Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)

Jean Piaget was a Swiss philosopher and psychologist whose principal research interests were in episte-mology and developmental psychology. He believed that to understand knowledge, one must look at its psychological origins and how it evolves as children become adults. His research led him to the epistemo-logical stance he deemed constructivism—the position that knowledge is constructed from experience over time.

During work in Alfred Binet's lab at the Sorbonne, Piaget noticed that children of the same age consistently made the same mistakes on intelligence tests. Later, after very careful observations of children during which he would ask questions or assign tasks to elicit behaviors that would give him insight, Piaget noted that children were organizing and reorganizing the world as they gained more experience. He concluded that children were not simply imitating or regurgitating what they were told or observed; they were creatively interpreting the world based on their past experiences at a fairly constant rate, which could be organized into stages.

According to Piaget, children proceed with this process of interpretation by constructing and revising gestalt-type schema, which allow for future recognition of patterns that have been experienced. with this view in mind, Piaget conducted experiments to determine specifically how the knowledge of time is constructed in children. His results are oudined primarily in The Construction of Reality in the Child (1937) and The Child's Conception of Time (1946).

These experiments led Piaget to conclude that children begin with an egocentric conception of time where duration (number of minutes, years, etc.) depends on speed of action—the faster one goes the less time one spends on an action. [Page 994]Eventually children develop a distinction between duration and succession (past, present, future; before and after), which allows them to see that the flow of time is constant. For Piaget, the fact that children seem to move from special relations constituting the concept of time to the more complex notion of independent time flow showed that space was a more basic concept from which the concept of time is constructed.

Many have criticized Piaget's epistemology and conception of time. J. T. Fraser, a prominent author on time who debated Piaget, held that there must be some intuition of time in children. Later, other prominent authors critiqued Piaget for unwarranted generalizations and other experimental problems. However, his importance to the progression toward understanding time in psychology and philosophy is evident in his influence on such thinkers as Jürgen Habermas, Thomas S. Kuhn, and contemporary constructivist epistemologists, as well as reactions from such prominent thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Hilary Putnam.