Constructivism III: Recovering Discoveries

One of the great puzzles to me is Piaget’s research on object permanence.  It is a mark of intellectual advancement to him when an infant of around nine months is able to realize (odd, isn’t it, how realism sneaks into the most innocent words!) that when a toy is hidden underneath a blanket that it still exists, regardless of the fact that the child cannot see it. 

Yet Piaget denied that we form pictures of the real world (S 15).  Through assimilation and accommodation alone our cognitive structures are altered by our experience and mistakes corrected.  But how does such a process account for the toddler (around nine months) suddenly grasping the notion that the toy is under the blanket, when she has not had the prior experience of its hidden existence?  Our language suggests a different paradigm:  we use the word insight to explain a mental visualization of something that may or may not exist.  We “see” the problem or its solution, envisioning what is not before us or what a course of action might lead to.  We then act on our insight, and dis-cover  what we have hypothesized, however incoherently, is there.  In the process, our child finds her toy, which was, as she then realizes, there all along. 

It’s an interesting word, “discover.”  Piaget writes, “from an empiricist point of view, a ‘discovery’ is new for the person who makes it, but what is discovered was already in existence in external reality and there is therefore no construction of new realities” (GE 77).  He disputes this.  Yet it is precisely this sense in which Piaget uses the word “discover” or “discovery” several times in Structuralism (5, 24, 27, 32, 45, 56, 61). 

Piaget can write, “structure was discovered” (S 55), implying that structure existed before we discovered it.  The toy existed under the blanket before the child uncovered it.  The Pythagorean Theorem existed before Pythagoras—or whoever—discovered it. (This is not Platonism:  it is the nature of a right triangle that the sum of the squares of the sides should equal the square of the hypotenuse.) 

If we have discovered a theorem and toys and structures, it is likely we have discovered much else that was “external,” indifferent to our knowledge of it.  Once discovered, we can share our new knowledge by objectifying it through language (Popper 25).  That is how the Pythagorean Theorem means the same thing everywhere.

We do not need to dispute that we understand the world through conceptual frameworks that we construct, but those are amenable to change in a way that object permanence is not.  Though Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions has served as justification for Constructivism, Boghossian points out that Kuhn documents the empirical data that led to scientific revolutions.  They are facts that are external, that defy explanation by the prevailing paradigm.  At a certain point, accommodation is not possible according to Kuhn’s account:  only a new paradigm will serve.

References

Boghossian, Paul. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford: Clarendon, 2006. Print.

Kuhn, Thomas S.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Second Edition.  Chicago:  University of Chicago, 1970. Print

Piaget, Jean. Genetic Epistemology (GE). Trans. Eleanor Duckworth. New York: Columbia UP, 1970. Print. Woodbridge Lectures Delivered at Columbia University in October 1968. Print.

Piaget, Jean. Structuralism (S). Trans. Chaninah Maschler. New York: Basic, 1970. Print.

Popper, Karl R. "Conjectural Knowledge: My Solution to the Problem of Induction." Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon. 1-31. Print.