Epistemology and Developmental Psychology

Citation preview

Epistemology and Developmental Psychology Stephen Toulmin Noûs, Vol. 11, No. 1, Symposium Papers to be Read at the Meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, Illinois, April 28-30, 1977. (Mar., 1977), pp. 51-53. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624%28197703%2911%3A1%3C51%3AEADP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0 Noûs is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.

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http://www.jstor.org Fri May 18 09:07:47 2007

Epistemology and Developmental

Psychology

(Abstract)

STEPHEN T OULMIN UNIVERSITY O F CHICAGO

For much of the twentieth century, philosophers generally have taken care to avoid the "genetic fallacy" and the fallacy of "psychologism": i.e. to follow the example set by Frege in the philosophy of mathematics, of di~tin~guishing the logical issues appropriate t o philosophy from all empirical issues, whether in history or in psychology. (Hence much of the force, for instance, of Hans Reichenbach's distinction between the "context of discovery" and the "context of justification", which held sway for so long in the philosophy of science.) In recent years, there has been some relaxation of the barriers between the history of science and the philosophy of science; b u t the separation of epistemology and developmental psychology is still generally insisted on. It is one thing t o analyze and characterize the rational procedures constitutive of "mature, adult thought", which are the presumed destination of mental development; but it is quite another thing (it is said) to investigate the various pathways by which children come t o achieve a grasp of those procedures. The purpose of the present paper is to reopen this question. Far from the issues available for study in epistemology, on the one hand, and in psycholinguistics and developmental psychology on the other, being absolutely distinct and separable, they are (I shall argue) in certain respects crucially interdependent. True: it is widely taken for granted today that we can define a particular constellation of rational skills and procedures as constituting the goal of intellectual development-the skills and procedures a'ssociated with a grasp of "formal operations", of the "deep structure" of any human NO^ 11 (1977) O 1977 b y Indiana University

51

language, or of the "everyday conceptual framework". (Different writers describe it in different ways.) But the nature and implications of this assumption themselves need to be scrutinized and brought t o the philosophical light of day. Most of all: we need to ask whether anything in the real world actually answers t o this singular name-whether, that is, intellectual development in actual fact has one-and-only-one mature goal, as the use of the definite article, "the", implies. (Perhaps, we should be paying a different kind of attention to Frege a t this point !) On the contrary, this assumption (I shall claim) is at best a first-order approximation. While it may be the case that the intellectual development of young children and adolescents in different cultures and at different epochs has taken, and still takes, generally parallel fonns, the "destinations" at which they arrive are certainly not identical; and it is certainly far too strong for Piaget (say) to speak of the growing child coining t o recognize "the necessity of operating" in accordance with (e.g.) the formal procedures represented by Euclid's geometry. Despite all of his disclaimers of philosophical commitment, Piaget seems in this respect still under the spell of the Kantian theories into which he grew up. Conversely, it is hard t o specify anything answering to the name of "the everyday conceptual framework", unless we are prepared t o investigate the empirical question, whether in fact the experience of growing up in any culture, at any epoch, will lead a child to one-and-the-same 66 conceptual framework" in every case. Once we seek t o move beyond first-order approximations and speak once more in precise tenns, accordingly, a certain limited collaboration of philosophers with both historians and psychologists is unavoidable. Rather than mature adult human thought being governed by a unique set of "a priori fonns", the outcome of intellectual development for the child born into one or another culture, a t one or another epoch, has t o be defined in tenns appropriate to the milieu in question. It remains a matter for psychological investigation, therefore, how far we shall be able to give a common description of this outcome that will hold good for all milieux, and how far we must allow for changes, as changing conceptions of conservation, or causality, or non-Euclidean geometry (say) become incorporated into everyday as well as technical thinking. And it remains a matter for psychological investigation, too, over just what the range of

EPISTEMOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT PSYCHOLOGY

53

variability the possible outcoines of intellectual development in different inilieux can in fact be distributed. To say this is not t o assert (1) that epistemologists must wait upon developmental psychologists to bring them einpirical data before they can even begin work: on the contrary, philosophers theinselves have an important role t o play in helping t o fraine the basic questions for developinental psychology-otherwise, psychologists are liable t o be left stranded in an outdated Kantianisin, like Piaget. Nor is it t o assert (2) that there will not in fact prove t o be a cominon outcome of intellectual development for children in all cultures: on the contrary, such evidence as we have inay quite possibly lead to this result in the long run-but this result will be, in part, a result of einpirical investigations in "comparative developinental psychology", a subject on which serious work has only recently begun. It is t o assert only (3) that beyond a certain point the deliverances of coinmon sense run out, and the philosopher is coinpelled t o take into serious account anything he can learn, not just froin historians of science and culture about the teinporal evolution of our rational skills and procedures, but also froin developmental psychologists about the actual endpoints of intellectual development. The final characterization of the "mature reason" must, after all, be one that a child is at least capable of coming t o grasp.