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-[[!meta title="The Psychology of Intelligence"]]
-
-* Author: Jean Piaget.
-* Publisher: Routledge Classics.
-* Year: 1950. 
-
-## References
-
-* [Piaget's theory of cognitive development - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget's_theory_of_cognitive_development).
-
-## Overview
-
-This overview is a mixed of both ideas from the book altogether with other
-considerations I've got by reading other, related material:
-
-### Intelligence is reversible!
-
-As what's really wonderful about this reversibility is that it's built atop of
-lower, fundamental levels of irreversible dynamical systems.
-
-That revesibility is the capacity to the adaptive system do turn away from
-configurations that doesn't lead to a defined goal and replace by other
-pathways, mixing introspection and empirism.
-
-Reading this book along with The Tree of Live from Maturana and Varella
-and Morin's Method I get the feeling that intelligence in life arises from
-the sensori-motor system and gets deeper in a process where the nervous
-system inflates to give way to impulses/stimuli that originates from itself.
-
-Consequential to this reversibility is that intelligence might experimentation
-freely without risking itself producing damages or permanent harm to itself,
-which is different to say that somebody can't harm him/herself by the consequence
-of his/her acts.
-
-Also, while what happens with intelligence looks entirely reversible, mind is
-not composed of intelligence alone. Other instances exist that might put the
-whole apparatus on restricted modes of operation, such when in a neurosis which
-is a state of constant looping in a given theme.
-
-## Misc
-
-* Perception (imediate contact with the world) (127).
-
-* Habit: beyond short and rapidly automatised connections between per-
-  ceptions and responses (habit) (127).
-
-* How the whole body is seem according to his theory? There's a movement (sic)
-  where intelligence raises from the sensori-motor to the mind, but can we
-  consider the other way as well, about what's conceived by abstract thought
-  be then used as a source of sensori-motor intelligence? I guess so, but wonder
-  how that could be articulated in Piaget's theory.
-
-## Intelligence and equilibrium
-
-    Then, if intelligence is thus conceived as the form of equilibrium towards
-    which all cognitive processes tend, there arises the problem of its relations
-    with perception (Chap. 3), and with habit (Chap. 4).
-
-    -- Preface
-
-    Every response, whether it be an act directed towards the outside world or an
-    act internalized as thought, takes the form of an adaptation or, better, of a
-    re-adaptation. The individual acts only if he experiences a need, i.e., if the
-    equilibrium between the environment and the organism is momentarily upset, and
-    action tends to re-establish the equilibrium, i.e., to re-adapt the organ- ism
-    (Claparède). A response is thus a particular case of inter- action between the
-    external world and the subject, but unlike physiological interactions, which
-    are of a material nature and involve an internal change in the bodies which are
-    present, the responses studied by psychology are of a functional nature and are
-    achieved at greater and greater distances in space (percep- tion, etc.) and in
-    time (memory, etc.) besides following more and more complex paths (reversals,
-    detours, etc.). Behaviour, thus conceived in terms of functional interaction,
-    presupposes two essential and closely interdependent aspects: an affective
-    aspect and a cognitive aspect.
-
-    -- 5
-
-    Furthermore, intelligence itself does not consist of an isolated and sharply
-    differentiated class of cognitive processes. It is not, properly speaking, one
-    form of structuring among others; it is the form of equilibrium towards which
-    all the structures arising out of perception, habit and elementary
-    sensori-motor mechan- isms tend. It must be understood that if intelligence is
-    not a faculty this denial involves a radical functional continuity between the
-    higher forms of thought and the whole mass of lower types of cognitive and
-    motor adaptation; so intelligence can only be the form of equilibrium towards
-    which these tend.
