What Is Psychology?

JEAN PIAGET Geneva, Switzerland

CONSTANCE KAMII University of Illinois at Chicago Circle
(Trans.) and University of Geneva

ABSTRACT: Five points are made: (1) Psychology is consciousness, and this indeed happened to certain
the science not only of the individual but also of hu- extremists. However, the problem of consciousness
mans in general. For example, mathematics and physics has come back to the forefront of psychology, with
have been created by human beings, and this creation the work of psychoneurologists on "vigilance," or
can be understood only in terms of human intelligence attention, and with the study of development.
in its totality. (2) Psychology is a natural science, and,
Everybody pays attention to it today, including
like every other science, it is built not only with what
comes from the object but also with the structures con-
Russian psychologists, regardless of their philos-
structed by the subject. (3) Psychology occupies a key ophy.
position among the sciences because it explains the no- I have five remarks to make about psychology.
tions and operations used in the development of all the The first is perhaps obvious, but not to every-
sciences. (4) It is impossible to dissociate psychology body. It is that psychology is the science not only
from epistemology. (5) Psychology, like all other sci- of the individual but also of humans in general and
ences, can thrive only on interdisciplinary cooperation. notably of "the subject" in a universal sense.
Surely, applied psychology can in certain situations
I am very honored by the confidence you have be interested in individual cases, and the empirical
shown in awarding me the Edward Lee Thorndike or theoretical study of individual cases represents
Award for 1977. I am also moved by the excep- an interesting chapter called "differential psychol-
tion you have made in allowing me to designate ogy" [or the psychology of individual differences].
someone else to deliver this address, as traveling But even in applied psychology the subject in gen-
from Europe has become more and more difficult eral necessarily intervenes. For example, to reform
for me. My principal merit is to have been sur- the teaching of mathematics or physics, we cannot
rounded by first-rate collaborators. The books I consider only the retardation or difficulties of par-
have written over the years have also been signed ticular individual pupils. The problem consists
by others who have contributed to their essence, first of situating the knowledge of mathematics,
beginning with B. Inhelder. physics, and every other science in the totality of
the process of intelligence and its development.
If I gave a broad title to today's address, it is
partly because the public does not fully realize the And this is a problem of human intelligence in its
extraordinary developments that have occurred in totality, which is related to general problems of
psychology since the beginning of this century. The knowledge to which I shall return shortly.
18th International Congress of Psychology, which My second point requires more comment. Psy-
was held in Moscow in 1966 with 6,000 participants,
ended its work with an address by Paul Fraisse, the This article was an address by Jean Piaget translated and
then-new President of the International Union of delivered by Constance Kamii at the annual convention of
Scientific Psychology. In this address, Fraisse sum- the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, Au-
gust 29, 1977. Division 15 (Educational Psychology)
marized his impressions with the striking sentence, awarded the author the 1977 Edward Lee Thorndike
"Psychology no longer knows any taboo subject." Award for Distinguished Psychological Contribution to
To cite only one example [of what he meant], ever Education.
Material in brackets, throughout the article, has been
since psychology understood that it was a science of added by the translator.
1
conduct and not only one of consciousness ("con- [The French words conduite and comportement are
duct" referring to behavior, but behavior that in- usually both translated into English as behavior, perhaps
because conduct has a moral connotation. As can be seen
cludes the act of "becoming aware" of what we in this context, the term conduct does not necessarily have
1
do), we could have worried that it would neglect any moral connotation.]

