n035  1137  24 Jan 80
 
BC-BOOK REVIEW II (UNDATED)
 By JOHN LEONARD
 c. 1980 N.Y. Times News Service
 JEAN PIAGET. By Margaret A. Boden. 176 pages. Viking. $11.95.
 
    For more than 10 years, Frank Kermode has been editing and the
Viking Press has been publishing the ''Modern Masters'' series, a
string of long essays or short books devoted to people ''who have
changed and are changing the life and thought of our age.'' The
various ''masters'' are not always revered - Irving Howe was hard on
Leon Trotsky; Jonathan Miller demystified Marshall McLuhan; Alasdair
MacIntyre told us that ''almost all of Herbert Marcuse's key
positions are false''; Raymond Williams missed the point of George
Orwell - but they are usually fun to read about.
    Jean Piaget, the 83-year-old father figure of cognitive psychology,
is not much fun to read about, although he is more fun to read about
than he is to read. Margaret A. Boden, reader in philosophy and
psychology at the University of Sussex, has doubts about Piaget's
prose style, his theory, his methodology and his math, but she ends
up arguing that he asked the right questions and that what he
observed of children getting to know space, time, cause and
objectivity is an indispensable starting point for thinking about how
the mind constructs the world.
    According to Piaget, intellectual development proceeds by a
universal and invariable sequence of mental stages. During the
''sensorimotor'' period, from birth to 18 months, the infant decides
that the world is stable and divided into objects that retain their
identity through space and time. During the ''concrete operations''
period, from 2 to 11 years old, the child organizes objects according
to number, class and quantity, and comes to understand the principles
of classification. During the ''formal operations'' period, from 12
until senility, the adolescent learns systematically to coordinate
his or her own principles of classification. Beginning, then, with
reflex and stimuli, mind arrives at logic and mathematics by a
''progressive coordination'' of the organized intellectual system we
are born with and the external world we live in.
    Is this clear? It is not empiricism, which says that intelligence
develops as a ''resonance'' to the external world, and it is not
''nativism,'' which says that intelligence is the unfolding of a
predetermined system. It is not ''behaviorism,'' because it is
interested in ''mental'' operations, as well as observed activity.
And it is not Noam Chomsky, because it does not believe in an
''innate grammar''; language, on the contrary, is a tool guided by
the ''reciprocal and self-regulating processes of adjustment to and
modification of the environment.''
    Even if it isn't clear, is it true? I don't know. Obviously, we have
trouble thinking about thinking in words that make sense. What I call
''spontaneous learning'' is what Piaget and Dr. Boden call
''equilibratory cognitive improvements.'' Equilibrium requires
self-regulation. Where and how? Piaget is looking for something in
the mind that resembles cybernetic feedback. Dr. Boden suggests he
would have better luck borrowing several concepts from
information-processing and computational theory. Meanwhile, we have
to worry about the psychologist Peter Bryant's ''perceptually
mediated transitive inferences.'' Grammar may be innate; elegance
certainly is not.
    Dr. Boden is firm when clinical experience and scientific experiment
contradict Piaget's assertions. She reminds us that he relies too
much on anecdotes. She is impatient with his indifference to social
factors - mother and baby, for instance, plus language - in cognitive
development. She doubts whether his stages are ''invariable,'' and
even wonders if there are any stages at all. And she has interesting
things to say about his pretensions as a biologist (he wrote his
doctoral thesis on molluscs) and philosopher (a little Kant and a lot
of mush, it seems to me).
    On the whole, however, she approves, and I suppose the rest of us
must, too. His is at least a humane psychology, stressing curiosity
and competence. The vagueness wouldn't bother me so much, were it not
for the fact that the vagueness and the anecdotes are translated into
educational theory and plunked right down in American schools, where
reading is no longer very important because learning to read somehow
violates the ''rhythm'' of a child's inevitable development. I'm not
sure his three white upper-middle-class Swiss children, now
immortalized in 60 books, have much to say to the hundreds of
thousands of nonwhite, non-upper-middle-class, non-Swiss children now
neglected by our schools.
    I would also have liked to hear more of Piaget's children, and of
Piaget as a child. Dr. Boden ignores the social context, as if she
were competing with the man she writes a. She is interested in
whether the artificial intellilgence of computers will yield a model
that will correspond to Piaget's theory - ''accommodating'' and
''transforming'' - and so am I. But I am more interested in why he
was compelled to develop his theory and what it has done to our
schools. When, in the ''Modern Masters'' series, Jonathan Miller
wrote about Marshall McLuhan, he observed: ''The fate of ideas and
inventions is determined by the character of social institutions that
choose to exploit them, and not by some hypothetical spiritual flaw
ingrained in the imagination.'' Or in the sensorimotor stage.
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