-
-    This does not mean, of course, that a judgment consists of a co- ordination of
-    perceptual structures, or that perceiving means unconscious inference (although
-    both these theories have been held), for functional continuity in no way
-    excludes diversity or even heterogeneity among structures. Every structure is
-    to be thought of as a particular form of equilibrium, more or less stable
-    within its restricted field and losing its stability on reach- ing the limits of
-    the field. But these structures, forming different levels, are to be regarded as
-    succeeding one another according to a law of development, such that each one
-    brings about a more inclusive and stable equilibrium for the processes that
-    emerge from the preceding level. Intelligence is thus only a generic term to
-    indicate the superior forms of organization or equilibrium of cognitive
-    structurings.
-
-    -- 7
-
-    In general, we may thus conclude that there is an essential unity between the
-    sensori-motor processes that engender per- ceptual activity, the formation of
-    habits, and pre-verbal or pre- representative intelligence itself. The latter
-    does not therefore arise as a new power, superimposed all of a sudden on com-
-    pletely prepared previous mechanisms, but is only the expres- sion of these
-    same mechanisms when they go beyond present and immediate contact with the
-    world (perception), as well as beyond short and rapidly automatised connections
-    between per- ceptions and responses (habit), and operate at progressively
-    greater distances and by more complex routes, in the direction of mobility and
-    reversibility. Early intelligence, therefore, is simply the form of mobile
-    equilibrium towards which the mechanisms adapted to perception and habit tend;
-    but the latter attain this only by leaving their respective fields of
-    application.  Moreover, intelligence, from this first sensori-motor stage
-    onwards, has already succeeded in constructing, in the special case of space,
-    the equilibrated structure that we call the group of displacements—in an
-    entirely empirical or practical form, it is true, and of course remaining on
-    the very restricted plane of immediate space. But it goes without saying that
-    this organiza- tion, circumscribed as it is by the limitations of action, still
-    does not constitute a form of thought. On the contrary, the whole development
-    of thought, from the advent of language to the end of childhood, is necessary
-    in order that the completed sensori- motor structures, which may even be
-    co-ordinated in the form of empirical groups, may be extended into genuine
-    operations, which will constitute or reconstruct these groupings and groups at
-    the level of symbolic behaviour and reflective reasoning.
-
-    -- 127-128
-
-## Logic and psychology
-
-    An axiomatics is an exclusively hypothetico-deductive sci-
-    ence, i.e., it reduces to a minimum appeals to experience (it even
-    aims to eliminate them entirely) in order freely to reconstruct its
-    object by means of undemonstrable propositions (axioms),
-    which are to be combined as rigorously as possible and in every
-    possible way. In this way geometry has made great progress,
-    seeking to liberate itself from all intuition and constructing the
-    most diverse spaces simply by defining the primary elements to
-    be admitted by hypothesis and the operations to which they are
-    subject. The axiomatic method is thus the mathematical method
-    par excellence and it has had numerous applications, not only in
-    pure mathematics, but in various fields of applied mathematics
-    (from theoretical physics to mathematical economics). The use-
-    fulness of an axiomatics, in fact, goes beyond that of demonstra-
-    tion (although in this field it constitutes the only rigorous
-    method); in the face of complex realities, resisting exhaustive
-    analysis, it permits us to construct simplified models of reality
-    and thus provides the study of the latter with irreplaceable dis-
-    secting instruments. To sum up, an axiomatics constitutes a “pat-
-    tern” for reality, as F. Gonseth has clearly shown, and, since all
-    abstraction leads to a schematization, the axiomatic method in
-    the long run extends the scope of intelligence itself.
-
-    But precisely because of its “schematic” character, an axiomat-
-    ics cannot claim to be the basis of, and still less to replace, its
-    corresponding experimental science, i.e. the science relating to
-    that sector of reality for which the axiomatics forms the pattern.
-    Thus, axiomatic geometry is incapable of teaching us what the
-    space of the real world is like (and “pure economics” in no way
-    exhausts the complexity of concrete economic facts). No axi-
-    omatics could replace the inductive science which corresponds
-    to it, for the essential reason that its own purity is merely a limit
-    which is never completely attained. As Gonseth also says, there
-    always remains an intuitive residue in the most purified pattern
-    (just as there is already an element of schematization in all intu-
-    ition). This reason alone is enough to show why an axiomatics
-    will never be the basis of an experimental science and why there
-    is an experimental science corresponding to every axiomatics
-    (and, no doubt, vice versa).
