Piaget's Theory

Piaget's Theory on Cognitive Progression as the correct view of Personality Development Philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget has numerous contributions to the modern understanding of human intellectual development, particularly in developmental psychology, which Piaget pioneered. After reading different theories of human development, Piaget's Theory caught my attention and made me interested in finding out how he conducted his research and how he came to his conclusions.

Piaget was a psychologist with a decidedly biologist-oriented touch. He was also a philosopher and an epistemologist. As an epistemologist, he believed that an understanding of the nature of cognitive development in infants and children is essential to a more general understanding of the nature of knowledge. Piaget also worked on what he called genetic

epistemology (what we would now call evolutionary epistemology). He can be considered the father of developmental psychology as well as an important cognitive theorist.

An individual's personality is simply the sum of his methods of responding to stimulus, which derive from knowledge. Hence, to understand personality one must understand the nature of knowledge and intellectual development. Piaget was the first to establish a body of theory on how intelligence develops in humans (with particular emphasis on children). He believed that we need to understand how knowledge is acquired to be able to understand the nature of knowledge at all. To understand this acquisition of knowledge, he performed various psychological experiments and investigations. He was a pioneer in making us understand human

mental development by focusing on the seemingly illogical methods of children. He thought of the study of infants and youngsters as essential in discovering the nature of human knowledge. Piaget was also a biologist, and held the belief that cognitive development was a biological process, a way of adapting to the environment. He also believed that knowledge is operative, which is, primarily founded upon an awareness of change in the environment. He was

against "preformation" (or the doctrine of innate ideas) and environmental determinism. He introduced the view of the child's mind is not the tabula rasa that it was previously believed to be, but that children also constantly "invent" and reconfigure their own knowledge. Piaget stated that "Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves". This is in keeping with what I think of as an encouragement of imagination and creativity. It suggests that active theorizing, no matter how illogical (in children at least) is more important than the dead finality of correctness.

Piaget was committed to understanding human