Words matter. These are the best Jean Piaget Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.
All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules.
The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.
Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.
Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.
I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.
Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life.
Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.
The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.
Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.
One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.
The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.
Play is the answer to the question, ‘How does anything new come about?’
I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.
Play is the work of childhood.
The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.
I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health.
Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
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.
Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.
The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.
The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.
To reason logically is so to link one’s propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one’s own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other.
To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.
