Mind Is An Extension Of Natural Structure For Piaget

The Developmental Stages Of Children

The Accommodation/Assimilation Process Allows For The Intelligent Navigation Of Our Environment

From his experiments and observations with children, Piaget identified three
developmental stages that a child must pass through before the child can attain a
mature state of psychological development. In the first stage, the sensorimotor stage, an infant encounters a resistant environment and, in the process, is made aware of objects, space, time, and causality. It is at this stage where the infant acquires what Piaget calls a "practical intelligence."

In the preoperational or representation stage of development, the child evolves
toward the possession of concrete operations. At this stage of development, up
to and including the elementary years, the child learns the implicit nature of
concrete operations; that is, the child no longer has to "go through the
movements" in order to coordinate its own activities in a recognizable and
ordered world. The term concrete here signifies that the matters of fact materials
that a child uses to measure his/her world are “real things," e.g., people,
physical objects, etc. It is only after the child has reached the stage of formal
operations, sometime between the ages of twelve and fifteen, that the child is
able to conceptualize what is not perceived (e.g., principles of conservation,
reversibility, transitivity, etc.) in his/her capacity to invoke reasoned
judgments and deductive thought.

Piaget specified the logical operations which occur at each of the
three developmental stages, i.e., sensorimotor, representational, and formal
operative. To my knowledge the evidence for the validation of this claim is
still inconclusive, however, it seems to me that Piaget's theory is so well
articulated that it is only a matter of time before it will be conclusively
rejected or confirmed.

Before I move on to Michel Foucault, the last structuralist I want to talk
about in this paper, I believe a few words are in order concerning where the
"self" is located in Piaget's constructivist structuralism. In so far as Piaget
locates intelligence in structure and understands structure to arise from a
constructive process of continual assimilation and accommodation of an organism
in its environment, one could say that Piaget was taking a transcendental
Kantian perspective on self. But, in so far as Piaget locates structure in
nature as much as he locates it in the mind, and in fact understands mind to be
an extension of natural structure, he dissociates himself from Kant as he takes
a more holistic position on self. This position separates Piaget from the
structuralists I have dealt with previously in this paper.