independent of logical relations. In other words, experience cannot be interpreted in abstraction from the conceptual and logical apparatus that makes such an interpretation possible. In our experiments with B. Inelder, young children were asked to answer the question: when is the surface of water in an inclined glass tube horizontal and when is it not? We have found that children do not perceive "horizontality" until they are able to construct a framework of spatial relationships. To build such a framework, they need geometric operations, and when building these operations, it is necessary to use logical operations.

Secondly, throughout the development of children, logical relations never appear as a simple system of linguistic or symbolic expressions, they are always included in a group of operations. SS.574-576)

Finally, there is a third difficulty preventing the acceptance of the thesis that logic is simply language. If this thesis were true, then logic would have to reveal the essential features of the child's intellect. We could expect from her, on the one hand, a simple explanation of sensible facts, and on the other, a simple translation of these facts into a verbal basis, i.e. considering them as a language in the proper sense. But if perceptions presuppose a preliminary semantic interpretation involving logical relations, and these relations in turn presuppose actions and operations, then a considerable period of time must elapse before such an interaction between perception and operations is established. Indeed, logic in the thinking of children appears relatively late.<...>(p. 578)

This brings us to the fourth and last possible way of explaining logical relations - operationalism. The founder of this trend is P. Bridgman (USA). At present, in many countries there are followers of this trend (the operationalist movement in Italy - Chekatto and others). Unlike previous interpretations, operationalism provides a valid basis for the connection between logic and psychology. Since logic is based on abstract algebra and deals with symbolic transformations, operations (contrary to L. Couture!) play an extremely important role in it. On the other hand, operations are actual elements of mental activity, and any knowledge is based on a system of operations.

Therefore, in order to determine the relationship between logic and psychology, it is necessary: ​​(1) to construct a psychological theory of operations in terms of their genesis and structure, (2) to analyze logical operations, considering them as algebraic calculus, and structured Integers, and (3) compare the results obtained in (1) and (2). (S. 578-579)

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Period 1925-1929 is important in the formation of the psychological concept of J. Piaget. At this time, J. Piaget moved from the analysis of verbal thinking to a direct study of the active side of the thinking process ( It took some time, Piaget wrote later, to understand that the roots of logical operations lie deeper than linguistic connections and that my early research on thinking was too much focused on the linguistic aspect (See J. Piaget. Comments on Vygotsky's critical remarks)). Research materials 1925-1929. were published by J. Piaget in the books: "The Emergence of Intellect in a Child" (1936), "The Construction of Reality in a Child" (1937), "Formation of a Symbol in a Child" (1945), as well as in a number of articles. Research center in the period 1925-1929. was focused around the analysis of the structure of the intellect in the initial, pre-symbolic sensorimotor period of its development and in the period of symbolic thinking following it.

In 1929, Piaget began a new cycle of research (it ended approximately in 1939). In the course of these studies, Piaget, firstly, continuing the main line of work of 1925-1929, supplemented the analysis of the intellect of young children with a study of intellectual development in middle age (primarily on the basis of the analysis of the genesis of number and the concept of quantity), and secondly, he formulated the main ideas of his psychological theory of thinking (the operational concept of intelligence), and, thirdly, he built his logical concept. The results of these studies were published by Piaget in the books Genesis of Number in a Child (together with A. Sheminskaya, 1941), Development of Quantity in a Child (together with B. Inelder, 1941), Psychology of Intellect (1946), Logic and psychology" (1953). The works "Classes, Relations and Numbers" (1942), "Tractatus Logique" (1949) and others are devoted to a special presentation of the logical theory of J. Piaget. psychological and logical concept.

According to the operational concept of intelligence, the development and functioning of mental phenomena is, on the one hand, the assimilation or assimilation of this material by existing patterns of behavior, and on the other, the accommodation of these patterns to a specific situation. Piaget considers the adaptation of the organism to the environment as a balancing of subject and object. The concepts of assimilation and accommodation play the main role in Piaget's proposed explanation of the genesis of mental functions. In essence, this genesis acts as a successive change of various stages of balancing assimilation and accommodation ( See J. Piaget. La psychologic de l "intelligence. Paris, 1952, p. 13-15).

Piaget emphasizes the great difficulties in developing a theory of the development of mental functions. The main one is the extreme difficulty of separating the internal factors of development4 (maturation) from its external factors (environmental influences). Classical psychology, Piaget notes, operated on three main factors of development - heredity, physical environment and social environment, but it could neither single them out in a "pure" form, nor establish the nature of the relationship between them.

Consideration of the fundamental dependence of external and internal factors of development, Piaget continues further, leads to the conclusion that all behavior is the assimilation of the given by pre-created schemes and, at the same time, the accommodation of these schemes to the present situation. It follows from this that "the theory of development must necessarily turn to the concept of equilibrium, for all behavior essentially expresses a balance between internal and external factors or, more generally, between assimilation and accommodation" ( J. Piaget. Le role de la notion d "equilibre dans l" explication en psychologie. - "Actes du quinzienie congres Internationale de psychologic. Bruxelles, 1957". Amsterdam, 1959, p. 53).

Piaget proposes to consider the balance factor as the fourth main factor of development. It does not join the three antecedent factors simply additively, for none of them can, strictly speaking, be separated from the others. At the same time, equilibrium as a fourth factor has an important advantage over others: according to Piaget, equilibrium is a more general factor and can be analyzed relatively independently ( Ibid., pp. 53-54).

Piaget emphasizes that equilibrium can be understood in two ways - as a result and as a process of balancing. Moreover, equilibrium as a process is rigidly associated by Piaget with the principle of activity. Any changes external to the organism can be compensated only through activity. Because of this, the maximum value of equilibrium corresponds not to the state of rest, but to the maximum value of activity, which compensates for both actual and virtual changes ( Ibid., p. 53).

The concept of equilibrium, according to Piaget, should be used as an explanatory principle of all mental functions of the body. The intellect, or thinking, is one of these functions, the most developed and perfect (in the sense of the possibility of mastering the external world), moreover, it has such forms of balance to which all other mental structures gravitate.

Raising the question of the genesis of the intellect and its relationship with other mental functions, Piaget clearly formulates the principle, prepared by his early studies, of the derivativeness of internalized mental structures from external objective actions.

From Piaget's point of view, it is meaningless to talk about the "starting point" of mental development, at which the intellect first appears. On the other hand, it makes sense to talk about various intellectual structures that replace one another in the process of development, one can compare these structures with each other and use the concept of "degree of intellectuality", it can be argued that in the process of development, behavior becomes more and more intellectual.

