Piaget and the Egocentric Tradition

Abstract

Yet an adult demonstrates his egocentrism through his conviction that all mental development must naturally and inevitably lead to modes of thought and feeling exactly like his own, bearing, moreover, the particular stamp of the time and place in which he lives.(Henri Wallon, 1973a) The reason why Piaget's developmental psychology has had such a fascination for educators and psychologists is, in part, that it appears to be based on good empirical data collected in ingenious experiments or in semi-natural settings.For teachers there is the additional bonus that in those experiments Piaget addresses topics that are familiar to them from their own classroom experience.However, Piaget provides not only empirical data.He also supplies concepts to interpret the data: central concepts such as egocentricity, subject and object, action, interaction, adaptation, equilibrium, structure, and transformation.Such concepts are theory-laden.They go far beyond the information given in the empirical data.They have their origins in particular contexts of inquiry, and their extension to other contexts of human endeavour are always fraught with the possibility of distortion and misunderstanding.Piaget himself has warned his readers that his theory of development, which is mainly a theory of development of cognitive functions, "is impossible to understand if one does not begin by analyzing 162 epistemological consequences in which it ends," (quoted in Boden, 1980).This warning clearly deserves to be taken seriously.The fact that this has not always been done has led to the spectacle in North American psychology which Broughton, in the first of five essays devoted to a comprehensive critique of Piagetian theory, describes as follows:

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