Thank you very much for your two notes on counter-suggestions and necessary knowledge. As usual they are pertinent.
I do not maintain that counter-suggestions alone are enough to warrant conclusions about necessity. Even though they are not sufficient to warrant such conclusions, I think that they are necessary as a means for determing if a child's answer on a typical Piagetian task is or not already dominated by the idea of logical necessity. In other words, if an apparently preoperational child changes his or her initial answer when he or she is confronted with a counter-suggestion, then it seems to me that we can say that that child is not totally dominated by the idea of pseudo-necessity. In the same vein, if an apparently operational child changes her or his initial response when he or she is confronted?with a counter-suggestion, then we can conclude that that child's initual response is not really dominated by the idea of logical necessity. So, as you say in your message, counter-suggestions are required, namely in studies of children's development of necessary knowledge.
However, my main argument as far as counter-suggestions are concerned is to claim that Piaget's appeal to counter-suggestions could have been explored more deeply, because, to my knowledge, Piaget only confronted the child with a contrary response from a putative child of the same age as that of the child being interviewed. As I noted in my initial query, I think that is possible to confront the child with other types of counter-suggestions. For instance, with a justified contrary response from the above mentioned putative child, or with a counter-suggestion from an adult who knows a lot about the issue at hand. I am of the opinion that, among other, these two types of counter-suggestions are a means for exploring more deeply the child's idea of logical necessity and also of pseudo necessity.
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