Intelligence cannot be defined by specifying its "limits," Piaget argues. The definition of intellect can be given only through an indication of its development in the direction of the greatest balance of cognitive structures. From this it follows, in particular, that the method of studying the intellect can only be the genetic method, since the intellectual structure, torn out of the chain of development, taken outside of its relation to the previous and subsequent forms of balancing, cannot be correctly understood.

The genesis of intelligence is expressed in the formation of such intellectual structures, each of which can be considered as a special form of equilibrium between the organism and the environment, and intellectual development leads to the formation of more and more stable forms of equilibrium.

According to Piaget, the analysis of the successive formation of the intellect should begin with elementary sensorimotor actions. The latter, as they become more complex and differentiated, lead to the formation of a pre-operational form of intellect associated with representation, and then to thinking of a concrete-operational type, and, finally, to intellect proper, i.e., to the ability to manipulate formal operations.

The task of psychology, according to Piaget, is to give a detailed description of this process, to show how external objective actions are gradually internalized, leading to the formation of intellect.

The essence of the intellect, according to Piaget, lies in the system of operations that form it. The highest forms of balancing the organism and the environment are expressed in the formation of operational intellectual structures.

According to Piaget, an operation is an internal action of the subject, derived from an external, objective action and coordinated with other operations in such a way that together they form a certain structural whole, a system.

The system of operations is characterized by the fact that in it some operations are balanced by others, inverse to the first (the reverse is the operation that, based on the results of the first operation, restores the original position). Depending on the complexity of the operating system, the forms of reversibility that take place between operations change. The psychological criterion for the emergence of operational systems is the construction of invariants, or concepts of conservation (for example, for the appearance of operations A + A "= B and A = B-A" it is necessary to realize the conservation of B) ( See J. Piaget. La psychologie de l "intelligence, p. 53-55).

Thus, the principles of activity and pro-production of internalized mental structures from external objective actions, the ideas of genesis and the operational (systemic) nature of the intellect form the initial foundations of the psychological theory of J. Piaget.

The way in which Piaget tries to uncover the essential connections of the intellect is through the analysis of mental operations and their systems. How is such an analysis carried out?

Psychological and logical ways of studying intelligence

In the analysis of intelligence, it is necessary, Piaget believes, to combine psychological and logical research plans. In this statement and in its clear implementation is one of the most important features of Piaget's theory of thinking.

Although already when writing his early works, J. Piaget was well aware of the principles of the new logic - mathematical, or logistics, he, striving for the "purity" of psychological analysis, believed that attempts at a hasty deductive presentation of experimental data easily lead to the fact that the researcher is " dominated by preconceived ideas, superficial analogies suggested by the history of science and the psychology of primitive peoples, or, even more dangerously, by the prejudices of the logical or epistemological system" ( J. Piaget. Speech and thinking of the child, p. 64) (our detente. - V. L. and V. S.). "Classical logic (that is, the logic of textbooks) and the naive realism of common sense," he wrote, "two mortal enemies of a healthy psychology of knowledge..." ( Ibid).

The critical attitude of J. Piaget to the "logic of textbooks" is, to a large extent, a reaction against the logicization of the psychology of thinking, which was widespread in the 19th century. Piaget himself characterizes the situation that took place at that time as follows. Classical formal logic (i.e., pre-mathematical logic) believed that it was possible to reveal the actual structures of thought processes, and classical philosophical psychology, in turn, believed that the laws of logic are implicit in the mental functioning of every normal individual. There were no grounds for disagreement between these two disciplines at that time ( J. Piaget. Logic and psychology. Manchester University Press, 1953, p. one).

However, in the subsequent development of experimental psychology, logical factors were excluded from it as "alien" for the subject studied in it. Attempts to preserve the unity of psychological and logical research, as they took place, for example, among the supporters of the Würzburg psychological school, were not crowned with success. The use of logic in the "causal explanation of psychological facts proper" ( J. Piaget. Logic and psychology, p. one) was called "logicism" in psychological research and, since the end of the 19th century, was considered as one of the most important dangers that an experimental psychologist must avoid. “Most modern psychologists,” writes J. Piaget, “are trying to explain intelligence without any recourse to logical theory” ( Ibid., p. 2).

This state of affairs was also facilitated by changes in the theoretical interpretation of logic that occurred at the end of the 19th century. Instead of understanding logic as a part of psychology, the laws of which are derived from the empirical facts of the intellectual life of people ("psychologism" in logic), the dominant view of logic has become a set of formal calculus that establishes the rules for transforming one linguistic form into another, which are independent of empirical psychological material and do not are related to the analysis of the process of thinking. Piaget quite rightly notes that "most modern logicians no longer concern themselves with the question of whether the laws and structures of logic have any kind of relation to psychological structures" ( Ibid). Between the psychology of thinking and modern formal logic, a seemingly insurmountable wall has formed since the beginning of the 20th century.

Speaking in his early works for the "purity" of psychological analysis, against the introduction of elements of logic into psychological research, J. Piaget undoubtedly paid tribute to the views prevailing at that time. But his position, even at that time, should by no means be regarded as accepting the point of view of the absolute separation of psychological and logical research. Piaget fought against the introduction of elementary, "school" logic into psychology and against the interpretation of a child's thinking in terms of the logical structures of an adult's thinking, and not against the use of logic in psychology in general. In his early works, he proceeds from the fact that adult thinking is logical thinking, i.e., subject to a set of skills "used by the mind in the general conduct of operations" ( J. Piaget. Speech and thinking of the child, page 97), and Piaget turns his main attention to the analysis of the specific features of the child's logic, which is not reducible to the logical thinking of an adult ( Ibid., pp. 370-408).

Thus, already the early works of J. Piaget were characterized in fact by the desire for the unity of psychological and logical analysis. However, the real implementation of such a unified analysis was given by Piaget only in the 1930s.

The main task that J. Piaget solves in his studies of the problems of logic is to decide whether there is a correspondence between the logical structures and the operational structures of psychology. In the case of a positive solution to this issue, the real development of mental operations receives a logical justification.

According to J. Piaget, three main difficulties arise when comparing axiomatic logical theories with a psychological description of the real development of the intellect: 1) adult thinking is not formalized; 2) the deployment of axiomatic logic is in a certain respect opposite to the genetic order of construction of operations (for example, in axiomatic construction, the logic of classes is derived from the logic of propositions, while from the genetic point of view, propositional operations are derived from the logic of classes and relations; 3) axiomatic logic has an atomic character (it is based on atomic elements) and the method of proof used in it is of necessity linear; the real operations of the intellect, on the contrary, are organized into some integral, structural formations, and only within this framework do they act as operations of thinking ( See J. Piaget. Logic and psychology, p. 24).

