One of the most serious contemporary objections against philosophical foundations for moral education and character development is scepticism regarding our capacity to know with any degree of assurance reality as it is. There are many sources in the history of modern and contemporary philosophy for this scepticism. One prominent present source comes from an implication in the language analysis approach to philosophy. To many philosophers it seems that we cognitively construct the world about us through our culture's language: we see reality through the map or conceptual framework of our language, and restructure our view of the world by restructuring our language. What roots can the moral life of a society have if this be the case? Most probably they would come from no more than a consensus among those who have a major influence in shaping our culture on questions of what is just or good, unjust and morally evil.
In these circumstances, any study of the philosophical foundations of moral education must address the epistemological question. This is done in the present chapter from the perspective of one who initially accepted a classical view of our knowledge of reality as presented by Thomas Aquinas, and then studied major objections to this view in representative modern philosophers, including those from the Anglo-American language analysis approach to philosophy.
Philosophers and psychologists in the twentieth century who reflect on human knowledge--its scope and processes--generally deny to the human person the kind of metaphysical knowledge which St. Thomas ascribes to man. In such a situation those who share Thomas' view that human beings have a capacity for, and an orientation to, a metaphysical knowledge of reality as being, need to reflect on human knowledge in a way that is in close relation with contemporary thought. In this chapter I wish to do just that, to present an account of the psychogenesis of being, that makes central use of contemporary psychologies of knowledge and keeps in view contemporary objections against metaphysical knowledge. This is done only in an exploratory manner, more to suggest its significance than to develop my theme with the fullness it deserves.
To introduce this study we must review something of the Thomistic analysis of the human person's understanding of being. There is no one, universally accepted interpretation of Thomas' view on the way one knows reality as being. There is however widespread agreement that the existential judgment is proportioned to the knowledge of being as understood by Thomas, since for him being is that which is. Reality as being is reducible neither to substance nor to the act of being. If one accepts this, still there remains disagreement about the principles which account for such knowledge being present in man. The main Thomistic view is that knowledge of concretely existing sensible reality is primary in the genesis of such knowledge, and thus that both the concrete sensible reality and human knowledge of it through the senses, intellectual abstraction, and insight are the essential principles of this knowledge.
But for many interpreters this cannot fully account for the existential judgment, since sense knowledge and intellectual abstraction as such do not properly deliver esse or the act of being. ln another place I have defended the view that for a full explanation of the existential judgment one has to recognize that the act of being is more properly the object of our affective inclination and volitional act than of our intellectual insight mediated by sense knowledge and abstraction.1 In support of this view we may note that we place the infinitive form of the verb in a sentence as the direct object of a word or expression referring to our acts of love, desire, and hate; for example, we say, "I want to live." We normally express the direct object of an act of knowledge by a noun or a noun clause. If esse is more properly the object of affectivity and desire than of intellectual knowledge, the existential judgment and the knowledge of being proper to metaphysics is dependent in part on the intellectual knowledge we have through participation in our affective inclination, act, and its object. That is, it is dependent in part upon our affective inclination to our own actualization or act of being as the good we seek, and upon other realities which are related to this or to which our actualization is related. The existential judgment then is not fully explained by direct intellectual knowledge of concrete sensible reality through sense and abstraction.
We need not review the major modern difficulties against this view of man's knowledge of being--such as those coming from Heidegger, on the one hand, or from an empiricism, rationalism, or constructivism, on the other--to recognize that we need something like a contemporary "phenomenology" of knowledge if we are to evaluate Thomas' view in a way that meets the problems of our time.2 For such a contemporary analysis of man's knowledge I suggest major attention should be paid to the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget. I do this in spite of his strictures against a philosophy of knowledge,3 for his is widely recognized to be the outstanding twentieth-century psychology of knowledge. He has an epistemological interest in showing how one comes to have the structures of knowledge exhibited in modern science; and his developmental approach provides a unique insight into the dynamism of human knowledge. Moreover, his study of knowledge has gone far beyond the reductionism of the behaviorists. By turning to Piaget we have a vast reservoir of experiments on, and observations of, human knowledge in its stages from infancy to adolescence with which philosophers of differing traditions must come to grips.
Yet Piaget's work, valuable as it is, needs to be supplemented by the work of some American psychologists with a different emphasis and interpretation from Piaget. In fact, it appears that the traditional dichotomy between empiricism and rationalism (or some form of idealism) is seen in a different way today in this divergence of some American psychologists such as Eleanor Gibson and Jerome Bruner (different as these are from one another) from Piaget and his associates. Their agreements are all the more significant for their differences, and both aid us to grasp the present state of the question. For a full study of the relevance of their work for the psychogenesis of being one would have to analyse their questions, methods, and evidence at much greater length than we can here. Our brief study can do no more than suggest the possibilities a larger study might contain.
To indicate how the findings of these contemporary psychologies of knowledge are related to the question of the psychogenesis of being, we will note, first in reference to Piaget and more briefly in reference to Gibson, their points of departure, their models of knowledge, and the stages evident in the evolution they study. Then, as we proceed, we shall suggest the relevance of their views to the question of the psychogenesis of being.
POINTS OF DEPARTURE
In the first place, Piaget's point of departure is to take the structures basic to scientific knowledge, e.g., the formation and systematic testing of hypotheses, and then study the evolutionary emergence of these structures in the epistemological subject. "The main aim of a theory of development is to explain the constitution of the operational structures of the integrated whole or totality, (structure operatoire d'ensemble)."4 Reacting against the simple stimulus-response empiricist explanation of knowledge, Piaget has insisted that our knowledge of the world depends upon the structures we bring to bear upon it. His early biological work on the evolution of the mollusk gave him a genetic approach to the problem of explaining psychologically the structures present in scientific knowledge. Experiments have shown, for example, that it is only in the child of 11 or 12 that hypothetico-deductive reasoning is found. Piaget seeks then to explain this emergence genetically.
