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Piaget and Human Intelligence

Jean Piaget's theory in The Origins of Intelligence in Children is constructed on the basis of his understanding of the relationship between human intelligence and the biological processes of morphogenesis and adaptation to the environment. The hereditary factors that condition the development of intelligence have been understood in several ways and the precise nature of these factors long constituted much of the debate over the origins of intelligence. Piaget makes a distinction between two types of hereditary factor -- the transmission of structures and the transmission of functions -- that are involved in the development of intellect and intelligence. The operation of inherited functions, i. e., the functional invariants of intelligence, will, like those of biological organization, "impose on the structures certain necessary and irreducible conditions" (3). This concept, resembling the old notion of an a priori, was not entirely new and was developed out of existing ideas regarding the nature of the relationship between biology and intelligence that Piaget outlines in his discussion of the biological theory that claimed that organism and environment form "an indissoluble entity" in which each has an influence in forming the other (16). Piaget re-worked the theory with his explication of the relationship of various structures and functions. But the most original aspect of his theory was developmental. He made the claim that previous theorists had misunderstood the a priori as "structures existing ready-made from the beginning of development" (3). Instead, Piaget said, the functional invariant is involved in all stages of early development and is only gradually imposed on consciousness through the elaboration of the structures that are "increasingly adapted to the function itself" (3). The operation of functional invariants mirrors that of biological organization. "Intelligence is an adaptation" and, therefore, its rela...

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Piaget and Human Intelligence. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 17:50, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707203.html