The axiomatic construction of logic is not, however, the starting point for logic itself. Both historically and theoretically, it is preceded by some meaningful consideration of logical concepts - in the form of an analysis of systems of logical operations (algebra of logic). It is these operational-algebraic structures that, according to J. Piaget, can act as an intermediate link between psychological and logical structures.

Given the above, Piaget believes that logic and its relation to the psychology of thinking can be given the following interpretation ( See J. Piaget. La psychologic de l "intelligence, p. 37-43).

Modern formal logic, for all its formalized and highly abstract nature, is ultimately a specific reflection of actually occurring thinking. This means that logic can be regarded as the axiomatics of thinking, and the psychology of thinking as an experimental science corresponding to logic. Axiomatics is a hypothetical-deductive science that tries to minimize the appeal to experience and reproduces the object with the help of a series of unprovable statements (axioms), from which it deduces all possible consequences using predetermined, strictly fixed rules. Axiomatics can be regarded as a kind of "scheme" of a real object. But precisely because of the "schematic" nature of any axiomatics, it can neither replace the corresponding experimental science, nor be considered the "basis" of the latter, since the "schematism" of axiomatics is evidence of its obvious limitations.

Logic, being an ideal model of thinking, does not feel any need to appeal to psychological facts, since the hypothetical-deductive theory does not directly analyze facts, but only at some extreme point comes into contact with experimental data. However, since a certain connection with actual data is nevertheless inherent in any hypothetical-deductive theory, since any axiomatic is a "scheme" of some really existing object, there must be some correspondence between psychology and logic (although there is never any parallelism between them). This correspondence between logic and psychology takes place to the extent that psychology analyzes the final positions of equilibrium reached by a developed intellect.

In order for the data of modern formal logic to be used for the purpose of explanation in psychology, it is necessary to single out the operational-algebraic structures of logic. The solution to this problem is given in a number of works by Piaget ( See J. Piaget. Classes, relations and nombres. Essai sur les groupements de la logistique et sur la reversibilite de la pensee. Paris, 1942; J. Pia-get. Traite de logique. Paris, 1949).

The most important role in these studies by Piaget is played by the concept of grouping, which is derived from the concept of a group. A group in algebra is understood as a set of elements that satisfy the following conditions: 1) the combination of two elements of the set gives a new element of the given set; 2) each operation applied to the elements of a set can be canceled by an inverse (inverse) operation; 3) set operations are associative, for example: (x+x")+y =x+(x"+y); 4) there is one and only one identical operator (0), which, when applied to an operation, does not change it, and which is the result of applying the inverse (x+0=x; x-x=0) to the direct operation. Grouping is obtained by adding a fifth condition to the four conditions of the group: 5) the presence of a tautology: x+x=x; y+y=y.

Consider, for example, a simple classification, where B is divided by A and not \u003d A (A "), C - by B and B", etc. Schematically, a simple classification can be represented as follows:


The laws of formation of a simple classification are as follows:

The fulfillment of the first four conditions shows that a simple classification is a group. But it also fulfills the fifth condition, which can be interpreted as follows: the group operation "+" means the union of all elements of two sets connected by this operation into one set, in which all elements are included once (if any element is contained in both sets, then this element appears in the resulting set only once). By virtue of what has been said, it is clear that A + A = A, because all elements of the second set are contained in the first. Thus, a simple classification is a grouping, more precisely, one of the elementary groupings of class logic.

Piaget establishes eight such elementary groupings of the logic of classes and relations. Each of these groupings has a well-defined structure; some of these structures are rather elementary (as in the example given with a simple classification), the rest are more complex. For relations there is a grouping (additive grouping of asymmetric relations), an isomorphic grouping of a simple classification. Let's characterize this group.

Let A->B be the relation "B is greater than A", which is asymmetric and transitive. We will write it like this: A a -> B, where a is the difference between B and A; respectively: A b -> C, B a " -> C, C b" -> D, C c " -> D, etc.

The addition of asymmetric relationships forms a grouping:


Logical groupings of classes and relations represent, according to Piaget, certain structures that serve as a standard to which the real operations of thinking "aspire" at a certain level of their development (the so-called level of concrete operations). Psychologically, therefore, they can be seen as defining a form of equilibrium of the intellect. At the same time, each grouping condition receives a corresponding psychological interpretation: the first condition indicates the possibility of coordinating the actions of the subject, the second asserts a certain freedom of action direction (associativity condition), the third (the presence of a reverse operation) - the ability to cancel the result of the previous action (what is in the intellect and what not, for example, in perception), etc.

According to Piaget, the subject's mastery of the corresponding logical operations is the criterion of his intellectual development. All eight groupings of the logic of classes and relations belong to Piaget's so-called concrete-operational level of development of the intellect. A fourth level is built on top of it and from it is formed - the stage of formal operations, where the subject masters the logical connections that take place in the logic of propositions.

In this regard, Piaget is faced with the question of the logical structures of this higher level of development of the intellect - the stage of formal operations. In the study of this problem, carried out, in particular, in the Logical Treatise, Piaget came to the following conclusions ( See J. Piaget. Traite de logique, ch. V, Paris, 1949).

1. For each propositional calculus operation, there is an inverse operation (N), which is the complement to the full statement. Thus, for р∨q, whose normal form is pq∨pg∨pq, the operation pq will be inverse; for p⊃q - pq, etc.

2. For each operation there is a reciprocal operation (R), i.e. the same operation, but performed on statements of inverse signs: for p∨q - p∨, for pq-pq, etc.

3. For each operation there is a correlative operation (C), which is obtained by replacing the sign V with a sign in the corresponding normal form; and back. For p∨q, the correlative operation is p q, and vice versa.

4. Finally, if we add to N, R and C the identical operation (I), i.e., the operation that leaves the expression the same, then the set of transformations (N, R, C and I) form a communicative group given by the equalities

N=RC(=CR); R=NC(=CN); C⇔NR(=RN); I=RCN

or table


The RCNI group, however, does not cover the entire two-valued propositional calculus; it expresses only part of it. The problem of the logical organization of the propositional calculus as a whole - the most important component of the stage of formal operations - is solved by Piaget on the way of generalizing the concept of grouping introduced by him. In particular, he constructs a special grouping that expresses the logical structure of the propositional calculus ( See ibid., §§36-40). At the same time, Piaget shows that the two-valued logic of propositions is based solely on the relationship of the part to the whole and the complement of the part to the whole. Thus, it considers the relation of the parts to each other, but only through the relation to the whole and does not take into account the direct relation of the parts to each other ( Ibid., pp. 355-356. See also: F. Kroner. Zur Logik von J. Pia-get.- "Dialectica", 1950, vol. 4, N 1).

