Jean Piaget Quotes

• To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

  Jean Piaget

• This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

  Jean Piaget

• The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.

  Jean Piaget

• The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

  Jean Piaget

• The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.

  Jean Piaget

• The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

  Jean Piaget

• The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.

  Jean Piaget

• Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.

  Jean Piaget

• Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

  Jean Piaget

• Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

  Jean Piaget

• Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

  Jean Piaget

• On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.

  Jean Piaget

• Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

  Jean Piaget

• Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

  Jean Piaget

• Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

  Jean Piaget

• It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

  Jean Piaget

• In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.

  Jean Piaget

• In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

  Jean Piaget

• I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health.

  Jean Piaget

• From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.

  Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget (22)

Birth:	9th August, 1896
Death:	16th September, 1980
Nationality:	Swiss
Profession:	Psychologist

About

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was a Swiss clinical psychologist known for his pioneering work in child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology". He studied at the University of Neuchâtel and the University of Zürich. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual." He created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 while on the faculty of the University of Geneva and directed the Center until his death in 1980. From 1925 to 1929 he was professor of psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of science at the University of Neuchatel. He served as a professor at the University of Geneva and the University of Paris. In 1979, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences. He wrote several books include: The Language and Thought of the Child, The Child's Conception of the World, The Moral Judgment of the Child, The construction of reality in the child, The psychology of intelligence, The Psychology of the Child(with Bärbel Inhelder), and Success and Understanding.

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