"What is more, the mere act of asking this question -
which is a question you can pose to any intelligent being..."

This would seem to mean that intelligence is always languaged. Do you think that objects-of-knowing are not constructed without language?

I think there is both intelligence and consciousness that is not languaged. For example, in "The Origins...." does not Piaget formulate his ideas about the "invention of new means" without giving language a role.¡¡I think in a Piagetian approach, these new means--arising with the coordination of pre-existing schemes--are to be considered as biological intermediates on the journey to normative.¡¡As indeed is the object concept itself.

Perhaps focusing on terms like "normativity" can emphasize the gap between biology and mentality in a way that can do disservice to some of Piaget's contribution unless we do the work of specifying the biological intermediaries (or explicitly include stuff like Piaget's "invention of new means" and the object concept as prescriptive/normative).¡¡

It is such issues, as well as non-human (animal) intelligence and consciousness, that lead me to speak in terms of the interplay between, on one hand, relations of schemes to external objects-of-knowing and, on the other hand, relations of schemes with one another as the basic Piagetian contribution to conceptualizing intelligence and consciousness.

Concerning your strictures, in a previous posting, on the helpfulness of AI: Suppose we take AI in a broad sense to be concerned with producing intelligence in matter different from the "meat" that has historically been responsible for it.¡¡Piagetian theory suggests that if we manage to create something in which such an interplay (see above) occurs, we might be on a road to the development of intelligence-consciousness.¡¡ The issue for me is that this is not going to occur in any predictable way (i.e., except by accident) from an approach--such as seems currently endemic to AI-- that sees "information" as a non-problematic concept when applied in a non-mental realm.

(by Joe Becker)

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(This article is from email discussions through owner-piaget-list@interchange.ubc.ca)