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 th

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incorporated into the organism's cycle. In this case the organism either fails to adapt (and its cycle is destroyed) or adapts and is, thereby, changed by the environmental substance. Thus adaptation consists of "an equilibrium between assimilation and accommodation" and must always consist of this dynamic (6). Organization is complementary to adaptation. The organization is determined by the relationship between parts and whole and in intelligence every intellectual operation functions under the same rules as every other operation. Similarly, "every act of intelligence presupposes a system of mutual implications and interconnected meanings" (7). The intelligence employs categories for the organization of its adaptive efforts; space and time, causality and substance, etc. Piaget clarifies the complementary natures of adaptation and environment by describing them, respectively, as "accord of thought with things" and "accord of thought with itself" (8). In this study of the first stages of the development of human intelligence, therefore, Piaget is concerned with how the first structures of the categories of reason (the basic intellectual activities which are, of course, featured at every stage of development) are formed

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