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Psychology 261
said ‘All right, but if we begin with an infant, it may take a year or two more,
and even excluding this, three or four years already takes us back to the question
of stages’ (the sequence of which can be speeded up but not eliminated).
Secondly, we would point out that besides the socializing process as between
adults and children, there are the social relations between children, and these
develop only gradually. While past studies on the egocentrism of children’s
speech have not found unanimous acceptance, there remains the idea of a necessary
decentring of thought that can be verified both as regards social relations
(combined activities, team games, and the like) and thought structures.
The third factor that is commonly adduced is the part played by experience
in the development of the intelligence. It is universally recognized that it plays
an essential part, though a distinction must be made. On the one hand, there is
what may be called in the widest meaning of the term physical experience, i.e.,
experience that involves contact with objects and the gaining of knowledge by
abstraction from the object itself (colours, weights, and so on). It is the kind we
commonly think of and which alone is taken into account by empiricism. On
the other hand, however, there is what may be called logico-mathematical
experience, which plays an important part before the appearance of deductive
processes. It too involves contact with objects, but by obtaining knowledge of
these actions themselves and not from the objects as such. Such is the case, for
example, when children check commutativeness by changing the order of objects
and counting them again, the order and counting then being due to the action
itself. This distinction has been disputed on the grounds, for example, that the
order and number definitely reside in the objects. However, there still remains
the question of who put them there - the action of the subject or their physical
nature itself?
Both this distinction and the direct study of the sensori-motor intelligence
forming before speech, and therefore independently of it, then lead to the assumption
that mental and especially logico-mathematical processes spring from the
action (e.g., the action of bringing together) and consist of interiorized actions
(addition) that have become reversible (corresponding to addition is its reverse
subtraction) because they express the most general types of co-ordination (the
connexion established by bringing together does not just apply to the objects,
but to any form of co-ordination of actions). However, the study of the processes
chiefly shows that they never appear in isolation and are directly bound up
with one another within overall systems, operating, for example, in the form
of classification, seriation, the sequence of numbers, of correspondence going
in pairs or more, of matrices, and so on. Logically, these aggregates are governed
by such well-known structures as ‘groups’, ‘lattices’, ‘bodies’, ‘rings’, and psychological
analysis shows that these structures are in fact ‘natural’, i.e. that they
are spontaneously formed with the processes themselves, from, moreover, more
elementary structures - various ‘groupoids’ or ‘groups’.
In addition to maturation factors, social life or experience, which are those
commonly put forward to explain development, we therefore have to take into
account a factor of non-innate co-ordination of acts, which operates during
their actual functional unfolding and which may be called the equilibration fac-