"Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions"
About this Quote
Piaget is quietly drawing a line between doing and knowing, and the line lands where most adults assume it started: not inside the solitary mind, but in the choreography of behavior. “Reflective abstraction” sounds like a philosopher’s parlor trick until you notice what he’s insisting on here: higher thinking isn’t extracted from one-off acts (grabbing, counting, stacking) but from the way those acts are organized, repeated, and made to work together. The mind doesn’t simply record experience; it composes it.
The specific intent is methodological as much as theoretical. Piaget is arguing against accounts of learning that treat concepts as either copied from the world (empiricism) or preloaded in the head (nativism). For him, abstraction is earned: children build concepts by coordinating schemes - linking actions into systems with rules, reversibility, and conservation. “Coordinated actions” is the tell. It points to structure: the relations between actions, the pattern that survives when the specific objects change.
The subtext is a kind of democratic insult to adult intuition. We like to picture intelligence as a flash of insight; Piaget frames it as a slow engineering project. A child understands number not by touching “three” but by coordinating acts of one-to-one correspondence, ordering, and counting, then reflecting on that coordination.
Context matters: Piaget is writing in a 20th-century moment hungry for scientific accounts of development, when psychology is trying to distinguish itself from introspection and pure behaviorism. This line smuggles in his big claim: cognition is constructed, and the blueprint is action organized into systems.
The specific intent is methodological as much as theoretical. Piaget is arguing against accounts of learning that treat concepts as either copied from the world (empiricism) or preloaded in the head (nativism). For him, abstraction is earned: children build concepts by coordinating schemes - linking actions into systems with rules, reversibility, and conservation. “Coordinated actions” is the tell. It points to structure: the relations between actions, the pattern that survives when the specific objects change.
The subtext is a kind of democratic insult to adult intuition. We like to picture intelligence as a flash of insight; Piaget frames it as a slow engineering project. A child understands number not by touching “three” but by coordinating acts of one-to-one correspondence, ordering, and counting, then reflecting on that coordination.
Context matters: Piaget is writing in a 20th-century moment hungry for scientific accounts of development, when psychology is trying to distinguish itself from introspection and pure behaviorism. This line smuggles in his big claim: cognition is constructed, and the blueprint is action organized into systems.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|
More Quotes by Jean
Add to List