The constructed logic gives Piaget an important criterion for psychological research. As soon as the logical structures of the intellect have been established, which must be developed in the individual, the task of psychological research now is to show how, in what way this process occurs, what is its mechanism. In this case, logical structures will always act as the final links that must be formed in the individual.

Successive stages of the formation of intelligence

The central core of the genesis of intelligence, according to Piaget, forms the formation of logical thinking, the ability for which, according to Piaget, is neither innate nor preformed in the human spirit. Logical thinking is a product of the growing activity of the subject in his relationship with the outside world.

J. Piaget identified four main stages in the development of logical thinking: sensorimotor, pre-operational intelligence, concrete operations and formal operations ( When presenting the stages of the formation of intelligence, we rely mainly on the final work of J. Piaget and B. Inelder: J. Piaget und B. Inhelder. Die Psychologic der Friihen Kindheit. Die geistige Entwicklung von der Geburt bis zum 7 Lebensjahr. - In: "Handbuch der Psychologic" hrsg. D. and R. Katz. Basel - Stuttgart, 1960, S. 275-314).

I. Intellectual acts at the stage of sensorimotor intelligence (up to two years) are based on the coordination of movements and perceptions and are performed without any idea. Although the sensorimotor intellect is not yet logical, it forms a "functional" preparation for proper logical thinking.

II. Pre-operational intelligence (from two to seven years) is characterized by well-formed speech, ideas, internalization of action into thought (action is replaced by some kind of sign: word, image, symbol).

At a year and a half, the child begins to gradually master the language of the people around him. Initially, however, the mutual relation of designation and thing is still indeterminate for the child. At first it does not form concepts in a logical sense. His visual concepts, or "concepts," do not yet have any precisely described meaning. A small child does not conclude either deductively or inductively. His thinking is based primarily on inferences by analogy. By the age of seven, the child thinks well visually, that is, he experiments internally with the help of ideas. However, in contrast to logical-operational thinking, these thought experiments are still irreversible. At the stage of pre-operational intelligence, the child is not able to apply the previously acquired scheme of action with constant objects either to distant objects or to certain sets and quantities. The child lacks reversible operations and conservation concepts applicable to actions of a higher level than sensorimotor actions. The quantitative judgments of the child during this period, notes J. Piaget, lack systematic transitivity. If we take the quantities A and B, and then B and C, then each pair is recognized as equal - (A \u003d B) and (B \u003d C) - without establishing the equality of A and C ( J. Piaget. La psychologie de l "intelligence, p. 102).

III. At the stage of concrete operations (from 8 to 11 years), various types of mental activity that arose during the previous period finally reach a state of "mobile equilibrium", i.e., acquire the character of reversibility. In the same period, the basic concepts of conservation are formed, the child is capable of logically specific operations. It can form both relations and classes from concrete objects. The child is able during this period: to arrange the sticks in a continuous sequence from smallest to largest or vice versa; correctly establish an asymmetric sequence (A

“However, all logical operations at this age still depend on specific areas of application. If, for example, a child already at the age of seven manages to arrange sticks along their length, then only at nine and a half years old is he able to perform similar operations with weights, and with volumes - only at 11-12 years old" ( J. Piaget and B. Inhelder. Die Psychologie der friihen Kindheit, S. 284). Logical operations have not yet become generalized. At this stage, children cannot construct logically correct speech, regardless of the actual action.

IV. At the stage of formal operations (from 11-12 to 14-15 years old), the genesis of intelligence is completed. During this period, the ability to think hypothetically-deductively appears, theoretically, a system of operations of propositional logic (propositional logic) is formed. With equal success, the subject can now operate both with objects and with statements. Along with the operations of propositional logic, the child during this period forms new groups of operations that are not directly related to the logic of propositions (the ability to perform combinatorial operations of any kind, to operate extensively with proportions); there are operational schemes related to probability, multiplicative compositions, etc. The appearance of such systems of operations indicates, according to J. Piaget, that the intellect is formed.

Although the development of logical thinking forms the most important aspect of the genesis of the intellect, it does not, however, completely exhaust this process. In the course and on the basis of the formation of operational structures of varying complexity, the child gradually masters the reality around him. “During the first seven years of life,” write Piaget and Inelder, “the child gradually discovers the elementary principles of invariance relating to the object, quantity, number, space and time, which give his picture of the world an objective structure” ( J. Piaget and B. Inhelder. Die Psychologic der fruhen Kindheit, S. 285). The most important components in the interpretation of this process proposed by Piaget are: 1) analysis of the construction of reality by the child, depending on his activity; 2) the spiritual development of the child as an ever-increasing system of invariants mastered by him; 3) the formation of logical thinking as the basis of the entire intellectual development of the child.

Piaget, together with his collaborators, subjected many aspects of this process to a detailed experimental analysis, the results of which are presented in a whole series of monographs. Without being able to enter into the subtleties of these studies, we will give a summary of the results of these studies.

The formation of the concept of an object and the basic physical principles of invariance in a child goes through the same four main stages as in the case of the development of logical thinking. At the first stage (sensory-motor intelligence) the sensory-motor scheme of the object is formed. Initially, the world of children's ideas consists of appearing and disappearing images; there is no constant object here (first and second steps). But gradually the child begins to distinguish known situations from unknown ones, pleasant from unpleasant.

During the second stage (pre-operational intelligence), the child develops a visual concept of set and quantity. He is not yet able to apply the previously acquired scheme of action with a constant object either to individual objects or to sets and quantities. Multiple objects (for example, a mountain) seem to the child of this phase to increase or decrease depending on their spatial arrangement. If a child is given two plasticine balls of equal shape and mass and one of them is deformed, then he believes that the amount of matter has increased (“the ball has now become so long”) or decreased (“it is now so thin”). Thus, children at this stage deny both the invariance of matter and the invariance of the quantity of matter.

At the stage of operational-concrete thinking, the child forms the logical-operational concepts of set and quantity. This process ends at the stage of formal-operational intelligence. During this period, the child is able to mentally process the perceived changes in Plurality and Quantity; thus, he confidently asserts that, despite the change in shape, there is an equal amount of plasticine (in the example just considered). This is the result of thinking operations, more precisely, of coordinating reversible relations ( See ibid., p. 288).

