In thirteen talks recorded in 1951, Piaget follows the construction of intelligence from an infant's first actions to the abstract reasoning of adolescence. He examines symbols, relations, classes and numbers, then tests competing explanations of thought: Russell, Gestalt theory, empiricism and trial and error. Intelligence emerges through action, reversibility and the gradual coordination of operations. Knowledge is neither a copy of the world nor a ready-made framework imposed upon it, but a continuing interaction between the mind and its objects.
Jean Piaget — 2 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: The Psychology of Intelligence by Jean Piaget.
Let us first define intelligence by locating it among mental functions as a whole. Modern psychology has, as we know, abandoned the notion of faculties: the belief that the mind is divided into compartments separated by watertight partitions. One compartment for knowing, another for feeling, another for willing. Modern psychology has even ceased to define its subject through consciousness. It studies behaviour, including consciousness, of course, but extending beyond it. We can, for example, study animal intelligence or an infant’s intelligence without knowing anything about their degree of consciousness. We rely simply on their behaviour. Now, all behaviour involves both cognition and affectivity. Behaviour is inconceivable without both these aspects. Mathematical reasoning, for example, which seems the very model of purely intellectual behaviour, is actually full of feelings. It requires interest and effort; it involves pleasure, disappointment, feelings of harmony, aesthetic feelings, and so on. At the other extreme, a feeling of love presupposes cognitive elements: perception, discrimination and understanding. Affectivity and cognition are therefore two inseparable aspects of all behaviour. Affectivity provides its dynamics, the regulation of its forces, as Janet showed. Intelligence—or rather cognition in the broader sense—provides the structure of behaviour: the whole set of relationships between the subject and the objects of behaviour. But not all cognition is intelligence. There are perceptual structures, images, motor adaptations, and so forth. How, then, can we define intelligence within cognitive functions? This is difficult. Claparède, for example, sought to define intelligence through trial and error. He divided behaviour into three groups: instinct, an inherited adaptation to recurring situations; habit, an acquired adaptation to recurring situations; and intelligence, adaptation to new situations, necessarily involving a certain amount of trial and error. For other authors, however, trial and error must be excluded from intelligence. Bühler likewise divides behaviour into instinct, training and intelligence, but places trial and error under training, reserving intelligence for behaviour involving immediate, sudden understanding without trial and error. Similarly, Köhler sees intelligence as a sudden restructuring of situations. Perception gives us a direct, immediate but incomplete structure. Intelligence completes it by restructuring all the perceptual data. For Köhler too, trial and error must be excluded from intelligence; it is a kind of makeshift substitute for it. Who is right? All three—or none. I mean that the problem, stated in these terms, seems meaningless. There is no absolute criterion in a static sense. Intelligence is defined through development,…