The Piagetian Approach to the Scientific Method

Abstract

One cannot really understand the importance of Piagetian psychology, and thus the pedagogical implications of it, if one does not understand its epistemological foundations. Piaget himself said on many occasions that his psychological work was the consequence of epistemological questions that he raised at the beginning of his scientific career. For instance, in 1961 he wrote:

I decided that for building a biological epistemology it would have been necessary—in the absence of any information on the philogenesis of knowledge and on the prehistorical sociogenesis of men’s knowledges—to devote myself to an equivalent of the embriogenetic analysis, and thus to study the growth of the intelligence in the child and the development of the principal intellectual operations. I proposed spending some five years in these preliminary studies, and then returning to general questions. But these preliminary studies occupied me for forty years, and it is from a period of less than ten years that I can approach epistemology from the genetic point of view that I decided to assume. (Beth & Piaget, 1961)