"From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time"
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A child doesn’t “discover” reality so much as assemble it, plank by plank, until the world stops wobbling. Piaget’s line captures the moment when experience hardens into architecture: the universe becomes a set of durable things linked by causes that don’t need you to believe in them. It’s a psychological coming-of-age story disguised as metaphysics.
The specific intent is clinical but radical. Piaget is describing a developmental shift toward what he called object permanence and, more broadly, operational thinking: the capacity to treat objects as stable entities that persist when unseen, and to imagine events as governed by consistent rules. The phrasing “from this time on” matters. It’s not a timeless claim about the cosmos; it’s a timestamp in the mind. Before this, the child’s world is closer to a stream of appearances, where absence can mean annihilation and causality can feel like magic. After it, reality is populated by things that endure, and those things “belong” to space and time rather than to the child’s immediate perception.
The subtext is an argument against naive realism from the inside out. “Objective space and time” aren’t presented as givens but as cognitive achievements, constructed through repeated collisions between expectation and stubborn fact. Piaget’s cool, almost bureaucratic diction (“aggregate,” “causal relations”) performs the point: objectivity feels impersonal because it is. The self gets decentered. The payoff is enormous - prediction, responsibility, science - but so is the loss: the world is no longer tailored to your gaze.
The specific intent is clinical but radical. Piaget is describing a developmental shift toward what he called object permanence and, more broadly, operational thinking: the capacity to treat objects as stable entities that persist when unseen, and to imagine events as governed by consistent rules. The phrasing “from this time on” matters. It’s not a timeless claim about the cosmos; it’s a timestamp in the mind. Before this, the child’s world is closer to a stream of appearances, where absence can mean annihilation and causality can feel like magic. After it, reality is populated by things that endure, and those things “belong” to space and time rather than to the child’s immediate perception.
The subtext is an argument against naive realism from the inside out. “Objective space and time” aren’t presented as givens but as cognitive achievements, constructed through repeated collisions between expectation and stubborn fact. Piaget’s cool, almost bureaucratic diction (“aggregate,” “causal relations”) performs the point: objectivity feels impersonal because it is. The self gets decentered. The payoff is enormous - prediction, responsibility, science - but so is the loss: the world is no longer tailored to your gaze.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
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