-
-    -- page 30
-
-    It is true that in addition to the individual consistency of
-    actions there enter into thought interactions of a collective order
-    and consequently “norms” imposed by this collaboration. But
-    co-operation is only a system of actions, or of operations, car-
-    ried out in concert, and we may repeat the preceding argument
-    for collective symbolic behaviour, which likewise remains at a
-    level containing real structures, unlike axiomatizations of a
-    formal nature.
-
-    For psychology, therefore, there remains unaltered the prob-
-    lem of understanding the mechanism with which intelligence
-    comes to construct coherent structures capable of operational
-    combination; and it is no use invoking “principles” which this
-    intelligence is supposed to apply spontaneously, since logical
-    principles concern the theoretical pattern formulated after
-    thought has been constructed and not this living process of con-
-    struction itself. Brunschvicg has made the profound observation
-    that intelligence wins battles or indulges, like poetry, in a con-
-    tinuous work of creation, while logico-mathematical deduction
-    is comparable only to treatises on strategy and to manuals of
-    “poetic art”, which codify the past victories of action or mind
-    but do not ensure their future conquests. 1
-
-    -- page 34
-
-## Habit and sensori-motor intelligence
-
-Circular reaction:
-
-    Let us imagine an infant in a cradle with a raised cover from which
-    hang a whole series of rattles and a loose string. The child grasps
-    this and so shakes the whole arrangement without expecting to do
-    so or understanding any of the detailed spatial or causal rela-
-    tions. Surprised by the result, he reaches for the string and
-    carries out the whole sequence several times over. J. M. Baldwin
-    called this active reproduction of a result at first obtained by
-    chance a “circular reaction”. The circular reaction is thus a typ-
-    ical example of reproductive assimilation. The first movement
-    executed and followed by its result constitutes a complete action,
-    which creates a new need once the objects to which it relates
-    have returned to their initial stage; these are then assimilated to
-    the previous action (thereby promoted to the status of a schema)
-    which stimulates its reproduction, and so on. Now this mechan-
-    ism is identical with that which is already present at the source
-    of elementary habits except that, in their case, the circular reac-
-    tion affects the body itself (so we will give the name “primary
-    circular reaction” to that of the early level, such as the schema of
-    thumb-sucking), whereas thenceforward, thanks to prehension,
-    it is applied to external objects (we will call this behaviour affect-
-    ing objects the “secondary circular reaction,” although we must
-    remember that these are not yet by any means conceived as
-    substances by the child).
-
-    -- 110-112
-
-Early intelligence:
-
-    The routes between the subject and the object fol-
-    lowed by action, and also by sensori-motor reconstitutions and
-    anticipations, are no longer direct and simple pathways as at the
-    previous stages: rectilinear as in perception, or stereotyped and
-    uni-directional as in circular reactions. The routes begin to vary
-    and the utilisation of earlier schemata begins to extend further in
-    time. This is characteristic of the connection between means and
-    ends, which henceforth are differentiated, and this is why we
-    may begin to speak of true intelligence. But, apart from the
-    continuity that links it with earlier behaviour, we should note the
-    limitations of this early intelligence: there are no inventions or
-    discoveries of new means, but simply application of known
-    means to unforeseen circumstances.
-
-    -- 114
-
-Innovation:
-
-    Two acquisitions characterise the next stage, both relating to
-    the utilisation of past experience. The assimilatory schemata so
-    far described are of course continually accommodated to
-    external data. But this accommodation is, so to speak, suffered
-    rather than sought; the subject acts according to his needs and
-    this action either harmonizes with reality or encounters resist-
-    ances which it tries to overcome. Innovations which arise for-
-    tuitously are either neglected or else assimilated to previous
-    schemata and reproduced by circular reaction. However, a time
-    comes when the innovation has an interest of its own, and this
-    certainly implies a sufficient stock of schemata for comparisons
-    to be possible and for the new fact to be sufficiently like the
-    known one to be interesting and sufficiently different to avoid
-    satiation. Circular reaction, then, will consist of a reproduction
-    of the new phenomenon, but with variations and active
-    experimentation that are intended precisely to extract from it its
-    new possibilities.
