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* 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
@@ -33,6 +37,90 @@ 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).
+
+## 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-
@@ -171,3 +259,68 @@ Innovation:
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