648 • JULY 1978 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST

Copyright 1978 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0003-066X/78/3307-0648$00.75
 chology is a natural science, and if this is now under-
stood in most countries, it pleases me to point out
that this position in the classification of fields of
knowledge has been practiced for a long time in the
great Genevan tradition since 1890, when the chair
I had the honor of occupying until my retirement
in 1971 was founded. T. Flournoy wanted to
place this chair in the Faculty of Sciences, and this
example is often cited. But this situation is some-
times a source of serious misunderstanding, as cer-
tain philosophers (I am thinking, among others, of
Husserl and phenomenology) oppose the transcen-
dental against the "natural" in order to emphasize
the inadequacy of "naturalism." Let us recall that
the transcendental, according to philosophers, refers
to conditions prior to knowledge and to instruments
of knowing that exist before experience, in a sense
more logical than chronological—namely, the [cog-
nitive] instruments that are necessary to render ex-
perience possible. If I use this term transcendental
here (which I do not often use), it is simply to
designate what, in knowledge, comes not from the
object but from the structures constructed by the
subject. I will return to this point shortly in con-
nection with a discussion of actions.
These misunderstandings are due also to certain
scientists as well as to philosophers. The source of
the misunderstanding must be sought in "positiv-
ism," which gave too narrow an image to nature and
particularly to the sciences of nature, thus making an
easy target that does not even require careful aim.
Positivism is a doctrine of the limits of science, and
positivists wanted to limit science to certain prob-
lems and consider others as being "metaphysical"
(hence the temptation to have both scientific psy-
chology and "philosophical" psychology). We know
that these boundaries have always been violated.
Auguste Comte proscribed "causal explanations" in
favor only of the search for "laws," but, in fact,
scientists are not satisfied with descriptions of phe-
nomena and do not stop looking for explanations.
Comte condemned the calculation of probabilities,
the study of astrophysics, and the use of the micro-
scope, and the positivists who followed him pro-
scribed the study of the atom as resulting from the
search for causes, and we now know what happened
to all of these beliefs! It is good to recall these
facts from time to time because this allows us to
judge certain prohibitions or limitations that no one
today would want to impose on science.
Neither science nor psychology is positivist. They
are "open" to new problems without limit. They
live on crises and revolutions as well as on con-
tinuity and tradition (see Kuhn, 1970). They
submit to all new facts and must constantly re-
examine their principles and methods. They ac-
knowledge the two fundamental principles Flournoy
laid out for himself a long time ago: (1) Every-
thing is possible ("There are more things in heaven
and earth . . . " ) , but (2) the weight of proof must
be proportional to the strangeness (or novelty) of
the facts.
In such a perspective, "naturalism" in the classi-
cal sense (and in the sense that Husserl still wanted
to combat) is only a myth, and this is true for two
reasons. The first is that nature is inexhaustible,
and we can know it only by successive approxima-
tion. The danger of naturalism, as understood
through positivism, was in its reduction of higher
order concepts to lower order ones, as exemplified
by the exaggerated reduction of certain higher order
mechanisms to conditioned reflexes. But those who
believed in this danger did not suspect the pos-
sibility of forms of thought such as those of con-
temporary dialectical currents. In reality, when
we try to reduce "higher order" concepts to a
lower level, the reduction is only apparent, because
sooner or later the "lower order" concept is enriched
by higher level conceptualizations. This is what
we saw with Einstein when Newtonian gravitation
was reduced to geometry. Animal psychology, too,
has already enriched biology, as certain authors
such as G. G. Simpson interpret animal psychology
as a factor in evolution.
The second reason is that knowledge, or the sci-
ences of nature, is constantly undergoing reor-
ganization. Indeed, no science can be placed on a
single plane, and each one of them involves multiple
and distinct epistemological levels. All sciences of
nature, therefore, involve transcendental aspects—
as defined above in the sense of instruments neces-
sary for structuring—transcendental aspects that
are inherent in research itself and that are in con-
stant movement and construction impossible to
substantiate or put down on paper once and for all.
In fact, there exists a reflexive progress in the sci-
ences (which is indissociable from their progress in
extension). It consists of the constant delineation
of new conditions of intelligibility, which are
transcendental with respect to the content of later
experience. To engage in physics or biology, for
example, mathematics 2 and logic are necessary, and
2
Even in mathematics itself, the Bourbakis used the
method of mapping to construct their matrix structures, and
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1978 • 649
 mathematics and logic are built not on facts but
on boundless human construction and the very co-
ordination of our actions on reality.
This notion of the subject's "actions" often gives
rise to misunderstanding because there is a tend-
ency to reduce actions to mere material actions,
when they can be interiorized in the form of mental
"operations," and the operations themselves can
(and even must) be coordinated into "structures"
such as seriation, classification, and enumeration.
These structures, which are constructed by children
themselves (and not received from the outside), re-
sult from their actions. Structures consist of "what
the children can do" in given situations, and not
oi what they think of it (their becoming aware of
what they do always remains incomplete). In-
deed, elementary actions begin by being material
(i.e., moving objects, pulling them, pushing them,
turning them over, etc.), but even from the sensori-
motor level they become coordinated among them-
selves into structures such as the "(practical) group
of displacements." Later on, the same movements,
and many other more complex ones, will be carried
out mentally, but these will still be actions, which
enrich reality with a set of possible transforma-
tions, that is, with structures constructed by the
subject, without which knowledge of objects would
remain impossible.
To stay with examples related to space, one can
cite the case of systems of reference (or "coordi-
nates") that allow children 7-10 years of age to
understand that to determine the position of a
point on a surface, there must be two coordinates,
one vertical and the other horizontal. Younger
subjects believe that it is enough to use one diagonal
measure from a corner of the surface. These young
subjects do not realize that if they do this, there
are many indeterminate positions possible, depend-
ing on the angle of the diagonal line. This is a
good example of actions that have not yet become
operatory and have not yet attained a "structure."
The structure the children later construct expresses
what they "know how to do" and what they figure
out with their own means.
Likewise, in the case of a logical structure such
as seriation—for example, A<B<C<D...<N
—children 7-8 years old understand and deduce im-
mediately that there are as many elements greater
than A (i.e., B . . . N) as there are elements smaller
once these structures were constructed, they became the
basis for McLane and Eilenberg to build their theories of
morphisms and categories.
650 • JULY 1978 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
than N (i.e., from A to N — 1). Younger children
5-6 years of age, on the other hand, need to count
the elements in both directions in order to answer
this question! We see clearly in this case that a
structure of actions or operations, once constructed
by the children themselves (and we know well the
successive and laborious phases of this construction
of seriation), gives them new "powers" that enrich
their knowledge of objects.
To these spatial and logico-arithmetical struc-
tures must be added causal [or physical] structures
