11.3 Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Stage
General Description
Cognitive Develop- ment
Origin of Life
Automatic
System-environment information exchange controlled mainly by struc-
innate system
tures or environment
Piagetan infantile
stage
Selforganizing proto- life system, e.g. Oparin [Opa52] water droplet, or Cairns-Smith [CS90] clay-based protolife
Adaptive
System-environment info exchange heavily guided by adaptively internally-created system structures
Piagetan “concrete op- erational” stage: sys- tematic internal world- world-
model guides
exploration
Simple autopoietic sys- tem, e.g. Oparin wa- ter droplet w/ basic metabolism
Symbolic
Internal symbolic rep- resentation of informa- tion exchange process
Piagetan formal stage: explicit logical/experi- mental learning about how to cognize in var- ious contexts
Genetic code: inter-
nal entities that “stand
for”
aspects of organ- ism and environment, thus enabling complex
epigenesis
Reflexive
Thoroughgoing self- based
symbolic
modification on this representation
Piagetan post-formal stage: purposive self- modification of basic mental processes
Genes+memes: genetic code-patterns guide their own modification via influencing culture
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Table 11.1: General Systems Theory of Development: Parallels Between Development of Mind
and Origin of Life
Indeed, Piaget viewed developmental stages as emerging from general “algebraic” principles rather than as being artifacts of the particulars of human psychology. But, Piaget’s stages are probably best viewed as a general interpretive framework rather than a precise scientific theory. Our suspicion is that once the empirical science of developmental psychology has progressed further, it will become clearer how to fit the various data into a broad Piaget-like framework, perhaps differing in many details from what Piaget described in his works.
Piaget conceived of child development in four stages, each roughly identified with an age group, and corresponding closely to the system-theoretic stages mentioned above:
e infantile, corresponding to the automatic stage mentioned above
— Example: Grasping blocks, piling blocks on top of each other, copying words that are
heard
® preoperational and concrete operational, corresponding to the adaptive stage men-
tioned above
— Example: Building complex blocks structures, from imagination and from imitating objects and pictures and based on verbal instructions; verbally describing what has been constructed
e formal, corresponding to the symbolic stage mentioned above
— Example: Writing detailed instructions in words and diagrams, explaining how to con- struct particular structures out of blocks; figuring out general rules describing which sorts of blocks structures are likely to be most stable
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