The Construction of Reality in the Child (Part 5)

Jean Piaget (1955)

§ 5. Conclusion

The formation of the universe, which seemed accomplished with that of sensorimotor intelligence, is continued throughout the development of thought, which is natural, but is continued while seeming at first to repeat itself, before truly progressing to encompass the data of action in a representative system of the totality. This is the information we have just gained from a comparison of our present observations with the results of examining the representations of the child of three to twelve years of age.

To understand the scope of such a fact we must amplify what we said in §1 of these conclusions about the relations between intellectual assimilation and accommodation, by applying these reflections to the processes of thought itself.

We have tried to show how, on the sensorimotor plane, assimilation and accommodation, at first undifferentiated but pulling behaviour in opposite directions, gradually became differentiated and complementary. From what we have seen with regard to space, object, causality, and time it is clear that on the plane of representative thought, which is at the same time that of social relationships or coordination among individual minds, new assimilations and accommodations become necessary and these in turn begin with a phase of chaotic undifferentiation and later proceed to a complementary differentiation and harmonisation.

During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience. Of course, on the plane of action the child is no longer entirely dominated by the appearance of things, because through sensorimotor intelligence he has managed to construct a coherent practical universe by combining accommodation to objects with assimilation of objects to intercoordinated structures. But when it is a question of transcending action to form an impersonal representation of reality, that is, a communicable image destined to attain truth rather than mere utility, accommodation to things finds itself at grips with new difficulties. It is no longer a matter only of acting but of describing, not only of foreseeing but of explaining, and even if the sensorimotor schemata are already adapted to their own function, which is to insure the equilibrium between individual activity and the perceived environment, thought is obliged to construct a new representation of things to satisfy the common consciousness and the demands of a conception of totality. In this sense the first contact of thought, properly so called, with the material universe constitutes what may be called "immediate experience" in contradistinction to experimentation which is scientific or corrected by the assimilation of things to reason.

Immediate experience, that is, the accommodation of thought to the surface of things, is simply empirical experience which considers, as objective datum, reality as it appears to direct perception. In the numerous cases in which reality coincides with appearance this superficial contact with the object suffices to lead to truth. But the further one departs from the field of immediate action to construct an adequate representation of reality, the more necessary it is, to understand the phenomena, to include them in a network of relations becoming increasingly remote from appearance and to insert appearance in a new reality elaborated by reason. In other words, it becomes more and more necessary to correct appearance and this requires the formation of relationships among, or the reciprocal assimilation of, various points of view. In the example we cited in §3 of the groups of displacements relating to mountains, it is obvious that a whole structuring of experience, that is, a rational assimilation and coordination of many possible points of view, is indispensable to make the child understand that, despite appearance, mountains do not displace themselves when one moves in relation to them and that the various perspectives on them do not exclude the permanence of their form. The same applies to attributing stationary banks to a river or a lake when the boat advances and, in a general way, to organising distant space no longer depending on direct action. Concerning objects let us consider the difference between immediate experience relating to the stars, that is, simple accommodation of perception to their apparent size and movements, from the real experience which the mind acquires when it combines that accommodation with an assimilation of the same data to the activity of reason. From the first of these points of view, the stars are little balls or spots located at the same height as clouds; their movements depend on our own walking and their permanence is impossible to determine (even with respect to the sun, there are children who believe in its identity with the moon when they do not, on the contrary, affirm the existence of several suns and moons). From the second point of view, on the contrary, real dimensions and distances no longer have any relation to appearance, the actual trajectories correspond with the apparent movements only through relationships of increasing complexity, and the identity of celestial bodies becomes the function of this system of totality. What is true on a large scale of the stars is always true, on every scale, of objects on which direct action does not bear. With regard to causality, the first example seen, like that of the floating of boats so suggestive to the child, gives rise to the same considerations. By following the course of immediate experience the child begins by believing that small boats float because they are light; but when he sees a tiny piece of lead or a little pebble gliding along at the bottom of the water, he adds that these bodies are doubtless too light and small to be held back by the water; moreover big boats float because they are heavy and can thus carry themselves. In short, if one remains on the surface of things, explanation is possible only at the price of continuous contradictions, because, if it is to embrace the sinuosity of reality, thought must constantly add apparent connections to one another instead of coordinating them in a coherent system of totality. On the contrary, the contact of the mind with real experience leads to a simple explanation, but on condition of completing this elementary accommodation of thought to the immediate data of perception by a correlative assimilation of these data to a system of relationships (between weight and volume, etc.) which reason succeeds in elaborating only by replacing the appearance of things with a real construction. Let us also be satisfied, in the realm of time and duration, with a single example, that of the dissociation of the concept of speed into relations between the concepts of time and the space traversed. From the point of view of immediate experience, the child succeeds very soon in estimating speeds of which he has direct awareness, the spaces traversed in an identical time or the "before" and "after" in arrival at a goal in cases of trajectories of the same length. But there is a considerable gap between this and a dissociation of the notion of speed to extract a measurement of time, for this would involve replacing the direct intuitions peculiar to the elementary accommodation of thought to things by a system of relations involving a constructive assimilation.

