The Construction of Reality in the Child (Part 2)

Jean Piaget (1955)

§ 2. The Transition from Sensorimotor Intelligence to Conceptual Thought

This last remark leads us to examine briefly, in conclusion, the relations between the practical universe elaborated by the sensorimotor intelligence and the representation of the world brought about by later reflective thought.

In the course of the first two years of childhood the evolution of sensorimotor intelligence, and also the correlative elaboration of the universe, seem, as we have tried to analyse them, to lead to a state of equilibrium bordering on rational thought. Thus, starting with the use of reflexes and the first acquired association, the child succeeds within a few months in constructing a system of schemata capable of unlimited combinations which presages that of logical concepts and relations. During the last stage of their development these schemata even become capable of certain spontaneous and internal regroupings which are equivalent to mental deduction and construction. Moreover, gradually as objects, causality, space, and time are elaborated, a coherent universe follows the chaos of the initial egocentric perceptions. When in the second year of life representation completes action by means of the progressive internalisation of behaviour patterns, one might therefore expect that the totality of sensorimotor operations would merely pass from the plane of action to that of language and thought and that the organisation of schemata would thus be directly extended in a system of rational concepts.

In reality, things are far from being so simple. In the first place, on the plane of practical intelligence alone, the excellent studies of Andre Reyl show that not all the problems are solved by the child by the end of his second year. As soon as the data of problems become complicated and the subjects are obliged to attain their ends by means of complex contacts or displacements, in the solution of these new problems through a sort of temporal displacement in extension we rediscover all the obstacles analysed in this volume apropos of the elementary stages of the first two years of life. Furthermore, and this is valuable to the theory of temporal displacements, these obstacles reappear in the same order despite the gap which separates the ages of birth to 2 years, studied here, from the ages of three to eight years studied by Andre Rey. Thus in Rey’s experiments the child begins by revealing a sort of "dynamic realism," "in the course of which the movement (pulling, pushing, etc.) would possess a quality independent of any adaptation to the particular data of the environment." Then he goes through a phase of "optical realism" analogous to that which we observe among chimpanzees, in which he substitutes for the physical relations of bodies the visual relations corresponding to the apparent data of perception. How is it possible not to compare these two preliminary steps to those which characterise the beginnings of sensorimotor intelligence and of the practical universe resulting from them? Dynamic realism is the residue of the assimilation of things to actions that accounts for practical groups and series, for the magico-phenomenalistic causality and the object-less universe peculiar to our elementary stages. Before being able to structure a complex situation, the child from three to four years of age, like the baby a few months old who is confronted by a situation that is simpler but from his point of view obscure, is limited to assimilating it to the act which should be performed. Because of a residual belief in the power of his personal activity, he still confers upon his gestures a sort of absolute value, which is tantamount to forgetting momentarily that things are permanent substances grouped spatially, seriated temporally, and sustaining among themselves objective causal relations. With regard to optical realism it seems clear that it constitutes a residue of behaviour patterns which are intermediate between the primitive egocentric stages and the stages of objectification, behaviour patterns characterised by subjective groups and series or by transitional behaviour relating to the beginnings of the object and of spatialized causality. Optical realism, too, consists in considering things as being what they appear to be in immediate perception and not what they will become once they have been inserted in a system of rational relations transcending the visual field. Thus the child imagines that a stick can draw an object because it is beside it or touches it, as though optical contact were equivalent to a causal link. It is precisely this confusion of immediate visual perceptions with physical realities that characterises the subjective groups or series, for example, when the baby does not know how to turn over a nursing bottle because he cannot conceive of the object’s reverse side, or when he imagines himself able to rediscover objects where he saw them the first time, regardless of their actual trajectory.

Hence, between the sensorimotor intelligence which precedes the advent of speech and the later practical intelligence which subsists under verbal and conceptual realities, there is not only a linear continuity but also there are temporal displacements in extension, so that in the presence of every truly new problem the same primitive processes of adaptation reappear, although diminishing in importance with age.

