The problem of content in the theory of formal operations: Piaget and Vygotskii in the South African context
Date
1984
Authors
Moll, Ian
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Abstract
This thesis explores the extent to which Piaget falsely ignores the
socio-economic contents of cognition in his account of formal
operational thought. His biological conception of the origins of
knowledge leads him to emphasize the structures of cognition, but
Vygotskii's dialectical materialist psychology challenges this. It
denies Piaget's separation of content from structure and accuses
him of losing sight of the social construction of cognition. The
thesis attempts to clarify the resultant dispute (drawing particularly
on Buck-Morss' charge that Piaget has a socio-economic bias)
and goes on to examine a concrete instance of the problem in the
attainment of formal operations across different South African
communities. Piaget's tasks showed that rural children exhibit significantly
less formal operational ability than their urban peers and
that within the latter group, township children have less abstract
cognitive ability than their middle-class counterparts. Interviews
showed that these tendencies correspond in each case to more
emphasis on concrete activities, and less on abstract activities, in
the everyday lifestyle of the former grouping. But this is in itself
not enough to demonstrate a weakness in Piaget's theory. On a more
abstract level, the final part of the thesis argues that the
epistemology of genetic epistemology is ·inadequate because it leaves
the very social nature of knowledge out of the picture. Taken
together with concrete cross-cultural differences, this establishes
a serious problem of content - a social "blindness'' - in Piaget's
theory of formal operations.
Description
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Arts
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
for the Degree of Master of Arts in Psychology.
Keywords
COGNITION IN CHILDREN--SOUTH AFRICA.