"During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions."
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Quote collection
Jean Piaget quotes (page 2 of 4)
73 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Everytime we teach a child something, we prevent him from inventing it himself."
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"We learn more when we are compelled to invent."
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"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."
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"In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning."
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"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."
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"Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures."
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"I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology."
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"Before games are played in common, no rules in the proper sense can come into existence. Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there, but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot call forth that submission to something superior to the self which characterizes the appearance of any rule."
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"Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But and this is where rules come into existence as soon as a balance is established between adaptation and assimilation, the course of conduct adopted becomes crystallized and ritualized. New schemas are even established which the child looks for and retains with care, as though they were obligatory or charged with efficacy."
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"The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply."
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"Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity."
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"How much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world."
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"The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie"."
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"In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. ... There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them."
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"To understand is to invent."
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"Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures."
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"The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to very touching demonstrations which are in no way prescribed. And here no doubt is the starting point for that morality of good which we shall see developing alongside of the morality of right or duty, and which in some persons completely replaces it."
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"Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process."
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"This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge."
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