Piaget traces the process of the child's mastery of the concepts of number, space, and time in a similar way. The main thing in this genesis is the formation of certain logical structures, and on their basis - the possibility of constructing an appropriate concept. In this case, Piaget's usual experimental technique is used: special tasks for children are selected, the degree of mastery of these tasks by them is established, then the task is complicated in such a way that it makes it possible to establish the subsequent stage of the child's spiritual development. On this basis, the entire analyzed process is divided into phases, stages, sub-stages, etc.

So, for example, when analyzing the genesis of a number in a child, it is established that the arithmetic concept of a number is not reduced to separate logical operations, but is based on the synthesis of the inclusion of classes (A + A "= B) and asymmetric relations (A Ibid., pp. 289-290; see J. Piaget et A. Szeminska for details. La genese du nombre chez l "enfant. Neuchatel, 1941).

In his studies, J. Piaget considers not only the actual development of the child's intellect, but also the genesis of his emotional sphere. Feelings are seen by Piaget (as opposed to Freud) as developing, as a result of active spiritual construction.

In this regard, the genesis of feelings is divided into three phases corresponding to the main phases of the development of the intellect: sensorimotor intelligence corresponds to the formation of elementary feelings, visual-symbolic thinking - the formation of moral consciousness, which depends on the judgment of adults and on the changing influences of the environment, and, finally, logically concrete thinking corresponds to the formation of will and moral independence ( J. Piaget. Le jugement moral chez l "enfant. Paris, 1932). During this last period, life in a children's society develops independence of moral judgment and a sense of mutual responsibility. Piaget emphasizes the fact that "the will develops together with moral independence and with the ability to think consistently logically." "The will really plays a role in the sensory life of the child, similar to the role of the operations of thinking in intellectual cognition: it preserves the balance and constancy of behavior" ( J. Piaget and B. Inhelder. Die Psychologic der fruhen Kindheit, S. 312). Thus, a single principle of analysis is consistently carried through the entire system.

Problems of interpretation of the operational concept of intelligence

We have outlined the main principles of the psychological concept of J. Piaget. We now turn to the consideration of issues that arise in connection with the interpretation of the operational concept of intelligence.

Attempts to construct such interpretations appeared ( See A. G. Comm. Problems of the psychology of intelligence in the works of J. Piaget; V. A. Lektorsky, V. N. Sadovsky. The main "ideas of "genetic epistemology" by J. Piaget. - "Questions of Psychology", 1961, No. 4, etc.), and it is natural to assume that work in this direction will be continued. Below we will try to offer an interpretation of a number of important aspects of Piaget's concept.

To build an interpretation of the operational concept of intelligence means, firstly, to reconstruct its subject matter, secondly, to establish the fundamental results obtained in the course of its deployment, and, thirdly, to correlate the theoretical representation of the subject studied by J. Piaget with the modern understanding of this object.

For the reconstruction of the subject studied in the operational concept of intelligence, it is necessary to single out the starting point of the psychological research of J. Piaget. As such, as already noted, is the task of analyzing the mental development of the individual depending on changes in the forms of social life. Schematically, such a subject of research can be represented as follows:


where ⇓ means the direct impact of various forms of social life on individual mental development.

With regard to the subject of research highlighted in scheme (1), the following should be emphasized.

1. The mental development of the individual from the very beginning is understood by J. Piaget, firstly, as a certain specific form of activity and, secondly, as something derived from external non-psychic (objective) activity.

2. In a real study (as, for example, it was carried out in the first books of J. Piaget), not the entire structure depicted in diagram (1) is subjected to analysis, but its relatively narrow "cut".

3. When studying the subject (1), the understanding of the psyche as a specific activity derived from objective activity, being accepted in principle, is actually replaced by consideration of only verbal activity (children's conversations), which, as is well known, Piaget himself was soon forced to abandon.

Distracting for the time being from the fact of the evolution of Piaget's concept (i.e., from the modification of the object studied within the framework of this concept, we consider it necessary to pay special attention to the original structure, the analysis of which J. Piaget tried to give in his first works. Singling out the subject (1) in as an object of psychological analysis puts Piaget at the forefront of contemporary psychological science.Moreover, this structure contains all the fundamental elements necessary to build a psychology of thinking from the point of view of today's theoretical ideas on this subject.Special mention should be made of the awareness of the fact that mental development depends on changes social reality and the principle of activity, that is, the understanding of the psyche not as some kind of static internal state of the individual, but as a product of a special form of activity of the subject.

However, having given the structure (1) as the initial object of study, Piaget essentially found himself in an unsolvable (at least for the period of the 1920s) situation. The fact is that such a subject of research is an extremely complex structural formation, the research methods of which have not been sufficiently developed even today. The success of the analysis of the subject (1) is possible only in the case of constructing detailed theories of the genesis of mental functions and the evolution of forms of social activity, and already on this basis - a detailed presentation of the ways in which social reality influences the psyche of the individual.

Piaget had neither the first, nor the second, nor the third. At that time, he did not have a specific apparatus for analyzing each of these components.

In this situation, Piaget's perfect transition from the original subject of research to its essential modification, which is much simpler in structure and therefore amenable to detailed analysis, seems quite natural. This modification concerned primarily three points:

1. The connection between the generation of the mental states of the individual by the forms of social activity is replaced by the relation of mutual expression of the first in the second, and vice versa.

2. For a rigorous representation of the various stages of the intellectual development of an individual, the apparatus of modern formal logic is used in such a way that the logical structures correspond to certain intellectual structures identified in psychology, and vice versa. As a result, a relationship of mutual expression is established not only between mental and social structures, but also between social structures and logical structures.

3. In the genetic plan, intellectual structures are generated by external objective actions; for its part, the form of organization of intellectual structures clearly expresses the organization towards which the structures of external objective actions strive, in other words, the structure of systems of external actions anticipates (expresses in an implicit form) the logical organization of the intellect.

Taking into account these modifications, we can give the following image of the subject of research in the works of J. Piaget:


In scheme (2), the arrow ↔ represents the relationship of mutual expression of one component of the object in another, the dotted arrow

--> characterizes the relation of the generation of intellectual structures by systems of external actions, and the arrow ⇒ indicates the field of science from which Piaget proceeds in his research when constructing the theory of logical structures in one case, and in the other case, the theory of the genesis of intelligence.

The multicomponent nature of structure (2) is largely imaginary. By introducing the relationship of mutual expression, J. Piaget essentially reduces the structure (1) to an object in which each component is only a different form of expression of the other, i.e., to an object in which there is only a different expression of the same structure. Thus, a real simplification of the subject of analysis is carried out; it is reduced to a structure that lends itself - at the present level of development - to detailed study.