He finds an analogy between the emergence of new psychological structures and the emergence of new biological structures. Among the evolutionary theories of the emergence of new biological structures he finds that of C.H. Waddington to be most consistent with his own previous psychological findings. Waddington gives great weight to the initiative and self-regulation of organisms in developing strategies to respond to challenges posed by the environment, the feedback from the environment and these strategies upon the organisms, and the emergence through this of successively new structures by which the organisms interact with the environment.5 Similarly, in the process of the development of the infant into an adolescent Piaget finds that the epistemological subject in its cognitive interaction with the environment constructs a series or succession of structures which emerge from earlier ones and lead to those found in the pre-adolescent and adolescent. His analysis of the emergence of these structures is in part an explanation of mankind's progressively enlarged knowledge of its environment, since this knowledge is dependent upon these structures.
Eleanor Gibson places her more recent studies on perception within a developmental framework.6 She works with an interpretation of perception defended by James Gibson and which is gaining wider acceptance. James Gibson reacted against the empiricist view that we initially sense only color as points or blotches, that perception of distance or depth is basically learned, and that this perception is the effect of one's interpretation of cues or clues and is thus a construction by a process of association. Against this he shows that the stimulus considered globally has correlates for one's perception of depth (e.g., in gradients of texture in the ground or setting of one's normal perceptions in the visual world) and that three-dimensional physical reality is given basically in perception rather than learned.
In continuity with this, Eleanor Gibson understands perception to be "action, but it is exploratory action, not executive action in the sense of manipulating the environment."8 She writes:
Perception, functionally speaking, is the process by which we obtain firsthand information about the world around us. It has a phenomenal aspect, the awareness of events presently occurring in the organism's immediate surroundings. It has also a responsive aspect; it entails discriminative, selective response to the stimuli in the immediate environment.9
She is reacting against the behaviorist interpretation of perception or the view that learning occurs through association of objects with the behavior or response they evoke.
Gibson holds that differing behavior with differing objects (for example, the differing behavior of Pavlov's dog in the presence of a circle that signaled the presence of food, and an elliptical figure that had ceased to signal food's presence) is a sign that the subject has discriminated the different objects. It is not the discrimination itself, nor does it mediate this discrimination. She studies perceptual learning, understood as "an increase in the ability of an organism to get information from its environment, as a result of practice with array of stimulation provided by the environment."10 Here the context is the child's development within its natural environment.
These basic approaches reflect the fact that the current psychological investigation of knowledge is primarily developmental: knowledge is studied as a process of interaction between an enlarging environment and a developing subject. We suggest that this approach has value also for the question of the psychogenesis of being. In asking the question of the emergence of human understanding of reality as being we should ask how the interaction of subject and environment gives rise to this understanding. In studying this we should give as much attention to the activity of the subject and its structure as to the object known in virtue of this activity and structure, as much attention to the physical world as to the cognitive activity and structure that it evokes. If Piaget's analysis of knowledge as development from egocentrism to objectivity (as we shall recall it below) is valid, self-knowledge appears to be as essential to this genesis as knowledge of the physical world. Through this approach, metaphysics will appear as a further stage of this interaction (when compared to the sciences) both in reference to the scope of the environment opened up to the subject and in reference to the cognitive structure centrally involved. It will appear to be, not only beyond science in a hierarchical order, but postscientific in the order of man's cognitive development.
MODELS OF KNOWLEDGE
In the second place, Piaget and Gibson take different aspects of knowledge and develop their analyses of the subject's interaction with his environment primarily in reference to these.
Piaget's analysis of the neonate's cognitive interaction with his immediate environment begins with an examination of the infant's sucking reflex and how its use mediates knowledge. By assimilating objects to this action scheme or schema, and by accommodating this structure to the variety of objects sucked, the infant can differentiate among them. For example, the infant sucks the breast, and knows it through this act; but he also sucks a coverlet, a toy, and a thumb, and all are sucked differently! Knowledge by the infant is through assimilation of its environment to a primitive structure and by the accommodation of this structure to its environment. Piaget considers assimilation to be "the fundamental fact of psychic development."11 Assimilation is a process common to human behavior considered physiologically and psychologically. It explains the basic psychological fact of repetition, for it shows how repetition can have functional meaning for the subject. Moreover,
the concept of assimilation from the very first embodies in the mechanism of repetition the essential element which distinguishes activity from passive habit: the coordination of the new with the old which foretells the process of judgment. In effect, the reproduction characteristic of the act of assimilation always implies the incorporation of an actual fact into a given schema, this schema being constituted by the repetition itself.12
Initially the child's knowledge is really limited to the most superficial aspects of its environment and is marked by egocentrism--that is, an awareness of the environment only as it is related to the self, without distinguishing the one from the other.
At the beginning of assimilatory activity, any object whatever presented by the external environment to the subject's activity is simply something to suck, to look at, or to grasp; such assimilation is at this stage centered solely on the assimilating subject.13
Objectivity is a term of the child's development, occurring when assimilation and accommodation are in balance. It is mediated not only by the child's knowledge of the environment, but by his growing self-awareness of what he contributes and how it distorts the world.14 The emergence of new and more fully developed structures by which the child cognitively interacts with his or her environment occurs through the initiative of the child, the feedback of the environment and of the child's activity upon his structures, and the effect of this feedback upon an adjustment of these structures. What is basic here is an equilibration process evoked by the discrepancy between the environment and the subject.
Gibson's analysis of the interaction that accounts for development is much simpler. Basically, she holds
that there is a structure in the world and structure in the stimulus, and that it is the structure in the stimulus--considered as a global array, not punctate--that constitutes information about the world. That there is structure in the world is self-evident to the physical scientist who uses elaborate tools and methods to discover it.15
There are discriminable aspects of this environment that at any particular point in time have not yet been discriminated. Development of perception is in the direction of specificity of discrimination; it is a development from perception of gross features of objects to greater specificity, rather than a process of synthesis toward structured wholes. She examines this development in reference to aspects of the child's natural environment, such as objects, space, events, representations of these and coded sources of stimulation (e.g., speech and writing). Principles or processes operative in perceptual learning or differentiation that she particularly stresses are:
abstraction of differential properties of stimuli, filtering out of irrelevant variables of stimulation, and selective attention of the kind described as exploratory activity of sense organs.16
What is the significance of this difference of emphasis regarding man's knowledge of his environment for the psychogenesis of being that grounds metaphysics? Much could be said, but we want particularly to note that the differing interpretations of knowledge in these two views correlate with the primacy given in the one to touch, and in the other to visual perception. In the first, motor activity as mediating knowledge of the world is more emphasized, while in the second, emphasis is placed on the stimulus present in the environment. The difference in emphasis can in part be due to the difference in the questions asked by these psychologists. Piaget is interested in the emergence of cognitive structures, and particularly the scientific structure with the place it accords to mathematics; while Gibson is interested in the emergence of one's perception of the physical world.
It seems that these two initially unintegrated aspects or forms of knowledge are present in the infant. We shall see some examples below indicating that both are operative in later stages of knowledge and that one cannot be reduced to the other; both are essential principles of man's developing knowledge of the world. Moreover, in the knowledge of reality as being, both of these forms of knowledge are likewise involved. We saw that knowledge of being, according to Thomas' understanding of it, is essentially dependent, not only upon the physical reality of the environment, but also upon two modes of knowledge. The one mediated by sense knowledge, intellectual abstraction, and insight is more in continuity with what Gibson emphasizes. The other, called participative knowledge, i.e., knowledge of our esse and what is related to it through participation in our affective inclination and its object is more in continuity with the dimensions Piaget emphasizes.
The infant's motor activity emerges from its affective inclination. The knowledge this activity mediates is not only that of the physical environment, but also that of the self (though at this age it is not distinguished) since these actions are directed to the need or good of the self. If we take account of the contributions of both Piaget and Gibson, despite their mutual tensions, we find in the infant's knowledge an anticipation of, or a point of departure for, the emergence of metaphysical knowledge as understood by St. Thomas. Of course, there are quite a few stages through which the infant must pass before becoming a metaphysician!
STAGES OF KNOWLEDGE
In the third place, the major successive periods of cognitive growth that Piaget
discovers in the child's evolution from infancy to adolescence are the sensori-motor
period (from birth until about 18 months), the concrete operatory period (beginning
about the age of 7 and preceded by a pre-operatory stage), and the period of formal
operations (beginning about the age of 12). We will note some central characteristics
of these successive periods, indicate some variants in the work of Gibson, and suggest
some implications of these psychologies of knowledge in reference to our question.
Sensori-motor Period
Piaget, in the sensori-motor period, studies the succession of action schemes or patterns which emerge from such primitive patterns as the sucking reflex. He analyzes the emergence of patterns such as sensory coordinations (e.g., between sight and hearing, between prehension and sight), the infant's progressive efforts to discover objects that have been hidden near him, and his use of means for an end. Piaget's observations and analyses bring out the gradual construction of action patterns in the infant. These contribute later to the construction of internalized actions (e.g., deferred imitation, symbolic play, formation of mental images, and verbal evocation of events), and still later to the formation of concrete logical operations of the school-age child and the interpropositional thought patterns of the pre-adolescent.
These early action patterns also have great importance for the way in which the world comes to be constructed cognitively by the child. For example, Piaget finds that objects near the infant do not initially have the character of permanently existing objects which they have for us; the construction of the permanent object is a process that occurs in stages over the first year. Piaget notes "how phenomenalistic (is) this primitive universe"17 of the neonate. The infant initially appears to be interested in objects about it only as these are occasions for its actions--e.g., sucking and looking. Until these objects are regarded as independent of the infant's action they are not considered as permanently existing substances. Concerning an intermediate stage in the process of constructing the permanently existing object, i.e., when the infant coordinates sight and hearing by looking toward the origin of sound, Piaget writes:
the space involved here is still only a space dependent on the immediate action and not precisely an objective space in which things and actions are placed in relation to each other in groups that are independent of the body itself. In short, intersensory coordinations contribute to solidifying the universe by organizing actions but they do not at all suffice to render that universe external to those actions.18
There is a certain recognition of objects by the neonate, but this can be accounted for by the infant's recognition of the reaction these objects set up in him or her; it does not of itself indicate the infant's recognition of objects as independently existing. lt takes the infant a similarly long process of construction to become aware of a space in which his or her own body is not the absolute center, but rather is an object together with other objects.
Gibson's study of the same early period shows marked differences from Piaget's. She holds that the objects about the infant and the stimulus array can account for the child's perception of space and the permanent object. Growth here is due to the infant's gradual discrimination of this global stimulus array, not to the child's motor activity or synthetic construction, save in a very subordinate sense. For example, in an experiment called "The Visual Cliff" she helped to show that infants just able to crawl had depth perception; this occurs earlier than Piaget's analysis can account for.19 In this experiment the infant is placed on a board that extends across plate glass. Under the glass to one side of the board there is a texture pattern quite close to the bottom of the glass, and the same texture pattern is placed more deeply under the glass to the other side of the board. Infants move to the apparently shallow side rather than to the perceptual cliff side, thus indicating that they have depth perception due to gradients of texture or motion parallax. Perception of object permanence, similarly, can be explained by the global array of stimulus:
Object permanence and perception of an event are reciprocal phenomena. One quite literally implies the other. If the ball rolls behind a chair, is temporarily occluded, and then rolls out again, we do not see it as a different ball and a new event. . . .
A concept of permanence would indeed be an intellectual achievement, but invariants over time in a stimulus sequence may provide a basis for the perception of an object's permanence (like the ball rolling behind a chair and out again).20
In these two explanations of infant knowledge of the environment there is a definite theoretical divergence that has not been resolved by psychologists. Yet, without trespassing on their field, it is legitimate to conclude that neither approach taken as such is a fully adequate account of the child's cognitive growth. Both taken together--without our being able to resolve the differences--contribute to an explanation of knowledge that offers a starting point for the kind of knowledge we indicated at the beginning of this chapter to be involved in the knowledge man has of being.
With Gibson we must admit that there is in the stimulus, as a global array, information that can account for one's perception of the permanent object and space. But with Piaget we must admit that after the first year there are elements in the infant's knowledge of permanent objects and space that previously were not present. There is a sense in which, partially dependent upon the child's action on the object, the object becomes disengaged from his action and acquires for him a permanent existence it did not possess earlier. Similarly, due in part to a development of the infant's motor activity into more complex action patterns, there is a growth in organization not only of the infant's behavior, but also of the space about him. There seem here to be two central principles of the infant's developing knowledge. One begins from the object perceived visually, but not exactly related to the self. The other begins from the child's executive action depending on his needs and interests and the significance this has for his knowledge of self and the environment, which are differentiated only gradually.
With reference to the child's growth after the sensori-motor period, we should note at least that both Piaget and Gibson view language as having a subordinate, though very important role.21 Language is not the source of the child's image, concept, or logic. But when the child does begin to develop speech, language has a feedback function promoting perceptual discrimination (Gibson). It "enables thought to range over vast stretches of time and space, liberating it from the immediate" (Piaget).22
Concrete Operatory Period
A central period in the child's cognitive development, and one in which the divergence between Piaget's and Gibson's interpretations is quite clear, occurs about the age of 7. Around this time the child develops a series of concepts organizing the concrete environment about him. This enables him to escape the distorting influence of perceptual cues to which he was earlier subject. For example, the concept of the conservation of quantity is developed. If in front of a child an experimenter pours water from a wide, short beaker into one that is tall and narrow, and then asks the child whether there is more in the first beaker or the second, or whether there is the same amount in both, the child of 5 will often say that there is more in the second, being confused by the perceptual cue of height. At times he may centrate on width and say that there is more in the first. He may vary his answers, but these are subject to the perceptual cues upon which he is centrating. About the age of 7 (or earlier for some children, but still in a definite sequence of stages), the child will say that there is the same amount in each beaker. This shows that he recognizes the conservation of quantity, a concept he will not lose. Similarly the child gradually becomes aware of conservation with other subject matters, such as number, area, space and volume.
For Piaget, this achievement is due to what he calls a "reflective abstraction,"
which does not derive properties from things but from our ways of acting on things, the operations we perform on them; perhaps, rather, from the various fundamental ways of coordinating such acts or operations.23
The knowledge of conservation that exists in the object is due to the child's assimilation of the object to an action scheme somewhat as the infant comes to know the nipple or thumb by assimilating it to the action scheme of sucking. Between the sensori-motor period and the period called that of "concrete operations," the child interiorizes the actions he performs on things; the action of pouring water from one beaker to the other leads by a process of reflective abstraction to an operation, or an interiorized structure, of inversion. By the operation of inversion and by that of negation (e.g., negating the height of the flask and adding proportionately to the width, or vice versa) the child gains an insight into the conservation of quantity. Piaget finds support for this interpretation in the intermediate stages through which the child moves in this achievement.
Another influence on Piaget's interpretation here is the success of the group concept in mathematics, where a property is arrived at, not by abstraction from the thing, but by an abstraction from an operation performed on it. Piaget holds that we cannot adequately explain the function of mathematics in physics unless we acknowledge that by reflective abstraction a person reaches structures in the world that are independent of him.
The isomorphism between intellectual structures and physical structures existing in the world is owed to the fact that our intellectual structures are constructed through the push and pull of the environment upon us: the formation of our external action patterns as a response to the environment, and the interiorization of these patterns through reflective abstraction.24 One characteristic of such concrete operations and conservation concepts that can be accounted for only by reflective abstraction is their necessity: the child who has come to recognize the conservation of quantity will say that there has to be the same amount of water in both beakers. But
if the logico-mathematical laws of "being" are discovered from without, in the manner of physical laws, they are then no longer `necessary' in the deductive and axiomatic meaning of the term, and nothing proves that the selection was sufficient for our adaptation being complete in their regard rather than simply approximating, as in other domains (perception, etc.).25
Eleanor Gibson interprets the same case differently. She holds that "conservation is invariance over time and over event sequence. . . . The perception of sameness over change is what is critical."26 Some evidence supports this. For example, the majority of children tested give as their reason for the conservation judgment the identity of the water in both beakers. Moreover, in an experiment where a screen is placed between the beakers and the children, thereby shielding them from perceptual differences, they judge more quickly that there is the same amount of water in each. This judgment seems then to come not from interiorized actions such as negation or compensation, but from perception of sameness over change. So for Gibson it is a matter of physical abstraction from the objects. In the conservation judgment she does not recognize a qualitatively higher stage of knowledge, as compared with perception, whereas Piaget does affirm such a qualitative difference between these forms of knowledge.
The problem of what accounts for the child's awareness of conservation has a bearing on how other concepts are developed, including some used in metaphysics. Without being able here to treat this question as it deserves, we would point out that whether conservation comes to be known by reflective abstraction or by simple abstraction, there is a structure or property in the physical thing that is known (contrary to Hume), and that the basis for one's judgment is the physical object as well as his cognitive structure (contrary to Kant). Perhaps we must agree with Piaget that reflective abstraction does at times give access to a structure or property of physical reality, since modern physics reaches such structures. As Piaget says, mathematics is not simply a language in physics--at times it predicts. Moreover, it would seem we must agree with Piaget that the conservation judgment, when compared with pre-operatory perception, is a qualitatively higher form of knowledge of the environment. Yet Piaget's view that necessity cannot properly derive from simple abstraction may show a lingering influence of empiricism in his own work; it has not met with as much agreement as other aspects of his studies on conservation.
Gibson's view that conservation is due to the perception of sameness over change has much to support it. But it seems excessively wary of admitting any distinction of stages in knowledge, and it does not give sufficient account of the subject's structures that may be involved. Perhaps at times the subject's structured activity is the conditio sine qua non and the physical object and simple abstraction from it the more direct source of a valid concept. At other times the subject's operation may be the source and the physical object and experience of it the conditio sine qua non. ln any case, one can see the relevance of developmental psychology's conservation studies to the question of the psychogenesis of philosophical concepts, specifically that of being.
Formal Operatory Period
A further stage of the child's cognitive growth is found in pre-adolescence (from age 11 or 12 to 15), a period Piaget calls that of formal operations. To relate this to our question we shall note an observation which in part exemplifies this period, discuss what accounts for the knowledge distinctive of this period, and then inquire whether the knowledge found here is implicitly metaphysical.
A central characteristic of the formal operatory period may be seen in the following experiment. Five flasks are set before subjects taken from middle childhood and pre-adolescence. Each flask has a chemically different liquid, which may be designated as 1, 2, 3, 4, and g. The experimenter tells each subject that a yellow liquid can be made by combining g with one or more of the other flasks' contents; the subject's task is to produce the yellow color. A younger child (7;1) takes g and pours it into several of the other flasks without achieving the desired result, and then into some combinations of the other flasks, but reaches only a few of the possible combinations. The pre-adolescent begins otherwise. One subject (13;0) says
You have to try with all the bottles. I'll begin with the one at the end (from 1 to 4 with g). . . . It doesn't work any more. Maybe you have to mix them (he tries 1 + 2 + g, then 1 + 3 + g). . . . It turned yellow . . . But are there other solutions? I'll try.27
This example illustrates the actual transcendence in the pre-adolescent's cognitive structure and operation when compared to the younger child's. The child at the concrete operatory level is not unsystematic, but what characterizes his approach to the problem is that he begins immediately by attempting an empirical correspondence with the experimenter's results. He is oriented to the actual concrete rather than to the possible. This is true generally of his level of operations, as the earlier example of the conservation of quantity showed. Connected with this limitation is the fact that the child of the concrete operatory period forms operational concepts one by one for very limited areas. His organization of the world about him proceeds by his development of "more or less separate islets of organization,"28 not interlocking to form the integrated systems found in adolescents.
The pre-adolescent begins his consideration of the problem by a systematic recognition of all the possibles, and only then proceeds to look for the real or actual by an examination of the different variables. He thus clearly distinguishes the actual from the possible in the problem.
Other characteristics are associated with this basic property of the formal operatory period. The preadolescent proceeds in the problem by a hypothetico-deductive method, systematically trying all the possible situations. This approach depends upon what the concrete operatory child has achieved, but the pre-adolescent puts these achievements into the form of propositions and reflects on the propositions rather than simply on the concrete data. Piaget notes that this interpropositional thinking is an approach sufficiently disengaged from centration on the concrete to allow a separation of form from content, and of possibilities from the actual. The greater scope and possibilities of the preadolescent's knowledge are based upon this more advanced structure. Piaget describes this structure and relates it to the adolescent's growth in affective and social interest in the following passage:
The subject succeeds in freeing himself from the concrete and in locating reality within a group of possible transformations. This final fundamental decentering, which occurs at the end of childhood, prepares for adolescence, whose principal characteristic is a similar liberation from the concrete in favor of interest oriented toward the non-present and the future. This is the age of great ideals and of the beginning of theories, as well as the time of simple present adaptation to reality. This affective and social impulse of adolescence has often been described. But it has not always been understood that this impulse is dependent upon a transformation of thought that permits the handling of hypotheses and reasoning with regard to propositions removed from concrete and present observation.29
We have not followed Piaget's analysis of the development of moral reasoning in the younger child--an area not as central to Piaget's interests as the knowledge that leads to scientific reasoning. Nevertheless, we should at least note, as the above passage indicates, that Piaget associates the adolescent's moral idealism and interest in the non-present and future with the cognitive development characteristic of the formal operatory period. The value orientation of the adolescent shows a development over that of the younger person similar to that found in his cognitive development. In both the affective and the cognitive areas the adolescent, while retaining the operation characteristic of the younger child, is capable of going beyond this by systematically considering what is possible and centering on the actual in its relation to the possible.
There is a correlation between stages in cognitive development and in socialization or moral reasoning. To take an example from an earlier stage, it is only when the child is entering the concrete operatory period that he is capable of playing games with other children in a way that calls for all of them to observe equally a set of rules independent of themselves. During the concrete operatory period the child's moral awareness mainly centers on an organization of his concrete behavior in virtue of rules given him and his affective relation to parent figures that makes the assimilation of rules possible. This period is marked by a moral realism that does not make much room for differences between intentional and accidental wrongdoing. The scope of the adolescent's interest, however, is much greater. This is due not simply to sociological factors, but to an inner growth toward an ability to center on possibilities for oneself and society, to experience their value and seek their realization, frequently, indeed, in a utopian manner.30
In continuity with his approach to earlier stages of the child's cognitive interaction with the environment, Piaget stresses that in the period of formal operations knowledge is gained more through the mediation of the subject's operations than through discrimination of the structure given in the environment. While not denying the latter, he emphasizes the former because he is showing the genesis of the knowledge and structure that underlies physical science, and particularly physics. He is interested in the child's quantitative knowledge, because that is what is characteristic of physics and of the interrelation of mathematics and physical experience found in that science.
The logic whose genesis he examines is modern logic closely related to mathematics. The development from the child's concrete operatory period to his formal operatory period is for him a matter of reflective abstraction. A new and more adequate cognitive structure is generated within one due to the objective situations the child faces in his or her environment (physical, but also social and academic, because these can facilitate or retard the child's growth), the inadequacy of the child's present structures to meet the problems presented to the situation, and the feedback from the situation and one's own cognitive interaction with it. The pre-adolescent who tries to find the combination that gives the yellow color achieves his solution by way of an operation that orders his action and the environment in accordance with a mathematical logic more advanced than that of the concrete operatory child:
Without knowing any logical formula, or the formal criteria for a mathematical `group' . . . the adolescent of twelve to fifteen is capable of manipulating transformations according to four possibilities: I (identical transformation) , N (inverse transformation), R (reciprocal transformation), and C (correlative transformation) . . . combining inversions and reciprocities into a single system, and thus achieving a synthesis of the hitherto partial structures.31
At a deeper level the operation of the pre-adolescent is seen as an application of the schemes of the possible and actual in accord with the hypothetico-deductive method. Similarly, Piaget sees the adolescent's new awareness of values as knowledge mediated by one's activity, one's development of the structure of the formal operatory period, and one's orientation to a wider horizon than in middle childhood.
In our analysis of earlier periods of the child's cognitive development we have suggested that Piaget's account must be supplemented by that of some Anglo-American psychologists who stress the subject's discrimination of the features of the environment to explain cognitive growth. We have indicated that in the infant's achievement of knowledge of the permanently existing object the knowledge present is not only that mediated by the child's activity, but also (and just as centrally) that mediated by his or her perceptual discrimination. In the concrete operatory child achieving awareness of conservation we have suggested that what is operative is not only knowledge mediated by internalized activity or operations, but also a qualitative knowledge through what Piaget calls "simple abstraction." That is, for example, discrimination of the attribute of quantity from that of height or width in the case of the flasks of water, by abstraction of the one from the other over a process of change. Similarly, we now suggest that in the formal operatory period there is also this qualitative knowledge that is basic to the increased scope evident in the young person's knowledge. At times Piaget acknowledges this, though he denies its centrality. For example, in explaining one of his experiments with pre-adolescents (a pendulum experiment), he notes that the child gains knowledge of metrical or quantitative proportion only by beginning with qualitative proportion.52
Psychologists who emphasize cognitive development through discrimination rather than through operation do not extend their studies into adolescence in the way that Piaget does. But in continuity with what we have said earlier, we suggest the following. The pre-adolescent's knowledge of the distinction between the actual and the possible, which is applied in the hypothetico-deductive reasoning that Piaget studies, is mediated by a process of discrimination as well as by a process of operation or adjustment. It is mediated by what Piaget calls simple abstraction as well as by reflective abstraction.
We acknowledge the presence of the latter. That is, the knowledge is in part the result of: (a) the growing child's adjustment to his environment (including here both his physical environment and his value horizon), (b) his experience that this environment is larger than that to which he previously adjusted himself and that the adjustment made in middle childhood is no longer adequate, (c) the feedback both of environment and of his earlier adjustment to it upon him as cognitive subject, and (d) his action (by reflective abstraction) to adjust to this environment, now within the context of the actual and the possible.
But in part it is due also to a kind of intellectual discrimination between the actual and the possible, which discrimination was not central for the younger child. It is made through a negation: the real is distinct from the simply possible. This involves a simple abstraction of what actually is from all the possibilities relating to a specific experiment (e.g., that of making the yellow color by a combination of flasks). It is involved in areas of qualitative knowledge that Piaget does not investigate. It is a matter of natural logic that questions why things are the way they are, rather than otherwise. Making this discrimination seems to require a higher order of abstraction than the abstraction of this (e.g., quantity as an attribute) from that (e.g., height or width as attributes), which underlay the child's grasp of conservation in his earlier period of cognitive growth. While depending genetically on the earlier discrimination of the child, this later growth makes possible the greater scope of the adolescent's knowledge.
What is the relevance of these remarks on the formal operatory period to our question about the psychogenesis of being? I suggest that this type of knowledge found in the adolescent, which is basic to scientific knowledge as well as to his self-direction in preparing himself for the adult world, is made possible through knowledge that is implicitly metaphysical. The basis for this suggestion is that what enables the pre-adolescent to interact cognitively with his environment in a way surpassing that of middle childhood is his knowledge of being. His approach to many problems offered him by his environment is based on his adjustment to this environment in the context of what is actual and what is possible, and on his discrimination of the actual from the possible.
This is what liberates him from the limited focus and method of the concrete operatory period and enables him to test systematically the varied possible answers to a problem such as that of the flasks. This liberates him also from centering his value orientation on adaptation simply to present circumstances. His knowledge does reach a structure in his environment and is not simply a knowledge of language or concept, for only a knowledge of the actual in the environment (as distinct from the possible) enables him to operate as he does in realistically forming and testing hypotheses. Similarly, this knowledge reaches a dimension of the value to which he is oriented, since the life that is possible for him is not restricted to an adjustment within his current situation or circumstances.
The actualization of his own possibilities and those of the society of which he is a part engages his interests. A sense of responsibility for such an actualization is a growth beyond the orientation of his childhood, and is as central to the development of the young person as his more directly cognitive growth. As we indicated at the beginning of this chapter, however, this entire achievement is what is meant by the word "being": what actually is, as distinct from what is merely possible, is nothing more than reality as being. In his orientation to the actualization of his own possibilities and those of his society the individual is oriented to esse, since the actualization of his being is esse.
Moreover, in his action and knowledge a double ground is evident for the adolescent's knowledge of being, as was called for by a Thomistic understanding of the psychogenesis of being. One ground is, as we said, a discrimination of the actual from the possible; this recalls the Thomistic position that being is known through sense knowledge, abstraction, and intellectual intuition or insight into the concrete existing reality of one's physical environment. The other ground is the initiative of the subject shown in his adjustment to an ever enlarging environment, an adjustment that his own being (esse) elicits from him. This is explainable by the Thomistic association of the good with esse, and the dependence of the subject's organization of his own activity and his environment upon his orientation to this actualization of himself and others.
We suggest, then, that the adolescent's distinctive knowledge is explainable by his orientation to being. On this account, his knowledge is implicitly metaphysical in that it is possible only through his knowledge of being. But it is merely implicitly so, for this knowledge is not possessed reflectively and systematically, as it is in metaphysics.
CONCLUSION
We have attempted to evaluate St. Thomas' assertion of man's orientation to, and capacity for, a knowledge of being that validly bases a metaphysics. This knowledge is mediated both by intellectual insight into being as concretely existing in the sensible individual and by man's affective orientation to, and action for, the good. We have sought to do this in view of modern objections deriving from one or another aspect of modern sciences against ascribing such a metaphysical scope to human knowledge.
To base our evaluation on modern experience and on a modern interpretation of knowledge, we turned to the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and some American psychologists to study their analysis of the subject's cognitive interaction with his or her environment in a progressive manner, and to the observations on which they base their interpretations. We have presented evidence to support Piaget's assertion of a limited transcendence in this knowledge through the sensory-motor period, the concrete operatory period, and the formal operatory period. The dimension of the environment that the child adjusts to and knows enlarges throughout this development, as do the structures that he brings to bear in his knowledge. The development is provoked both by dimensions of the environment not assimilable to earlier structures and by the activity of the cognitive subject.
The activity of the subject stressed by Piaget is behavior that leads by reflective abstraction to a more adequate and interior organization and construction of operations and environment. The activity the other psychologists stress is exploratory and discriminating perceptual activity. For the latter the environment is discriminable structure, whereas, for the former it is more a principle to which one adjusts one's behavior and which has a feedback influence on his changing cognitive structures. The action Piaget emphasizes is central not only for the subject's organization of the physical world, but also for enlarging his value awareness and moral knowledge.
With the aid of developmental psychology we have uncovered knowledge experiences for which many adversaries of metaphysical knowledge cannot account. For example, Hume's phenomenalism cannot account for the infant's grasp of the permanent object; only a realism can account for this. Linguistic philosophers who give primacy to language use cannot account for the emergence of language in the infant and young child, nor can they account for the relation of this emergence to the child's earlier cognitive interaction with his environment. Only a recognition of the dependence of language on knowledge can do this. Those who, in accord with the analytic-synthetic distinction, deny any knowledge of necessity in nature that is objectively based cannot account for the child's development into the concrete operatory period, nor, for that matter, for science itself. And those who deny man's knowledge of reality as being, in continuity with Thomas' understanding of this, cannot explain the pre-adolescent's enlargement of knowledge or the distinctive structure of his knowledge, shown both in his or her primitive scientific approach and in his or her value orientation and knowledge.
The development of these insights can help to show the human orientation to, and capacity for, a knowledge of being which bases a metaphysics. More than that, it can help save modern science from itself, for those who would restrict man's knowledge and interest to the level of science and to the technology it makes available deny the context that alone makes possible science and technological progress. To thus restrict cognitive growth and adjustment to one's environment is to deny the meaning of scientific knowledge as well as the fully human context in which the use of technology can be properly evaluated. This would also deny also a foundation for any morality that is more than a particular culture or a pragmatism.
St. Anselm's Abbey
Washington, D.C.
1. See "Human Transcendence and Thomistic Resources," in J. Farrelly, God's Work in a Changing World (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1985), pp. 228-286.
2. I examined a number of modern and contemporary objections against the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, and suggested some approaches to dialogue with these objections in "Religious Reflection and Human Transcendence," op. cit., pp. 161-227. In reference to current objections against realism and answers to these, see also, Realism (Proceedings of the American Catholic Philoshphical Association), 59 (1985).
3. These criticisms are expressed in J. Piaget, Insights and Illusions in Philosophy (New York: N.A.L., 1971). I have commented on several of them in op. cit., pp. 200-204.
The philosophical relevance of Piaget's work is discussed in Theodore Mischel, ed., Cognitive Development and Epistemology (New York: Academic Press, 1971). One of the discussants (D. W. Hamlyn) discounts such relevance: "My own opinion is that the mixture of philosophical and empirical issues involve in each case a muddle, that the philosophical and psychological questions which are at stake are different from each other, and that there are no grounds for the belief that philosophical questions can be answered by appeal to empirical evidence or vice versa," p. 19. Other contributors, Stephen Toulmin and Bernard Kaplan, differ from this position.
4. Jean Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology, 3rd ed., ed. Paul H. Mussen (New York: Wiley, 1970), p. 722. Of Piaget's many books we can cite here particularly his summary work, J. Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic, 1969). He discusses his own intellectual development in Insights. Among works on Piaget, I have been particularly helped by J. H. Flavell, The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget (Princeton: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1963), and Hans G. Furth, Piaget and Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969).
5. See C.H. Waddington, "The Theory of Evolution Today," in Beyond Reductionism, ed. Arthur Koestler and J.R. Smythies (Boston: Beacon, 1969), pp. 357-395.
6. Eleanor J. Gibson, Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969). This book represents not only Gibson's work but also that of many psychologists, mainly Anglo-American, whose work she reports on and uses. Also see D. Elkind and J. Flavell, eds., Studies in Cognitive Development (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969).
7. See James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950}, and Herbert L. Pick, Jr. and Anne Pick, "Sensory and Perceptual Development," in Mussen, ed. op. cit., I, 849-938.
The philosophical relevance of J. Gibson's work is brought out by R. Harré and E.H. Madden in "Natural Powers and Powerful Natures," Philosophy, 48 (1973), 209-230. In this article the authors show that a non-Humean philosophy is needed to account for what science is doing in relation to our knowledge and concepts of natural powers, natural kinds, and natural agency. The authors show that Gibson's work undercuts a philosophical presupposition of those who accept Hume's event-ontology: "Finally the powerful psychological work of J.J. Gibson has shown that there is no empirical basis for the tacit assumption, shared by many philosophers, that as a matter of fact percepts are organized groups of sensations," p. 217. Also see R. Harré and E.H. Madden Casual Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).
8. E. Gibson, op. cit., p. 121.
9. Ibid. p. 3.
10. Ibid., p. 77. "The criterion of perceptual learning is thus an increase in specificity. What is learned can be described as detection of properties, patterns, and distinctive features" not previously registered.
ll. Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (New York: Intl. Univ. Press, 1963), p. 42.
12. Loc. cit.
13. J. Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Basic, 1954), p. xi.
14. Ibid., pp. 354-357.
15. Gibson, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
16. Ibid., p. 117.
17. Piaget, Construction, p. 11.
18. Ibid., pp. 8-9.
19. See E.J. Gibson and R.D. Walk, "The Visual Cliff," Scientific American, 202 (1960), 64-71, and op. cit., ch. 17, "The Development of Perception in the Individual: Perceiving Space and Events," pp. 369ff. For supporting studies see T.G.R. Bower, "The Visual World of Infants," Scientific American, 215 (1966), 80-92, and "The Object in the World of the Infant," Scientific American, 225 (1971), 30-38. Bower develops ingenious experiments to defend for the infant what J.J. Gibson defended for the adult, namely, that perception of size, distance, shape, and solidity is not due to an inference based on association of visual or tactile cues with the infant's perception of the projected object. It is rather due to the infant's perception of the real object with its size, distance, shape, and solidity. It is however questionable whether Bower undermines Piaget's view on the amount of time it takes the infant to construct the permanently existing object.
20. Gibson, op. cit., pp. 381, 384.
21. For example, see Piaget, The Psychology of the Child, p. 90: "These data . . . indicate that language does not constitute the source of logic but is, on the contrary, structured by it." See also Piaget, "Language and Intellectual Operations," in Furth, op. cit., pp. 121-130; and Gibson, op. cit., pp. 154ff.
22. Piaget, Psychology, p. 86.
23. J. Piaget, Structuralism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 19. Piaget acknowledges a qualitative abstraction from things as a factor in our knowledge of the world: "There is what we call physical experience, which consists of extracting information from the objects themselves through a simple process of abstraction. This abstraction reduces to dissociating one newly discovered property from the others and disregarding the latter. Thus it is physical experience that allows the child to discover weight while disregarding the object's color, etc., or to discover that with objects with the same nature, their weight is greater as their volume increases, etc." in Mussen, op. cit., I, p. 721.
24. See Structuralism, pp. 37-43, 62. That there is a construction at the foundation of mathematical concepts is a view very widely held in the 20th century, though this construction is interpreted in different ways. See Charles Parsons, "Mathematics, Foundations of," The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. P. Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), V, 188-213, particularly his discussion of two types of constructivism, namely, "intuitionism" (Brouwer) and "formalism" (Hilbert). For a brief survey of how widespread the constructivist view of mathematics has become, see M. Vignano, "La matematica e ancora vera?", Gregorianum, 54 (1973), 61-89. While studies of the foundations of mathematics and of modern logic associated with mathematics are generally axiomatic and not anchored in the child's cognitive interaction with the world, Piaget relates the development of some primitive mathematical concepts and an elementary modern logic to the matrix of the child's natural cognitive development.
25. J. Piaget, Biologie et Connaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 361; also see Piaget's analysis of the meaning of structure, e.g., in Insights, p. 109: "The notion of `structure' is not at all reducible to a simple formalization due to the observer's mind; it expresses, on the contrary, through its formalizations to which, moreover, it lends itself, properties of the structured 'being'." Piaget acknowledges that some of his collaborators have differed from him on the source of necessity. Ibid., pp. 31f.
It is very informative to compare Piaget's views with those in the excellent book by Henry Veatch, Two Logics. The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1969). The logic whose genesis Piaget investigates is what Veatch calls a "relating-logic," and the logic associated with Piaget's "simple abstraction" is called by Veatch a "what-logic." The representatives of neoanalytic philosophy and "relating-logic" whom Veatch studies deny that by this logic we reach structures, causality, and necessity in the world. Piaget, however, considers that by this logic and the physical experience it organizes we do indeed reach quantitative structures in the physical world and their necessity and causal relations. On the other hand, Piaget denies that we reach a necessity in nature by qualitative knowledge or "simple abstraction," whereas Veatch argues effectively that we do. Veatch denies that the category "analytic proposition" does justice to our "what statements," and he shows that these statements are basic to our ordinary discourse, the humanities, and parts of science. While these are necessary truths if they are true at all, in principle they can be proved false by experience. The following is one summary of this in Veatch's book:
"For example, such statements as `Hydrogen is an element,' or `Human beings are a species of animal,' or `Motion is a transition of something from something to something else' are clearly what-statements, in that each merely attempts to state in the predicate what its subject is. If this is so, then it would seem that the evidence for the truth of such statements would have to be self-evidence--i.e., it is only through a consideration of hydrogen itself that we come to know what it is. On the other hand, for all of their seeming self-evidence, we also noted that such statements might well turn out to be false. Chemists might decide that hydrogen was not an element after all, or motion might turn out to be an entirely different sort of thing than the Aristotelians had thought it was, etc.," pp. 216-217.
26. Gibson, op. cit., pp. 388-389. She is here dependent upon experiments cited by Jerome Bruner in "On the Conservation of Liquids," in J. Bruner, et al., Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York: Wiley, 1966), pp. 183-207, although she, together with Piaget, differs from Bruner on the question of the dependence of conservation on language.
Also see L. Wallach, "On the Bases of Conservation," in Elkind and Flavell, eds., op. cit., pp. 191-219. Wallach gives positive value to both experience or perception, on the one hand, and to cognitive structure and operation, on the other, in the genesis of conservation, though more to the former than to the latter. See, in the same book, D. Elkind, "Conservation and Concept Formation," pp. 171-189. Elkind compares Piaget's study of concept formation with studies of concept formation by way of discrimination. He judges that the discriminative studies reflect more an Aristotelian mode of concept formation, while Piaget's reflects more a Galilean mode of concept formation. He concludes: "Taken singly, either approach provides only a partial understanding of the concept as we know it in the behaving and thinking subject and in the history of scientific enquiry. Taken together, however, these two versions of the concept can provide a comprehensive view of the concept that will account for the modes of conception in both the individual and science," p. 188.
27. B. Inhelder and J. Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (New York: Basic, 1958), p. 117.
28. Flavell, op cit., p. 204.
29. Piaget and Inhelder, Psychology, pp. 130-131. Emphasis added. Flavell comments as follows: "The most important general property of formal-operational thought, the one from which Piaget derives all others . . . concerns the real versus the possible." Flavell, op. cit., p. 204.
30. See Piaget, Psychology, pp. 114-127, 149-151.
31. Ibid., pp. 139-140.
32. Ibid., p. 142.