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Piaget (1979) had a scientific background and considered cognition accordingly.
Humans have evolved over a very long period, and natural selection has equipped
modern humans with apparatus to allow intelligent behaviour in the world, that is to
modify behaviour patterns in the light of experience as Dewey had noted. A human
being does not enter the world ex nihilo but as the outcome of a long-term selection
process that provides genetic instructions that offer the organism some compatibility
with the environment. Those genetic instructions support the development of a brain
that has structures similar to those that have allowed previous generations to survive
and procreate in the world: we might say our brains are structured to “fit” the world.
This is especially so for humans who despite lacking any exceptional qualities in
terms of strength or speed or visual acuity or sense of smell or tolerance of hot and
arid or cold conditions, etc., are however endowed with facilities to make enough
sense of the world to have a good chance of surviving in it. One aspect of this is
that the newly born infant's brain is “programmed” to learn (as this is something
that has been selected for): to learn new behaviours, and—in particular—to learn to
“re-programme” itself to some extent.
It was in this context that Piaget developed his highly influential model of cog-
nitive development (Bliss, 1995). The newly born baby is equipped to interact with
the environment, and to modify its actions on that environment through feedback.
This pre-supposes the existence of mental structures, schema, that have plasticity.
These schema are sensori-motor: according to Piaget, “thinking” at this stage is
through moving, pushing, touching, sucking, etc. However, Piaget's argument was
that the developing apparatus could not only refine its sensori-motor schema through
feedback processes, but that the ongoing maturation of the brain allowed this level
of cognition to provide the foundations for the development of qualitatively differ-
ent new structures which supported a more abstract form of cognition (Sugarman,
1987). In Piaget's model there were four main “stages” of cognitive development
that occurred through this interaction of brain development (maturation) with feed-
back from experience—learning. The most advanced of the stages in Piaget's system
is formal operations, which supports the use of logical operations in such areas as
science and mathematics.
Many of the details of Piaget's scheme have come under criticism, but some of
the key elements remain highly pertinent. Piaget offered us the modern view of the
brain as an organ which has evolved to
both
develop according to a common general
pattern through childhood and adolescence, and to retain plasticity throughout the
lifespan.
The Cognitive and the Conceptual
Here then we have the basis of another example of a very useful if over-simplistic
distinction. All human brains tend to have strong similarities in terms of the basic
cognitive apparatus and how this develops as we mature. Yet each brain is unique,
not only because of the specific generic instructions in a person's genome, but also
because unique experience of the world leads to unique learning.