To understand the position defended by Piaget about the relationship between social structures and structures of the intellect (both logical and actually mental), it is extremely interesting to pay attention to the formulation of this problem by him in the book "Psychology of Intellect". The question here is posed as follows: is logical grouping a cause or a result of socialization? ( See J. Piaget. La psychologie de l "intelligence, p. 195) According to Piaget, two different, but complementary, answers should be given to it. First, it should be noted that without the exchange of thoughts and without cooperation with other people, the individual could never co-organize his mental operations into a single whole - "in this sense, operational grouping presupposes social life" ( Ibid). But, on the other hand, the exchange of thoughts itself obeys the law of equilibrium, which is nothing more than a logical grouping - in this sense, social life presupposes a logical grouping. Thus, grouping acts as a form of balance of actions - both interindividual and individual. In other words, the grouping is a certain structure that is contained in both individual mental and social activity.

That is why, Piaget continues, the operational structure of thought can be isolated both from the study of the thought of the individual at the highest stage of its development and from the analysis of the ways in which thoughts are exchanged between members of society (cooperation) ( See J. Piaget. La psychologic de l "mtelligence, p. 197). "Internal operational activity and external cooperation ... are only two additional aspects of one whole, that is, the balance of one depends on the balance of the other" ( Ibid., p. 198).

The central link of the subject presented in the diagram (2) undoubtedly lies in the nature of the relationship between logical and real mental structures. This problem and the way to solve it, proposed in the operational concept of intelligence, express the most specific features of Piaget's approach to the study of the psyche.

If structure (1) is adopted, the researcher has two possible ways of further analysis - either in terms of elucidating the impact of forms of social activity on individual mental development (which, as we found out, significantly exceeded the real possibilities of psychology in the 1920s and 1930s), or in terms of direction of the opening of the patterns of "internal" mental activity. The transition to structure (2) indicates that Piaget solves the problem in favor of the second term of the alternative, which inevitably raises the question of the apparatus of such research.

Like any special scientific study, Piaget's analysis of the psychology of the formation of intelligence relies on some - perhaps not always clearly formulated - prerequisites. In this regard, we should first of all mention the concretization of the idea of ​​intellect as an activity (intelligence as a certain set of operations, i.e., the acceptance of the thesis that an operation is an element of activity). The next step is to define what an operation is. This question is solved by referring the operation to some integral system, only as a result of entering into which the action is an operation. Finally, the last premise is to adopt a genetic approach to the analysis of intellectual activity as different systems of operations.

These prerequisites for Piaget's psychological research represent a certain abstraction from the experimental material accumulated in the psychology of thinking (including in Piaget's works), and as such they should serve as means of further theoretical analysis. But at the same time - and this is no less obvious - these principles are not directly contained in the experimental psychological material itself: the process of their identification (and especially further development) is necessarily connected with the involvement of a special apparatus, which may not be directly related to psychology. child, but, however, must be able to clearly express these principles and have sufficient "opportunities" to concretize them.

Now we can clearly formulate, following J. Piaget, the main premises of his approach to the analysis of the psychology of intelligence only because the author of this concept "found" such an apparatus, and the choice turned out to be very promising.

Thus, in terms of the formation of the very concept of J. Piaget, the following relationship of its logical and psychological aspects took place:


The logical structures included in the operational concept of intelligence are a special reformulation of the content of certain sections of formal logic. The nature of this reformulation is determined, however, not only and not so much by the corresponding formal logical theories, but by the structure of those intuitively singled out mental structures, which, in the end, logical structures must act as a special way of describing. Therefore, in the construction of Piaget's concept, along with the relation "formal logic ⇒ logical structures", the most important role was played by the influence of intuitively distinguished mental structures on the formulation of the theory of logical structures non-intuitive representation) of the first. A similar mechanism for the formation of the concept led to the fact that in the created theory between the logical and psychological structures the relationship of mutual expression was established. The "become" theory removes the processes that led to its creation, and leaves only the final result - the correspondence of some structures to others.

In this regard, how is the problem of the status of logic and the psychology of thinking solved within the framework of Piaget's concept? In contrast to various interpretations of the subject of logic, which refuse to be a way of describing thinking - Platonism, conventionalism, etc. ( See J. Piaget. Logic and psychology. Manchester, 1953), Piaget puts forward the thesis that both traditional and modern formal logic ultimately describe certain patterns of thinking. Depending on the method of construction, the degree of formalization, axiomatization, the relation of logical systems to the real process of thinking varies. This relatedness is very indirect in the case, for example, of the axiomatic calculus of modern formal logic, and is much closer to the operational interpretation of logic.

To the extent that psychology analyzes the final states of equilibrium of thought, there is, Piaget argues, a correspondence between psychological experimental knowledge and logistics, just as there is a correspondence between a schema and the reality it represents ( See J. Piaget. La psychologic de 1 "intelligence, p. 40). At the same time, the particular parallelism between logic and psychology does not mean that logical rules are the psychological laws of thought, and it is impossible to apply the laws of logic to the laws of thought without ceremony ( J. Piaget, E. Beth, J. Dieudonne, A. Lichnerowicz, G. Choquet, C. Gattengo. L "enseignement des Mathematiques. Neuchatel - Paris, 1955).

Thus, there is no parallelism, understood literally, between logic and psychology. The relationship of mutual expression, correspondence of logical structures takes place only for those final states of equilibrium that are formed in the course of individual mental development. In all other respects, the psychology of thinking and logic belong to different areas and solve problems that differ from each other.

On the basis of what has been said, it is necessary to introduce the following concretization into the structure (2) (we take only one fragment of the whole subject):


Logical structures S 1 S 2 , S 3 .... included in the operational concept of intellect are a set of algebraic formations between which logical-mathematical relations are established, based ultimately on the use of deductive inference techniques. There is nothing specifically psychological, therefore, in this area. Structures S 1 , S 2 , S 3 ,... describe certain ideal conditions of equilibrium and as such correspond (with proper psychological interpretation) to real intellectual structures S 1 ", S 2 ", S 3 ",..., formed in the course of Particular parallelism, or rather mutual expression, the correspondence of certain "final products" - such is the real meaning of the connection between logic and psychology in the works of J. Piaget.