But above all, even if these obstacles encountered in action by the two- to seven-year-old child are destined to be overcome finally, through the instruments prepared by the sensorimotor intelligence during the first two years of life, the transition from the merely practical plane to that of speech and conceptual and socialised thought brings with it, by nature, obstacles that singularly complicate the progress of intelligence.

At the outset, two innovations place conceptual thought in opposition to sensorimotor intelligence and explain the difficulty of transition from one of these two forms of intellectual activity to the other. In the first place, sensorimotor intelligence seeks only practical adaptation, that is, it aims only at success or utilisation, whereas conceptual thought leads to knowledge as such and therefore yields to norms of truth. Even when the child explores a new object or studies the displacements he provokes [by a sort of "experiment in order to see," there is always in these kinds of sensorimotor assimilations, however precise the accommodation they evidence, the concept of a practical result to be obtained. By virtue of the very fact that the child cannot translate his observations into a system of verbal judgments and reflexive concepts but can simply register them by means of sensorimotor schemata, that is, by outlining possible actions, there can be no question of attributing to him the capacity of arriving at pure proofs or judgments properly so called, but it must be said that these judgments, if they were expressed in words, would be equivalent to something like, "one can do this with this object," "one could achieve this result," etc. In the behaviour patterns oriented by an actual goal, such as the discovery of new means through active experimentation or the invention of new means through mental combinations, the sole problem is to reach the desired goal, hence the only values involved are success or failure, and to the child it is not a matter of seeking a truth for itself or reflecting upon the relations which made it possible to obtain the desired result. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that sensorimotor intelligence is limited to desiring success or practical adaptation, whereas the function of verbal or conceptual thought is to know and state truths.

There is a second difference between these two types of activity: sensorimotor intelligence is an adaptation of the individual to things or to the body of another person but without socialisation of the intellect as such; whereas conceptual thought is collective thought obeying common laws. Even when the baby imitates an intelligent act performed by someone else or understands, from a smile or an expression of displeasure, the intentions of another person, we still may not call this an exchange of thoughts leading to modification of those intentions. On the contrary, after speech has been acquired the socialisation of thought is revealed by the elaboration of concepts, of relations, and by the formation of rules, that is, there is a structural evolution. It is precisely to the extent that verbal-conceptual thought is transformed by its collective nature that it becomes capable of proof and search for truth, in contradistinction to the practical character of the acts of sensorimotor intelligence and their search for success or satisfaction. It is by cooperation with another person that the mind arrives at verifying judgments, verification implying a presentation or an exchange and having in itself no meaning as regards individual activity. Whether conceptual thought is rational because it is social or vice versa, the interdependence of the search for truth and of socialisation seems to us undeniable.

The adaptation of intelligence to these new realities, when speech and conceptual thought are superimposed on the sensorimotor plane, entails the reappearance of all the obstacles already overcome in the realm of action. That is why, despite the level reached by the intelligence in the fifth and sixth stages of its sensorimotor development, it does not appear to be rational at the outset, when it begins to be organised on the verbal-conceptual plane. On the contrary, it manifests a series of temporal displacements in comprehension and no longer only in extension, since in view of corresponding operations the child of a given age is less advanced on the verbal-conceptual plane than on the plane of action. In simpler terms, the child does not at first succeed in reflecting in words and concepts the procedures that he already knows how to carry out in acts, and if he cannot reflect them it is because, in order to adapt himself to the collective and conceptual plane on which his thought will henceforth move, he is obliged to repeat the work of coordination between assimilation and accommodation already accomplished in his sensorimotor adaptation anterior to the physical and practical universe.

It is easy to prove: (1) that the assimilation and accommodation of the individual from the time of the beginnings of speech present a balance less well developed in relation to the social group than in the realm of sensorimotor intelligence; and ( 2 ) that to make possible the adaptation of the mind to the group these functions must proceed again over the same steps, and in the same order, as during the first months of life. From the social point of view, accommodation is nothing other than imitation and the totality of the operations enabling the individual to subordinate himself to the precepts and the demands of the group. With regard to assimilation it consists as before in incorporating reality into the activity and perspectives of the self. Just as on the plane of adaptation to the sensorimotor universe the subject, while submitting to the constraints of the environment from the very beginning, starts by considering things as dependent on his actions and succeeds only little by little in placing himself as an element in a totality which is coherent and independent of himself, so also on the social plane the child, while at first obeying someone else’s suggestions, for a long time remains enclosed in his personal point of view before placing it among other points of view. The self and the group therefore begin by remaining undissociated in a mixture of egocentrism and submission to environmental constraints, and subsequently are differentiated and give rise to a cooperation between personalities which have become autonomous. In other words, at the time when assimilation and accommodation are already dissociated on the plane of sensorimotor adaptation, they are not yet dissociated on the social plane, and thus they reproduce there an evolution analogous to that which has already occurred on the former plane.