that also rest on operatory deductions. For ex-
ample, young subjects acknowledge that a weight
exerts pressure on a piece of foam rubber because
they see the weight pressing down on it. But they
think that the same object does not have any
weight on the table because they do not see the
same phenomenon. Later, children deduce that if
an object has weight on foam rubber, it has the
same weight on the table, but that the table resists
the pressure. Finally, at about 11-12 years of
age, they deduce that if the body submitting to the
action of pressing down succeeds in resisting it, this
is because it, too, acts, but in the opposite direction.
With no formal instruction, 11-12-year-old chil-
dren can thus deduce Newton's third law of the
equality of action and reaction. This is a beautiful
example of a causal structure based on operations,
but these operations, although they are constructed
by the subjects, are then "attributed" to objects
themselves conceived in this case as "operators."
Let us further note that these diverse structures
are of special interest to the theory of intelligence
or of knowledge (epistemology). However, we
can also use them as instruments of analysis in ob-
serving individual children. Contrary to "tests,"
which only measure performance, structures permit
us to see how an individual subject reasons and,
consequently, what we can expect of him or her in
the future. But for this it is essential to follow
children in their spontaneity and not to transform
the method of operatory questions into a standard-
ized test (see Kamii & DeVries, 1978).
I return to psychology with a third remark,
which complements the preceding one. Psychology
presupposes the existence of other natural sciences
and, in fact, it is derived from them (from physiol-
ogy and biology to physico-chemistry and mathe-
matics), but a fundamental fact in interpreting these
relationships is that psychology in turn explains the
notions and operations that are used in these sci-
ences. It is psychology that enables us to under-
stand the construction of number (and how the solu-
 tions proposed by the famous authors of Principia
Mathematica are, in reality, inadequate),3 algebraic
structures (and child psychology shows us how the
"matrix structures" of Bourbaki are "natural" and
are due to man's intelligence), geometrical struc-
tures (and why topological structures precede Eu-
clidean and projective frameworks), elementary
kinetic notions (among others, the relationship be-
tween time and speed), logical structures in gen-
eral, etc. It is to this research that I have devoted
more than SO years.
Psychology thus occupies a key position, and its
implications become increasingly clear. The very
simple reason for this is that if the sciences of na-
ture explain the human species, humans in turn
explain the sciences of nature, and it is up to psy-
chology to show us how. Psychology, in fact, repre-
sents the juncture of two opposite directions of
scientific thought that are dialectically comple-
mentary. It follows that the system of sciences
cannot be arranged in a linear order, as many
people beginning with Auguste Comte have at-
tempted to arrange them. The form that charac-
terizes the system of sciences is that of a circle, or
more precisely, that of a spiral as it becomes ever
larger. In fact, objects are known only through the
subject, while the subject can know himself or her-
self only by acting on objects materially and men-
tally. Indeed, if objects are innumerable and sci-
ence indefinitely diverse, all knowledge of the sub-
ject brings us back to psychology, the science of
the subject and the subject's actions.
The fourth remark: People may say that I thus
engage in philosophy or epistemology and no longer
in scientific psychology. But, in the research that
we pursue, it is impossible to dissociate psychology
from epistemology. Indeed, if we study only one
level of development (for example, that of the adult
or adolescent), it is easy to distinguish the prob-
lems: psychological experience, emotions, intelli-
gence and its functions, etc., on the one hand, and
the broad problems of knowledge (epistemology),
etc., on the other. But if we want to study cogni-
tive functions and pursue a developmental point of
view in order to study the formation and trans-
formations of human intelligence (and this is why
I specialized in child psychology), then the prob-
lems must be formulated very differently: How is
knowledge acquired, how does it increase, and how
does it become organized or reorganized? These
are the very questions that must be answered. But
here, the answers we find, and from which we can
only choose by more or less refining them, are neces-
sarily of the following three types: Either knowl-
edge comes exclusively from the object, or it is
constructed by the subject alone, or it results from
multiple interactions between the subject and the
object—but what interactions and in what form?
Indeed, we see at once that these are epistemologi-
cal solutions stemming from empiricism, apriorism,
or diverse interactionism, which are more or less
static or dialectic. In short, it is impossible to
avoid epistemological problems in this kind of re-
search—epistemological problems that concern epis-
temology in movement, or genetic (.psychogenetic)
epistemology.
From this follows my fifth and final remark.
Psychology, like all other sciences, can live and
prosper only in an interdisciplinary atmosphere.
Interdisciplinary relationships indeed exist, but they
are still insufficient. In the science of human be-
ings, it is clear, for example, that the study of in-
telligence brings up the problem of the relationship
between thought and language—hence a collabora-
tion between psychology and linguistics; and the
current work of linguists on transformational gram-
mar and linguistic structure in general is very
promising for possible comparisons with the op-
eratory character of intelligence. But this is an
immense field to cover, and collaborations are only
beginning. Likewise, there exist numerous rela-
tionships between data from the science of eco-
nomics and of "conducts," and game (or decision)
theory, which was elaborated by economists, con-
stitutes a very enlightening instrument for the
analysis of "strategies" of behavior. But here, too,
collaboration is only beginning. The relationship
between psychology and sociology is evide.nt but
still not sufficiently elaborated, notably in the realm
of development. As far as the biological sciences
are concerned, the connections among psychology,
physiology, and neurology are close, but many rela-
tionships between general biology and the theory of
intelligence remain untouched. Indeed, many other
fields of cooperation remain equally indispensable
and are only beginning to take place—-with logic or
general algebra and with the epistemology of mathe-
matics and physics, for example.
Everything that I have been able to do in more
than 20 years of interdisciplinary research is due to
3
In fact, Russell and Whitehead explain the formation of
number in terms of one-to-one correspondence between
elements of equivalent classes. However, one-to-one cor-
respondence already implies number, and thus there is here
an obvious vicious circle.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1978 • 651
collaboration with specialists from all of these fields,
and the International Center of Genetic Epistemol-
ogy, to which the Faculty of Psychology has ex-
tended its kind hospitality, was created in 1955
precisely to facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation.
With the present state of knowledge, it would, in
fact, be regrettable and visionless to leave such col-
laboration to chance encounters or individual initia-
live. Interdisciplinary cooperation is necessary and
must be organized. More than 20 years of experi-
, .I , , , ,,. ,. ,..
ence and the abundance of publications resulting
from these exchanges among researchers who, at
first, had difficulty in understanding each other,
have shown us the increasing and unexpected
fecundity of these ever closer contacts. I hope to
continue the work of the International Center of
Genetic Epistemology in the same interdisciplinary
manner,
REFERENCES
Kamii, C., & DeVries, R. Physical knowledge in preschool
education: Implications oj Piaget's theory. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978.
Kuhll) T s The stmctwe o} scientific revolutions (2nd
ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Editors Sought for New JPSP