There is no doubt that the idea of ​​the unity of psychological and logical research is the most important merit of J. Piaget and his most significant contribution to the development of the psychology of thinking ( See V. A. Lektorsky, V. N. Sadovsky. The main ideas of the "genetic epistemology" of Jean Piaget. - "Questions of Psychology", 1961, No. 4, pp. 167-171, 176-178; G. P. Shchedrovitsky. The place of logic in psychological and pedagogical research. - "Abstracts of reports at the II Congress of the Society of Psychologists", vol. 2. M., 1963). Only as a result of the wide involvement of the logical apparatus in psychological research, Piaget was able to make great progress in the analysis of the most important problems of modern psychology: the idea of ​​the activity and genesis of the psyche, questions of the derivativeness of intellectual structures from external objective actions, and the systemic nature of mental formations.

It is well known that the concept of activity underlies many modern psychological interpretations of thinking.

However, as a rule, this concept is taken as intuitively obvious and further undefined, which inevitably leads to the fact that, in fact, it falls out of the analysis. Piaget, starting with such an intuitively accepted concept of activity, then, through the prism of his logical apparatus, introduced a certain rigor and certainty into this concept. The logical apparatus in his concept serves precisely to give a breakdown of activity and to turn this concept into a real means of psychological analysis. But, following the path to achieve this goal, Piaget - by virtue of the logical apparatus he uses - gives only an extremely one-sided presentation of activity. The activity analyzed within the framework of the operational concept of intelligence is an object built on the basis of the application of logical structures, and as such, on the one hand, it can be analyzed within the framework of the possibilities inherent in psychologically interpreted logical structures, and on the other hand, in no way can serve as a picture of the activity as a whole. After all, even for Piaget himself, logic is just some ideal scheme that never represents reality in its entirety.

The foregoing was very clearly manifested in the nature of Piaget's genetic research. To reveal the causal mechanism of genesis, this means, according to Piaget, "firstly, to restore the initial data of this genesis ... and, secondly, to show how and under the influence of what factors these initial structures are transformed into structures that are the subject of our study "( J. Piaget and B Inelder. Genesis of elementary logical structures. M., 1963, p. 10).

Giving a more detailed presentation of the criteria for genetic analysis, B. Inelder writes that the development of intelligence goes through a number of stages. At the same time: 1) each stage includes a period of formation of genesis and a period of "maturity"; the latter is characterized by a progressive organization of the structure of mental operations; 2) each structure is at the same time the existence of one stage and the starting point of the next stage, a new evolutionary process; 3) the sequence of stages is constant, the age at which one or another stage is reached varies within certain limits depending on the experience of the cultural environment, etc.; 4) the transition from the early stages to the later ones takes place through special integration: the previous structures become part of the subsequent ones ( W. Inholder. Some aspects of Piaget's genetic approach to cognition. - In: "Thought in the Young Child", p. 23).

What is really obtained as a result of research built on such principles? Fixing the successive stages that, according to this concept, the child goes through in his development, both in the field of logical thinking and mastering reality, and in the field of affective life. In this case, logical structures again act as the only working criterion. They not only correspond to real mental structures, but also predetermine - at each stage of development - what should be formed in the individual.

The genetic study of intelligence, therefore, acts as a fixation of the stages of achieving the corresponding logical structures. As a result, analysis of the internal mechanisms of the developmental process falls out of the study, and genetic consideration at best gives an idea of ​​pseudogenesis, built in accordance with the requirements arising from the system of logical structures.

The same difficulty, but in a slightly different form, appears when considering the process of generation of primary intellectual structures by external objective actions. Sensorimotor intelligence, according to Piaget, is an undeveloped form of balance. But in this case, as noted by A. Vallon, there is an error of anticipating the investigation. Unable to derive intelligence, personality from the system of actions, Piaget, according to Wallon, introduced intellectual structures into the actions themselves ( See A. Vallon. From action to thought. M., 1956, pp. 43, 46-50). To a large extent, this argument is justified. It should not, of course, be understood in the sense that the very idea of ​​deriving intellectual structures from sensorimotorism is false. The systematic consideration of this possibility contains the most important positive part of Piaget's work. The point is different - normative logical requirements here again act as the only real research principle, thereby reducing genetic analysis to a deliberately one-sided pseudogenetic reconstruction.

Great difficulties remain with Piaget in his interpretation of the intellect as a system of operations. Piaget shares with a number of other modern researchers the merit of putting forward the problem of consistency as one of the central problems of science. Much has also been done on the concrete application of this idea to the analysis of the psyche. Piaget repeatedly emphasizes the idea of ​​constructing a "logic of integrity" in the form of logical-algebraic structures: "... it is necessary to construct a logic of integrity, if they want it to serve as an adequate scheme for the equilibrium states of the spirit, and to analyze operations without returning to isolated elements, insufficient in terms of psychological requirements" ( J. Piaget. La psychologie de l "intelligence, p. 43; J. Piaget. Methode ixiomatique et metiiode operationnelle. - "Synthese", vol. X, 1957, N 1).

The algebraic apparatus used by Piaget in this regard undoubtedly acts, within certain limits, as a systemic alternative to atomized axiomatics. Group, grouping and other algebraic structures define elements, their connections and relations depending on the whole. But it is obvious that in the case of algebraic systems we are dealing with a very narrow and simplest class of system formations.

Piaget sees the intellect only through the prism of these algebraic structures, the inadequacy of which in terms of the analysis of mental activity does not require even a detailed justification.

Thus, the extremely important problem of the systemic nature of mental functions received in Piaget the first real results, which, however, essentially led to the need for a new "entry" in its analysis.

Concluding the consideration of the interpretation of the psychological theory of J. Piaget, it must be emphasized that the reconstruction of the subject studied in this theory helped us to establish both the real area subjected to analysis and the conceptual apparatus used for this, and the main difficulties in constructing the psychology of thinking that J. Piaget. Additional considerations on this subject we can get in the course of the analysis of the principles of "genetic epistemology".

Creator of the most profound and influential theories of the development of intelligence became a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget(1896-1980). He transformed the basic concepts of other schools: behaviorism (instead of the concept of reaction, he put forward the concept of operation), gestaltism (gestalt gave way to the concept of structure) and Jean (taking over from him the principle of interiorization, which goes back to Sechenov).

Piaget puts forward the provision on the genetic method as the guiding methodological principle of psychological research.

Focusing on the formation of the child's intelligence, Piaget emphasized that in scientific psychology any research should begin with the study of development and that it is the formation of mental mechanisms in a child that best explains their nature and functioning in an adult. On a genetic basis, according to Piaget, not only individual sciences, but also the theory of knowledge should be built. This idea became the basis for the creation genetic epistemology, those. the sciences of the mechanisms and conditions for the formation in humans of various forms and types of knowledge, concepts, cognitive operations, etc.

