Genetic epistemology
- What is knowledge?
- Where does it come from?
- Under what conditions is it possible?
Genetic epistemology focuses on both the development of each individual's knowledge from birth to death, and the historical development of knowledge within a particular culture, primarily within the scientific tradition of the West, over the course of the existence of a particular race. The task of genetic epistemology in piaget's understanding is to explain the development of knowledge and intelligence within the individual and within the culture by the same, mainly biological, age — related mechanisms and principles.
Piaget's contribution to the development of genetic epistemology is mainly methodological, because he proposed a way to solve classical epistemological problems — careful and prototypical in nature observation of how infants, children, adolescents and adults construct knowledge. In all his works on children's thinking, one can guess the desire to solve an epistemological problem by analyzing how we come to start thinking, and why our thinking is organized differently in different cases. For example, piaget answered the classic question of epistemology: does a tree falling in the forest make a noise if there is no one around to hear it? According to piaget, to acquire the inherent conviction of every adult that objects exist and will exist regardless of whether someone perceives them or not, each of us needs about the first 2 years of life. The assimilation of the idea of object constancy is one of the principal achievements of infancy.
An equally difficult epistemological problem is understanding causality, since we have no reliable way of knowing which relationships between objects are caused by certain causes and which are not. To clarify the question of causality, piaget suggested that we first describe at length how we construct our concept of causality.
Piaget's position is constructivist, i.e. he proceeds from the fact that the fundamental categories and structures of our consciousness are not given to us a priori, but are constructed by us in the process of our development through the evolution of systems by which we influence the environment and our own consciousness and transform them. Subsequent levels or stages are always reformulations or reconstructions of previous ways of perceiving the world and confirming knowledge, and the subsequent method always reflects reality more fully and corresponds to it better than the previous one.