-
-    -- 114
-
-Topology:
-
-    But there now arises a problem whose discussion leads to the study of space.
-    Perceptual constancy is the product of simple regulations and we saw (Chap. 3)
-    that the absence at all ages of absolute constancy and the existence of adult
-    “superconstancy” provide evidence for the regulative rather than operational
-    char- acter of the system. There is, therefore, all the more reason why it
-    should be true of the first two years. Does not the construction of space, on
-    the other hand, lead quite rapidly to a grouping structure and even a group
-    structure in accordance with
-    
-    Poincaré’s famous hypothesis concerning the psychologically primary influence of
-    the “group of displacements?” The genesis of space in sensori-motor
-    intelligence is com- pletely dominated by the progressive organisation of
-    responses, and this in effect leads to a “group” structure. But, contrary to
-    Poincaré’s belief in the a priori nature of the group of dis- placements, this
-    is developed gradually as the ultimate form of equilibrium reached by this
-    motor organisation. Successive co-ordinations (combinativity), reversals
-    (reversibility), detours (associativity) and conservations of position
-    (identity) gradually give rise to the group, which serves as a necessary
-    equilibrium for actions.
-
-    At the first two stages (reflexes and elementary habits), we could not even speak
-    of a space common to the various per- ceptual modalities, since there are as
-    many spaces, all mutually heterogeneous, as there are qualitatively distinct
-    fields (mouth, visual, tactile, etc.). It is only in the course of the third
-    stage that the mutual assimilation of these various spaces becomes system- atic
-    owing to the co-ordination of vision with prehension. Now, step by step with
-    these co-ordinations, we see growing up elementary spatial systems which
-    already presage the form of composition characteristic of the group. Thus, in
-    the case of interrupted circular reaction, the subject returns to the starting-
-    point to begin again; when his eyes are following a moving object that is
-    travelling too fast for continuous vision (falling etc.), the subject
-    occasionally catches up with the object by dis- placements of his own body to
-    correct for those of the external moving object.
-
-    But it is as well to realise that, if we take the point of view of the subject
-    and not merely that of a mathematical observer, the construction of a group
-    structure implies at least two conditions: the concept of an object and the
-    decentralisation of movements by correcting for, and even reversing, their
-    initial egocentricity.  In fact, it is clear that the reversibility
-    characteristic of the group presupposes the concept of an object, and also vice
-    versa, since to retrieve an object is to make it possible for oneself to return
-    (by displacing either the object itself or one’s own body). The object is
-    simply the constant due to the reversible composition of the group.
-    Furthermore, as Poincaré himself has clearly shown, the idea of displacement as
-    such implies the possibility of differentiating between irreversible changes of
-    state and those changes of position that are characterized precisely by their
-    reversibility (or by their possible correction through movements of one’s own
-    body). It is obvious, therefore, that without con- servation of objects there
-    could not be any “group”, since then everything would appear as a “change of
-    state”. The object and the group of displacements are thus indissociable, the
-    one con- stituting the static aspect and the other the dynamic aspect of the
-    same reality. But this is not all: a world with no objects is a universe with
-    no systematic differentiation between subjective and external realities, a world
-    that is consequently “adualistic” (J. M. Baldwin). By this very fact, such a
-    universe would be centred on one’s own actions, the subject being all the more
-    dominated by this egocentric point of view because he remains
-    un-self-conscious. But the group implies just the opposite attitude: a complete
-    decentralisation, such that one’s own body is located as one element among
-    others in a system of displacements enabling one to distinguish between one’s
-    own movements and those of objects.
-
-    -- 123-125