The first full-length study of Jean Piaget as a philosopher and evolutionist. Messerly traces Piaget's earliest conjectures about knowledge through its further developments to its mature formulation as 'genetic epistemology.' Messerly analyzes Piaget's constructivist theory of the evolution of human knowledge as continuous with, yet partially transcending, the biological process of adaptation to the environment. Messerly's study serves as an invitation to further explorations with Paiget's theory and will interest philosophers, biologists, and psychologists.

This book was first published in 1979.

What is the relationship between behavior and the processes which shape evolution? Why has behavior, whether it amounts to no more than a flower's reaction to light or encompasses the complexities of human thought, been so neglected by traditional evolutionary theory? Beginning with these questions, Jean Piaget offers a dazzling, at time demanding, inquiry into the state of our understanding of evolution. This is a task that takes Piaget from an investigation of the early giants Darwin and Lamarck, to the contributions of Weiss and Baldwin, to the role of cybernetics. Along the way he outlines the relation between instinct and evolution, habits and acquired characteristics. He criticizes those who reduce the question to a genetic determinism. And he challenges those who see no qualitative difference between the evolution of anatomical structures and the evolution of behavioral structures. What Piaget develops in this concise and remarkable work is a subtle, sophisticated theory of behavior in both the plant and the animal worlds. Drawing on his life's work, he argues that all organisms are active and creative, and that the forms of organization they create in their environment go to the heart of the meaning of behavior and the processes of evolution. A prolific writer on philosophy and biology, as well as the father of the development psychology he calls genetic epistemology, Jean Piaget has had as his main area of concern the genesis of abstract concepts (classes, relations, numbers) and physical concepts (space, speed, chance, time) in the developing child. His theories have been widely applied to education.

This book represents an attempt to understand the evolution of Jean Piaget's basic ideas in the context of his own intellectual development. Piaget sought to elucidate human knowledge by studying its origins and development. In this book, Michael Chapman applies the same method to Piaget's own thinking. Dr Chapman shows that some of the Swiss psychologist's essential ideas originated in adolescent philosophical speculations about the relation between science and value. These same ideas were then developed step by step in Piaget's investigations of children's cognitive development. Dr Chapman claims that Piaget's use of developmental psychology as a means for addressing questions about the evolution of knowledge has been misunderstood by psychologists approaching his work exclusively from the perspectives of their own discipline. Reconstructing Piaget's intellectual biography makes possible a better understanding of the questions he originally posed and the answers he subsequently provided. Dr Chapman concludes with an assessment of Piaget's relevance for contemporary psychology and philosophy and suggests ways in which Piagetian theory might be further developed.

This volume brings the current interest in primate cognition to bear on studies of cognitive development in humans, with chapters from leading researchers in both areas. For cognitive developmentalists and primatologists and comparative psychologists.