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254 Jean Piaget
II. In fact, a preliminary question arises here, which we are only just beginning
to realize is something of a fundamental one, because the implications of
working on the degenerate white rat instead of on growing children were not
realized. Is it learning that constitutes the primary phenomenon and explains
mental development itself, or does development obey its own laws and does
learning, in a certain and clearly defined situation, form only a more or less artificially
separated part of it (and that at all ages of life, for in the occupational
area, at any rate, development lasts until senility)? The postulate implicit in
most theories of learning is certainly consistent with the first of these two
solutions and in defiance of the spirit of all contemporary biology (which sees in
phenotypical reactions a result of the ‘reaction norm’ of the genotype or of the
genetic pool, with constant interaction between the organizing action of the
genotype or genetic pool and the influence of the environment). The second
solution on the other hand, is receiving more and more attention and profoundly
modifies the facts of the problem.
If, indeed, development precedes and governs learning, this certainly does
not mean that there is such a thing as innate or even acquired knowledge
without learning, but means that learning in any form involves, in addition to
the external facts Sand the observable reactions R, a set of active co-ordinations,
the gradual equilibration of which constitutes a fundamental factor that in fact
represents a logic or an algebra.
The International Centre of Genetic Epistemology in Geneva accordingly
asked itself two questions: What is the mode, traditional or specific, of the
learning of logical structures and does every form of learning, even of contingent
or arbitrary data, suppose a logic or not? On these two points the findings
of an experiment carried out on children at different known stages as regards
their operational structures are fairly clear. Firstly, the learning of a logical
structure (inclusion of classes, etc.) does not proceed by external reinforcement
(success or failure, as determined by the results), which is the only factor constantly
referred to by Hull, but is based on the generalization and differentiation
of prior logical or prelogical structures. For example, discovering that, if
all A’s are B’s but not all B’s are A’S, there are more B’s than A’s (quantification
of the inclusion) is not a process of merely counting the B’s and the A’s after a
given response. On the contrary, understanding is assisted if we start from the
intersection of two non-disjoint classes C and D, while the fact that there are
objects that are ‘at the same time’ C and D leads us to accept that A < B stems
rom AB < B.
This hypothesis of a subordination of learning to development forms the
basis of a series of researches on the acquisition of the notions of conservation,
and so on, being carried out by B. Inhelder, H. Sinclair and M. Bovet, and by M.
Laurendeau and A. Pinard in Montreal. Their method involves studying as
factors of learning those that the analysis of development seems to point to as
being decisive, especially during the passage from one operative structure to
another (or to the same one but with a lag due to different contents). Such a
hypothesis should, no doubt, be checked separately at every level of behaviour
(sensori-motor, semiotic or representative, etc.), but it may quite well be general-