In January 1980, the American Psychological Association will publish the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology in a new format consisting of three separately
edited and identifiable sections appearing each month as a single bound issue. The
sections are Attitudes and Social Cognition, Interpersonal Relations and Group
Processes, and Personality and Individual Processes. Articles in the three sections
will be selected by three autonomous editors, each of whom will work with separate
groups of advisory editors. The number of pages to be published in JPSP each
year will be based on the three editors' recommendations to APA's Publications and
Communications (P&C) Board. Authors will be asked to submit manuscripts to the
appropriate section editor according to a manuscript's major variables and theoreti-
cal orientation. When the three section editors are ready to receive articles in 1979,
detailed lists of topics appropriate to each section will be published.
The plans to restructure JPSP are the result of several years of deliberation by
the P&C Board. In 1974 and 1975, after considering the content of submissions,
number of submissions, and number of published pages, a task force chaired by
Albert Hastorf recommended a sectioned JPSP. Board action on this recommenda-
tion was originally postponed; during the past year, however, surveys of individual
subscribers and members of APA's Division of Personality and Social Psychology
have made it clear that the change to a sectioned journal is desirable and should be
implemented as soon as possible.
The P&C Board invites immediate nominations for the three editorships of JPSP.
Nominations should be received before August 1, 1978. The new editors will be
selected by early fall so that they can begin receiving manuscripts early in 1979 for
publication beginning in January 1980. Nominations should be sent to David Zea-
man, Department of Psychology, Box U-20, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Con-
necticut 06268. Names of the new editors will be announced later this year.

652 • JULY 1978 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST