Academic discussion of Piaget's developmental stages and parallels to origin‑of‑life theories

11.3 Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Stage General Description Cognitive Develop- ment Origin of Life Automatic System-environment information exchange controlled mainly by struc- innate system tures or environment Piagetan infantile stage Selforganizing proto- life system, e.g. Oparin [Opa52] water droplet, or Cairns-Smith [CS90] clay-based protolife Adaptive System-environment info exchange heavily guided by adaptively internally-created system structures Piagetan “concrete op- erational” stage: sys- tematic internal world- world- model guides exploration Simple autopoietic sys- tem, e.g. Oparin wa- ter droplet w/ basic metabolism Symbolic Internal symbolic rep- resentation of informa- tion exchange process Piagetan formal stage: explicit logical/experi- mental learning about how to cognize in var- ious contexts Genetic code: inter- nal entities that “stand for” aspects of organ- ism and environment, thus enabling complex epigenesis Reflexive Thoroughgoing self- based symbolic modification on this representation Piagetan post-formal stage: purposive self- modification of basic mental processes Genes+memes: genetic code-patterns guide their own modification via influencing culture 189 Table 11.1: General Systems Theory of Development: Parallels Between Development of Mind and Origin of Life Indeed, Piaget viewed developmental stages as emerging from general “algebraic” principles rather than as being artifacts of the particulars of human psychology. But, Piaget’s stages are probably best viewed as a general interpretive framework rather than a precise scientific theory. Our suspicion is that once the empirical science of developmental psychology has progressed further, it will become clearer how to fit the various data into a broad Piaget-like framework, perhaps differing in many details from what Piaget described in his works. Piaget conceived of child development in four stages, each roughly identified with an age group, and corresponding closely to the system-theoretic stages mentioned above: e infantile, corresponding to the automatic stage mentioned above — Example: Grasping blocks, piling blocks on top of each other, copying words that are heard ® preoperational and concrete operational, corresponding to the adaptive stage men- tioned above — Example: Building complex blocks structures, from imagination and from imitating objects and pictures and based on verbal instructions; verbally describing what has been constructed e formal, corresponding to the symbolic stage mentioned above — Example: Writing detailed instructions in words and diagrams, explaining how to con- struct particular structures out of blocks; figuring out general rules describing which sorts of blocks structures are likely to be most stable HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013105