From this arises a series of consequences very important in the structure of the child’s thought at its beginnings. Just as sensorimotor intelligence starts as the assimilation of objects to the schemata of personal activity with necessary accommodation but of inverse tendency to the preceding accommodation, and subsequently arrives at a precise adaptation to reality through the coordination of assimilation with accommodation, so also thought, at its advent, begins by being the assimilation of reality to the self with accommodation to the thought of others but without synthesis of these two tendencies, and only later acquires the rational unity which reconciles personal perspective with reciprocity.

In the first place, just as practical intelligence seeks success before truth, egocentric thought, to the extent that it is assimilation to the self, leads to satisfaction and not to objectivity. The extreme form of this assimilation to personal desires and interests is symbolic or imaginative play in which reality is transformed by the needs of the self to the point where the meanings of thought may remain strictly individual and incommunicable. But between this ultimate region of egocentric thought (a region in which the symbolic imagination makes it possible to increase tenfold the possibilities of satisfaction offered to the action and consequently to reinforce the tendencies of assimilation to personal activity previously manifested by sensorimotor intelligence) and thought adapted to another person is found an important zone of thought which, while presenting no quality of play, presents analogous characteristics of anomia and egocentrism. To account for this it is enough to demonstrate the difficulty experienced by little children from two to six years of age in participating in a conversation or a discussion, in narrating or explaining, in short, in emerging from personal thought to adapt themselves to the thought of others. In all the social behaviour patterns of thought it is easy to see how much more easily the child is led to satisfy his desires and to judge from his own personal point of view than to enter into that of others to arrive at an objective view. But in contrast to this powerful assimilation of reality to the self we witness during the earliest stages of individual thought the child’s astonishing docility with respect to the suggestions and statements of another person; the little child constantly repeats what he hears, imitates the attitudes he observes, and thus yields as readily to training by the group as he resists rational intercourse. In short, assimilation to the self and accommodation to others begins with a compromise without profound synthesis, and at first the subject wavers between these two tendencies without being able to control or organise them.

In the second place, there arises a series of intellectual structures peculiar to these beginnings of infantile thought and which reproduce through temporal displacement the initial sensorimotor structures. Thus the first concepts the child uses are not at the outset logical classes capable of operations of addition, multiplication, subtraction, etc., which characterise the logic of classes in its normal functioning, ,but rather kinds of preconcepts proceeding by syncretic assimilations. So also the child who succeeds in handling relationships on the sensorimotor plane begins on the verbal and reflexive plane by substituting for relationships absolute qualities for lack of ability to coordinate the different perspectives and to emerge from the personal point of view to which he assimilates everything. Thereafter the primitive infantile reasoning seems to return to the sensorimotor coordinations of the fifth and sixth stages: not yet familiar with classes or relations properly so called, it consists in simple fusions, in transductions proceeding by syncretic assimilations. It is only in the course of a laborious development which transforms ego-centric assimilation into true deduction, and accommodation into a real adjustment to experience and to perspectives surpassing the personal point of view, that the child’s reasoning becomes rational and thus extends, on the plane of thought, the acquisitions of sensorimotor intelligence.

Thus we see the extent to which the developmental pattern of assimilation and of accommodation characterising sensorimotor intelligence constitutes a general phenomenon capable of being reproduced on this new plane of conceptual thought before accommodation actually extends assimilation. In order better to understand this evolutionary process and this temporal displacement it is fitting to examine more closely a few concrete examples drawn from the facts analysed in this book. ***