Customer Reviews

The Psychology of Intelligence

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My only complaint about this book is its lack of brevity.
(I should stop here to make my point, right?)

I prefer my hard core intellectual concepts handed to me in bite-sized pieces. Easy to digest. Piaget uses every word in his thesaurus to deliver the most trivial of thoughts. Its a hard read for the average brain.

Having said that, Piaget's ideas are solid and have provided this reader a brilliant look into the inner workings of the mind. He explains the how and why of the motives of thought, learning, emotions and an organism's interaction with the world around it.

His discussion of "perturbances to the equilibrium of an organism's environment", ..."cause a weighted reaction in an effort to restore balance..." is fascinating.

I read this book in the late 70's while studying psychology. I've read it again in recent days because I now work with artificial intelligence - Piaget's fundamentals are as solid today as they were long ago.

This book was easier to read than "The Origins of Intelligence in Children" and held some of the same information. The translation was very good but held a few places where the English did not quite flow as well. Piaget discussed several theories of intelligence and cognition. This book is a very good source for a comparison of the development of intelligence.

I purchased this item as a required textbook for a class on cognitive development and education. I was a bit confused upon initially viewing the product listing, but it is just a run-of-the-mill paperback book. This bundle was much cheaper than the hardcover version listed on my syllabus. No complaints.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are known as "genetic epistemology".

He states in the Preface, "A book on the 'Psychology of Intelligence' could cover half the realm of psychology. The following pages are confined to outlining one view, that based on the formation of 'operations,' and to determing as objectively as possible its place among others which have been put forward."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"Every psychological explanation comes sooner or later to lean either on biology or on logic (or on sociology, but this in turn leads to the same alternatives)."
"And, furthermore, even if stages of development simply mark successive approximations of intelligence in its conquest of immutable 'ideas'; what proof have we that the normal adult or the logicians of Russell's school have succeeded in grasping them and will not be continually surpassed by future generations?"
"Formal logic is, according to this view, not an adequate description for the whole of living thought; formal operations constitute solely the structure of the final equilibrium to which concrete operations tend when they are reflected in more general systems linking together the propositions that express them."
"But, granting all this and admitting that logical thought is necessarily social, the fact remains that the laws of grouping constitute general forms of equilibrium which express both the equilibrium of inter-individual interaction and that of the operations which every socialized individual is capable when he reasons internally in terms of his most personal and original ideas."

This book is being used for my PhD work and has been a great source of information regarding Jean Piaget's work on human development.