A milestone of child psychology, The Child's Conception of the World explores the ways in which the reasoning powers of young children differ from those of adults. What conceptions of the world does the child naturally form at the different stages of its development? To what extent does the child distinguish the external world from an internal or subjective world and what limits does he or she draw between the self and objective reality? These questions make up the first problem, the child's notion of reality. A second fundamental problem is the significance of explanations put forward by the child. What use does he or she make of the notions of cause and law? Is the form of explanation presented by the child a new type? These and like questions form the second problem, the child's notion of causality. Jacques Voneche, Director of the Piaget Archives in Geneva, Switzerland, provides a preface to this classic in which he reveals the provanance of The Child's Conception of the World within the context of Piaget's other work and the then-burgeoning field of developmental psychology.
Biografie
Jean Piaget, 1896 in Neuchatel geboren, 1980 gestorben, ist einer der bedeutendsten Wissenschaftler des 20. Jahrhunderts auf den Gebieten der Entwicklungspsychologie und Erkenntnistheorie. Seine vielfältigen Untersuchungen haben das philosophische, anthropologische, psychologische und soziologische Denken unserer Zeit grundlegend beeinflusst.§Piaget war zwischen 1926 und 1954 Professor für Psychologie in Neuchâtel, Genf und Lausanne. Bis 1967 war er Direktor des Internationalen Erziehungsbüros, ab 1932 leitete er auch das Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Piaget war einer der Hauptvertreter der Entwicklungspsychologie (Genfer Schule); er befasste sich vor allem mit der Entwicklung der kognitiven Strukturen beim Kind sowie mit erkenntnistheoretischen Fragen.