It is known that representatives of different approaches differently understood the essence of the development of the psyche. Supporters of the idealistic, introspective approach took as their starting point the psychic world closed in itself; Representatives of behavioral psychology understood the development of the psyche, according to M.G. Yaroshevsky, “as filling the originally“ empty ”organism with skills, associations, etc. under the influence of environmental conditions. Both of these approaches Piaget rejected both in genetic and functional terms, i.e. in relation to the consciousness, mental life of an adult.

Piaget's starting point for his analysis was interactionaction of a holistic individual- and not the psyche or consciousness - with the surrounding world. He defined intelligence as a property of a living organism, which is formed in the process of material contacts with the environment.

According to Piaget, in the course of ontogenetic development, the external world begins to appear before the child in the form of objects not immediately, but as a result of active interaction with him. In the course of an ever more complete and deep interaction between the subject and the object, as the author believed, their mutual enrichment takes place: more and more new aspects and characteristics are distinguished in the object, and the subject develops more and more adequate, subtle and complex ways of influencing the world with the aim of knowledge and achievement of consciously set goals.

In his experimental and theoretical studies of the genesis of intelligence, Piaget studied only the elementary forms of activity of a developing person. The main material of the study was various forms of the child's behavior in the surrounding world. But unlike representatives of the behaviorist trend, Piaget did not confine himself to describing actions, but tried to reconstruct on their basis those mental structures that behavior is a manifestation of. Piaget's many years of research on the reconstruction of the psyche on the basis of behavior also led him to the conclusion that the mental processes themselves, not only intellectual, but also perceptual, represent a specific activity.

Piaget's main task was to study human structuressky intellect. He considered its structure as a natural development in the course of the evolution of less organized organic structures. However, the psychological views of J. Piaget were formed on the basis of a general biological understanding of the development process as a relationship assimilation And accommodation. During assimilation, the organism, as it were, imposes its own patterns of behavior on the environment, while during accommodation, it rearranges them in accordance with the characteristics of the environment. In this regard, the development of the intellect was conceived as a unity of assimilation and accommodation, because through these acts the organism adapts to its environment.

Piaget's first books were published in the 1920s: The Child's Speech and Thinking (1923), The Child's Judgment and Inference (1924), and The Child's Representation of the World (1926).

M.G. Yaroshevsky, analyzing these initial views of Piaget, writes the following: “On the way from an infant to an adult, thought undergoes a number of qualitative transformations - stages, each of which has its own characteristics. In an attempt to uncover them, Piaget initially focused on children's utterances. He used the method of free conversation with the child, trying to make the questions asked by the little subjects as close as possible to their spontaneous statements: what makes clouds, water, wind move? where do dreams come from? why is the boat floating? etc. It was not easy to find in many children's judgments, stories, retellings, replicas unifying principle, giving grounds to delimit "what the child has" from the cognitive activity of an adult.

So common denominator Piaget considered child's egocentrism. A small child is the unconscious center of his own world. He is not able to take the position of another, to take a critical look at himself from the outside, to understand that other people see things differently.

Therefore, he confuses the objective and the subjective, the experienced and the real. He attributes his personal motives to physical things, endows all objects with consciousness and will. This is reflected in children's speech. In the presence of others, the child talks aloud as if he were alone. He is not interested in whether he will be understood by others. His speech, expressing his desires, dreams, "the logic of feelings", serves as a kind of companion, an accompaniment to his real behavior. But life forces the child to leave the world of dreams, to adapt to the environment ... And then the child's thought loses its originality, deforms and begins to obey a different, "adult" logic drawn from the social environment, i.e. from the process of verbal communication with other human beings” [Yaroshevsky M.G.].

In the 1930s, Piaget's approach to the problems of the development of the psyche underwent a radical change. In order to describe the structure of intellectual acts, he develops a special logical and mathematical apparatus.

Piaget defined the stages of development of the intellect, their content and meaning differently. Now he believed that not communication with other people, but an operation (a logical-mathematical structure) determines the cognitive development of a child. In 1941, in collaboration with A. Sheminskaya, J. Piaget's book "The Genesis of Number in a Child" was published, and in the same year, together with B. Inelder, "The Development of the Concept of Quantity in a Child." In the center of the second work is the question of how the child discovers the invariance (constancy) of certain properties of objects, how his thinking learns the principle of conservation of matter, weight and volume of objects. Piaget found out that the principle of conservation is formed in children gradually, first they begin to understand the invariance of mass (8-10 years), then weight (10-12 years) and, finally, volume (about 12 years).

To arrive at the idea of ​​preservation, the child's mind, according to Piaget, must develop logical schemes representing the level (stage) of specific operations. These particular operations in turn have a long history. A mental action (arising from an external objective action) is not yet an operation. To become such, it must acquire very special features. Operations are reversible and coordinated into a system. For each operation there is an opposite or inverse operation, by means of which the initial position is restored and equilibrium is reached. The interconnection of operations creates stable and, at the same time, mobile integral structures. Gradually, the child's ability to draw conclusions and build hypotheses increases. After the age of 11, the child's thinking enters a new stage - formal operations, which ends by the age of 15.

When studying intelligence, Piaget used the so-called slicing method: he presented the same task to children of different ages and compared the results of solving it. This method made it possible to catch certain shifts in the intellectual activity of the child, to see in the previous stage the emergence of prerequisites and some elements of the subsequent stage. However, this method could not ensure the disclosure of the psychological formation in the child of a new intellectual device, concept, knowledge.

Piaget's main idea is that the child's understanding of reality is a coherent and consistent whole that allows him to adapt to his environment. As the child grows, he several stages, on each of which "equilibrium" is reached:

1. The first turning point, at about one and a half to two years, is also the end of the "sensomotor period". At this age, the child is able to solve various non-verbal tasks: looking for objects that have disappeared from the field of view, i.e. understands that the external world exists constantly, even when it is not perceived. The child can find the way by making a detour, uses the simplest tools to get the desired object, can anticipate the consequences of external influences (for example, that the ball will roll downhill, and if you push the swing, they will swing back to their previous position).

2. The next stage is the “pre-operational stage”, characterized by a conceptual understanding of the world and is associated with language acquisition.

3. By about the age of seven, the child reaches the stage of "concrete operations", for example, he understands that the number of objects does not depend on whether they are laid out in a long row or in a compact pile; earlier he could decide that there were more objects in a long row.

4. The last stage occurs in early adolescence and is called the "formal operations" stage. At this stage, a purely symbolic representation of objects and their relations becomes available, the ability to mentally manipulate symbols appears.



 
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