In short, thought in all realms starts from a surface contact with the external realities, that is, a simple accommodation to immediate experience. Why then, does this accommodation remain, in the true sense of the word, superficial, and why does it not at once lead to correcting the sensory impression by rational truth? Because, and this is what we are leading up to, primitive accommodation of thought, as previously that of sensorimotor intelligence, is undifferentiated from a distorting assimilation of reality to the self and is at the same time oriented in the opposite direction.

During this phase of superficial accommodation to physical and social experience, we observe a continuous assimilation of the universe not only to the impersonal structure of the mind - which is not completed except on the sensorimotor plane - but also and primarily to the personal point of view, to individual experience, and even to the desires and affectivity of the subject. Considered in its social aspect, this distorting assimilation consists, as we have seen (§2), in a sort of egocentrism of thought so that thought, still unsubmissive to the norms of intellectual reciprocity and logic, seeks satisfaction rather than truth and transforms reality into a function of personal affectivity. From the point of view of the adaptation of thought to the physical universe this assimilation leads to a series of consequences of interest to us here. In the domain of space, for example, it is evident that, if the child remains dominated by the immediate experience of the mountain which is displaced and by the other superficial accommodations we have discussed, it is because these remain undifferentiated from a continual assimilation of reality to the personal point of view; thus the child believes that his own displacements govern those of the mountains, the sky, etc. The same IS true of objects. To the extent the child has difficulty, for example, in constituting the identity of the moon and the stars in general because he does not transcend the immediate experience of their apparent movements, it is because he still believes he is followed by them and thus assimilates the image of their displacements to his own point of view, exactly like the baby whose universe is ill objectified because it is too closely centred on his own activity. With regard to causality, if the child has difficulty in integrating his explanations into a coherent system of relations, this is again because accommodation to the qualitative diversity of reality remains undifferentiated from an assimilation of phenomena to personal activity. Why, for instance, are boats conceived as heavy or light in themselves, without consideration of the relation of weight and volume, if not because weight is evaluated as the function of the subject’s muscular experience instead of being transformed into an objective relationship? So also, the primacy of internal duration over external time attests to the existence of a distorting assimilation which necessarily accompanies primitive accommodation of the mind to the surface of events.

The superficial accommodation of the beginnings of thought and the distorting assimilation of reality to the self are therefore at first undifferentiated and they operate in opposite directions. They are undifferentiated because the immediate experience which characterises the former always, in the last analysis, consists in considering the personal point of view as the expression of the absolute and thus in subjecting the appearance of things to an egocentric assimilation, just as this assimilation is necessarily on a par with a direct perception that excludes the construction of a rational system of relations. But at the beginning, however undifferentiated may be these accommodative operations and those in which assimilation may be discerned, they work in opposite directions. Precisely because immediate experience is accompanied by an assimilation of perceptions to the schemata of personal activity or modelled after it, accommodation to the inner workings of things is constantly impeded by it. Inversely, assimilation of things to the self is constantly held in check by the resistances necessitating this accommodation, since there is involved at least the appearance of reality, which is not unlimitedly pliant to the subject’s will. So also, on the social plane, the constraint imposed by the opinion of others thwarts egocentrism and vice versa, although the two attitudes of imitation of others and assimilation to the self are constantly coexistent and reveal the same difficulties of adaptation to reciprocity and true cooperation.

On the contrary, gradually, as the child’s thought evolves, assimilation and accommodation are differentiated and become increasingly complementary. In the realm of representation of the world this means, on the one hand, that accommodation, instead of remaining on the surface of experience, penetrates it more and more deeply, that is, under the chaos of appearances it seeks regularities and becomes capable of real experimentations to establish them. On the other hand, assimilation, instead of reducing phenomena to the concepts inspired by personal activity, incorporates them in the system of relationships rising from the more profound activity of intelligence itself. True experience and deductive construction thus become simultaneously separate and correlative, whereas in the social realm the increasingly close adjustment of personal thought to that of others and the reciprocal formation of relationships of perspectives insures the possibility of a cooperation that constitutes precisely the environment that is favourable to this elaboration of reason.

Thus it may be seen that thought in its various aspects reproduces on its own plane the processes of evolution we have observed in the case of sensorimotor intelligence and the structure of the initial practical universe. The development of reason, outlined on the sensorimotor level, follows the same laws, once social life and reflective thought have been formed. Confronted by the obstacles which the advent of those new realities raises, at the beginning of this second period of intellectual evolution assimilation and accommodation again find themselves in a situation through which they had already passed on the lower plane. But in proceeding from the purely individual state characteristic of sensorimotor intelligence to the cooperation which defines the plane on which thought will move henceforth, the child, after having overcome his egocentrism and the other obstacles which impede this cooperation, receives from it the instruments necessary to extend the rational construction prepared during the first two years of life and to expand it into a system of logical relationships and adequate representations.***