抄録
“Brown is elder than John . Brown is younger than Jack. Who is the eldest? Who is the youngest?”
This sort of problem is called as the three brothers test, of which Piaget found that children who could understand a single comparative sentence often answered quite in reverse: “The eldest is John and the youngest is Jack.” The reason for it: Brown is elder than John, so must be both Brown and John old, Brown is younger than Jack, so must be both Brown and Jack young; therefore, the eldest is John and the youngest is Jack. Or the problem has no sense, for Brown is old and young at the same time. They changed a relative Judgment into an absolute one.We name this type of answer for the three brothers test the principle of absolute Judgment.
We exeuted a numher of varieties of the three brothers test with ca. 250 normal pupils (age, 8-13) and 60 deaf pupils (age, 11-16), and found four types of answering. I. No principles, II. The principle of absolute Judgment, III. The principle of single proposition, IV. The good and normal principle.
A number of children seek after the proposition which has the same predicate as the question and answer only from this single proposition, neglecting the other As an example: Brown is elder than John. Brown is younger than Jack. Whis the eldest? Answer: The eldest is Brown (from the first proposition). Who is the youngest ? Answer: The youngest is Brown (from the second proposition). We name this type of answer the principle of single proposition.
The principle of absolute Judgment is vague and intuitive (synthetic in a wrong manner). A few pure cases of it were found only in the lowest class of the normal school (and never in the higher classes except the fifth class), but the dominant tendency in the first series of tests in the deaf school was of this type.
The principle of single proposition is rather analytic. The dominant tendencies both of the wrong answers in the normal school and the answers in the last series of tests in the deaf school were of this type. It seems that the third type is genetically later than the second type and forms the transition from the second type to the fourth type. The last type is analytic and constructive (synthetic in the adequate manner). It was rare in the deaf school. But in the normal school it was the more dominant, the higher the class stood.
