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Good question, Ann! My postcard version of Piaget's Equilibration account is this: Life starts and stops as birth and death, and no doubt each of these can be judged under different criteria [birth/conception, heart/brain dead, etc]. The elements in the process are frameworks [organisation, structure, system] used by a subject [agent, thinker, knower] on the objects [actual, mental, possible] in the world, where the framework changes in each-and-every use, thereby linking action A' with its successor A", whether trivially [new content] or profoundly [new form] - sans fin [with neither beginning nor end] and so, in that respect, each of us is a "runner" in a relay race, sometimes transmitting the 'baton', at other times recasting it [Neurath's boat]. The changes always include reasons, whether consciously detected by the reasoner or not. The principal reasons are necessitating. ps: I admire your succinct question and apologise for this non-succinct answer. But..... Piaget, J. (2006). Reason. New Ideas in Psychology, 24, 1-29 Smith, L. (2009). Piaget's developmental epistemology. In U. Müller, J.Carpendale, & L. Smith (eds.). Cambridge companion to Piaget. [pp. 64-93]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.