Search Forum:

I'm with you in what you say here about (a) form in ideas on artistic activity (b) inter-defined conceptual systems in ideas on knowledge construction.? But when you refer to "the feeling of logical necessity" I reckon we part company; or rather, this is my interpretation of Piaget on this, and I reckon yours is different, even contrary to it. This is a quote from Piaget in 1973 "Explanation or the search for the reason of things embodies a paradox. The paradox is how to reconcile necessity, on one hand, and the production of change or the production of novelty, on the other. In short, at issue is how to understand novelties as necessities." This quote nicely re-states what I have long argued to be Piaget's "central problem", i.e. the formation of necessary knowledge (my 1993 book Necessary Knowledge + chap 3 in 2009 Cambridge Companion to Piaget). It's quite a problem just because a novelty is by definition unfamiliar and it is very easy to go wrong.?For example: - the computer-proof the 4-colour problem: is it mathematically valid? If it is, it is a necessity. It the proof is invalid, it's not. Whatever feelings I or you may have about this proof are irrelevant as to whether the proof really is valid or invalid. - Goldbach's conjecture that any even number is the sum of two primes: the same dilemma. If it is valid, it’s necessarily true; if it's invalid, it's not. And anyone feelings about this are irrelevant to answering the substantive question: is the conjecture valid? In his Equilibration book, Piaget made this telling point [what follows is my emendation of the 1985 p38 translation: the 1975 French text reads "avec tous les intermédiaires entre cette évidence subjective et la nécessit?logique" My translation runs: "Coordinations are inferences, implicit or explicit, that the subject considers or utilizes as if they were imposed on him. This imposition varies, and it covers all the intermediaries between this subjective evidence and logical necessity." Piaget's point, as I interpret this, is that in the advance from subjectivity [the ego in egocentrism] based on beliefs and values, construction can go astray; but it may also eventuate in the right structure, i.e. a structure with inherent necessity in its use. The former ?alas ?is a fact of human life; but ?hurray! ?so is the latter. What counts in "a?feeling of necessity" is not the feeling [because it can be wrong] but the system in use behind it. Further, since there are multple systems, what is necessary in S1 may not be in S2. But either way, "necessity is always the result of constructions inherent a subject" [Piaget, Essay on Necessity]. And what counts is necessity in system S1, not any feeling correlated with it. In the Arts, and in the Sciences too, there are 1001 further factors that enter into the formation of a system that a person uses to understand "what is going on". These of course deserve their own special attention. But Piaget is offering is a unitary account of the construction of necessities in systems/structures despite the special nature of these individual differences.