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Topic: Piaget's interest in necessary knowlege
Posted by: Orlando Martins Lourenço
Date/Time: 2010/10/19 22:33:47

Hi to everybody!

Anyone familiar with Piaget's work knows that the idea of logical necessity and necessary knowlege pervades all of his thinking. When, on his tasks, he resorted to "perceptual seductions", asked children to justify their answers and reacted to presented counter-suggestions, Piaget was just appealing to procedures used for seeing if the child's answers on his famous operational tasks were not only the case (i.e., true knowledge), but that they had to be the case and could not be otherwise (i.e., necessary knowledge).

If I understand it well, Piaget, so to speak, could not go further than he went as far as "perceptual seductions" and children's justifications for their answers are concerned. That is, "perceptual seductions" were indeed highly salient in perceptual terms, and children's justifications for their answers were asked by the interviewer in various forms (e.g., "Why do you say that?"; "How do you know that your answer is correct?", and so on).

However, in terms of the presented counter-suggestions, I am of the opinion that Piaget could have gone a bit further. In other words, counter-suggestions were always presented as contrary responses to those given by the child being interviewed, those contrary responses belonging to a putative child of the same age as that of the child interviewed. Given Piaget's interest in necessary knowledge (and also in pseudo necessary knowledge) it is relatively surprizing that he had not resorted to other forms of counter-suggestions. For example: 1) to confront the child being interviewed, not only with a contrary answer coming from a child of the same as that of the child interviewed, but with a justified contrary answer coming from that latter child (i.e., justified through an operational argument [identity, reversibility, compensation or reciprocity], in the case of an preoperational answer or child; or through a functional or figurative argument in the case of an operational child or answer; 2) to confront the respose of the child in question with a contrary answer belonging to an adult that knows a lot about the issue at hand, for instance, to the interviewer; and 3) to confront the child in question with a justified answer coming from that adult (see above). I wonder whether resorting to these and other types of counter-suggestions would not amount to staying in a better position than that of Piaget's to understand more deeply or profoundly the idea of the emergence and development of logical necessity or necessary knowledge in Piagetian children.

As I intend to carry out a study on the idea of logical necessity in preoperational and operational children, your commnets would be welcome and appreciated.


Entire Thread

Topic(Point at the topics to see relevant reminders)Date PostedPosted By
     Piaget's interest in necessary knowlege2010/10/19 22:33:47Orlando Martins Lourenço
     Re:Piaget's interest in necessary knowlege2010/10/19 22:35:30joe becker
     Re:Piaget's interest in necessary knowlege2010/10/19 22:37:13Dewey Dykstra
          This is probably an unreasonable request given that whole monographs have been written on reflective abs2010/10/19 22:40:26Michael Lamport Commons
               Re:This is probably an unreasonable request given that whole monographs have been written on reflective abs2010/10/19 22:42:29Stephan Desrochers
               Re:This is probably an unreasonable request given that whole monographs have been written on reflective abs2010/10/19 22:43:54Andre Hopper
               Re:This is probably an unreasonable request given that whole monographs have been written on reflective abs2010/10/19 22:46:53Michael Lamport Commons
                    Re:Re:This is probably an unreasonable request given that whole monographs have been written on reflective abs2010/10/19 22:48:29Boom, J. (Jan)
     Re:Piaget's interest in necessary knowlege2010/10/19 22:45:37Andre Hopper
          Re:Re:Piaget's interest in necessary knowlege2010/10/19 22:49:59Orlando Martins Lourenço

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