Re#ections on Piaget's sociological studies

Re#ecting on Piaget's recently translated collection of sociological studies, we highlight some salient points in his approach to sociological issues. At the same time we attempt to explain the contrast between Piaget's singular in#uence in cognitive and developmental psychology with nothing comparable in empirical sociology. We believe that our own social research is a genuine continuation of what had remained on a speculative level in Piaget. One of us focused on the constructive, the other on the interrelational aspect of Piaget's thought. ( 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. A recent English translation of sociological writings composed by Piaget (1970, 1995a) during the years 1928}1960 provides the opportunity to re#ect on Piaget's fertile thought as it relates to the human social reality. We as authors of these re#ections are aware that our contact with Piaget's thought started early in our research career, nearly 40 years ago, when together we explored the thinking potential of profoundly deaf children. These children seemed to lack a cognitive tool available to all other healthy children, namely, the mastery of a conventional language, whether it was in the form of English or the American Sign Language. (Nearly all of these deaf children came from hearing parents and were intentionally kept away from the deaf community.) `Thinking without languagea, the title of the book summarizing our "rst years of research (Furth, 1966), sounded almost contradictory to contemporary scholars who considered human language as the direct or indirect foundation of thinking. Indeed, you could say that for many scholars knowledge was likened to something like an interiorized dictionary of a language. In this context, Piaget was the welcome exception. In his theory, knowledge was treated as an action, that is, an active know-how. For Piaget, the development of thinking had its source in the coordination of actions and was described as a gradual construction on the part of the child. It included above all the construction of 0732-118X/00/$ see front matter ( 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S 0 7 3 2 1 1 8 X ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 0 2 7 cognitive tools (such as the mature logical framework) and communicative tools (such as the acquisition of a societal language). In this perspective, logical thinking is not directly dependent on knowing a language. If anything, it is the other way around: societal relations are the preconditions of a societal language. In any case, the development of normal thinking in children without mastery of a conventional language was no problem within Piaget's theoretical framework. In fact, we believe that our research with deaf people is a strong con"rmation of the soundness and fertility of his overall theoretical approach to knowledge. It is generally recognized that Piaget's research consistently had an epistemological focus. This means that even in the one "eld where he turned most consistently to empirical evidence* the intellectual development of the child* he was always more concerned with theoretical questions about the general nature of knowledge than with the speci"c psychology of the child. Thus, he was not really interested in studying what we would call individual di!erences, even though he observed them in his three children and generally took them for granted. His paramount strategy of exploring knowledge was to observe how children change and move from a less to a more comprehensive manner of knowing. Observation of these changes in the active use of knowledge gave Piaget a basis and a check for answering epistemological questions which motivated his research in the "rst place. This strategy resulted in a multitude of new psychological insights related to the nature of knowledge. We would like here to single out three notions, both because they are insightful for knowledge itself and also because in our estimation they are fundamental for an understanding of human social reality. What Piaget calls the `permanent objecta is in fact nothing else but the origin of what for lack of a better word we refer to as `mentala reality (in contrast to present sensorimotor reality). The second related notion of note is Piaget's explanation of how children come to construct `mental signi"ersa or `symbolsa (again, in contrast to sensorimotor `action signi"ersa or `signalsa). Observing the development of his own three children, Piaget described how these two capacities * the formation of mental objects and mental symbols* were gradually acquired by the end of the second year. And third, there is Piaget's notion of `operationa as a general framework that puts some degree of logical order into the children's mentality. This logical framework, on account of its generality and felt necessity, permits a meaningful sharing of mental objects and symbols within children's social world. Our "rst impression in examining Piaget's explicit investigation into sociality is the contrast between the riches of new insights that Piaget's theory was able to engender in the psychological "eld and the relative poverty in the sociological "eld; or perhaps it would be better to put it in terms of abstractness. With the single exception of one small empirical study concerning children's idea of homeland (Chapter 7)* and this has more to do with a child's social knowledge than with social reality * all the writings in this volume are on a theoretical and speculative level. Quite di!erent from the many psychological studies undertaken by him and his school, there are no empirical observations of constructing social reality. Even more surprising, Piaget's notion of genetic constructivism, the rock bottom of his entire research, is nowhere applied to human society as such. 122 H.G. Furth, J. Youniss / New Ideas in Psychology 18 (2000) 121}133