Though Piagetian theory dominated reserch on cognitive development in 1960s and early 70s, many investigators in the field have recently moved away from Piaget toward cognitive science. Does this trend mean that we have already exploited his contributions? Or, did we fail to incorporate many of his potentially fruitful ideas?
Nakagaki, as the first speaker of the symposium, claimed that Piaget's greatest contribution to psychology was provision of a paradigm. It includes the following three basic assumptions:1) cognitive function is a sector of biological adaptation, 2) cognitive structure is constructed through continuous interaction between an organism and its environment, and 3) acquired specific knowledge is determined by the level of operations in cognitive structure. He then proposed several important topics for study within this paradigm.
Muto, the last speaker, also admitted that there is some interesting truth in Piaget's basic assumptions or meta-theory, e. g., his emphasis of rationality of cognition and active nature of interaction with the environment. But he was very critical of the third assumption by Nakagaki. Instead of postulating the existence of uniform stages of development, which has not been supported empirically, Muto proposed to assume a set of concrete schemata, which can interact and influence each other
Three discussants made comments from their own perspectives. Maruno asserted that we now might study processes of shift between stages or of self-regulation, using the concept of schema. Arai pointed out that though Piaget's systematic theorizing was attractive, his emphasis of corstructivism often led him to underestimate the role of education in development. Finally, Ochiai, after reviewing recent empirical findings, suggested to combine Piagetian and cognitive science approaches.
Discussions among the participants clarified several debatable issues, but failed to agree on many points.
