Celebrating Divergence: Piaget and Vygotsky

Abstract

Contrasting Piaget’s emphasis on the invariant logic of growth with Vygotsky’s emphasis upon the centrality of culturally patterned dialogue in the enablement of growth, one is led to conclude that their two approaches were incommensurate. This incommensurateness may expresss a deep and possibly irreconcilable difference between two ways of knowing: one seeking to ‘explain’ and the other to ‘interpret’ human growth and the human condition. We are blessed to have had such gifted exponents of the two views at the very start of our discipline, for their divergence has alerted us to the deeper puzzles posed by research in human development.

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