Jean Piaget - Emergence of Morality

 

Emergence of morality

Anyways, how is Piaget purporting to manage this? One thing he does is, for Piaget, it's really important that you have a body. That's one of the things that it's very cool about his thinking. So you could think about him as an early exponent of embodied cognition. It's like he's not exactly a Cartesian, a follower of Descartes. He doesn't believe that you have a spirit or rational mind, that is in some sense separate from your body, which is an implicit presupposition of a lot of philosophical claims. Piaget really sticks you in your body. The other thing that Piaget claims is that your abstract knowledge is actually determined by the structure of your body. It unfolds from your body up into abstraction, and that's what happens as infants transform into adults. First of all, almost all their knowledge is embodied. There's a couple of different kinds of memory. The most fundamental distinction is between procedural memory and representational memory. So when you remember your past, like a little movie, or that runs in your head, or maybe the facts that you can recite about your past, that's episodic memory. That's representational. But procedural memory is different. Procedural memories are how you walk. You don't know how you walk. It's how you ride a bike. It's how you play the piano. It's how you type. So it's automatic. It's built into your nervous system. It's built into the nerves that innervate your musculature. There are completely separate memory systems. One can represent the other, which is interesting, the representational system can represent the output of the body, which is basically what happens when someone tells a story, even when you tell a story about your own life. But the contents of procedural memory precede the contents of representational memory. They're shaped in different ways. For example, part of the wisdom that's encoded in your body is there because of things you've practiced. But it's also there because you've practiced things in a social environment. So while you practice those things, the effect of the social environment shapes the way you learn it and that's encoded right in your neurons. It's not representational. It's encoded in the way you do things. It's encoded in the way you smile when you look at someone, or you frown, or when you do that. That's all implicit. It's not under your conscious control. It's not even in that system. Piaget figured this out. One of the things he said was that you start as an infant by building your procedural memory, not your representational memory. That's partly perhaps why you can't remember your infancy. You don't actually have that kind of representational memory there. What you do is you act, you learn to act, you build your body, so that it can move. You do that partly by experimenting with your own body, but you also do that by experimenting with your body in a context that's shaped from the beginning by the presence of other people. For example, when a child learns how to breastfeed, its mouth is pretty wired up right at birth. And the rest of its body isn't wired up very much at all. But its mouth is. You might think that's just a reflex, and Piaget would agree with that. It's something built in that a baby can do right at birth. But even in the act of breastfeeding, the baby has to learn how to modify that reflex, so that it gets along with its mother. So even at the very beginning with the most primordial acts, there's a sociological influence and there's a mutual dynamic going on. That's really important. In some sense for Piaget, the structure of society is implicitly built into the structure of the procedural memory system. One of the things you might think about, he looks at the relationship between play and dreams and imitation. He's kind of a quasi-psychoanalyst. One of the things coded in your behavior is the social structure in which you emerged. It's coded in a way that you don't actually understand. You just know how to act. And then you can figure out how you're acting and you can extract out of that some of the social rules, but that doesn't mean that you know the rules. It meant that the rules were built into you. Here's the way of thinking about it. The wolf pack knows how to operate together. It knows how to hunt. Each wolf knows where every other wolf is in the dominance hierarchy. But they don't know they know that. They don't have rules. They don't have a code. They don't have laws. What they have is patterned behavioral regularities. Those are like morality. In fact, they are a dominance hierarchy of animals that aren't representational. They don't have language. It's a way of setting up individual behavior within a social context to maximize cooperation and minimize competition. Fran's de Waal who's a great primatologist, by the way, he's written a lot of books about the emergence of morality and chimpanzees in particular. He follows the same line of logic. Morality emerges out of the interaction between the chimpanzees, and it's bounded by the necessity that the actions take certain forms. For example, if the chimpanzees act in a way that each of them kills everyone else, that's the end of it. It's the end of the game. So that's not a very functional morality. It doesn't produce the survival and flourishing of the individuals, certainly. 

 

One of the things that's so brilliant about Piaget is that the social interactions between people necessarily emerge within a kind of bounded space. The space is the game. We're always playing games. A game is a microcosm of the world, and a small child's game is a tiny fractional microcosm of the world. But then you get up into adult games, and you could think about those maybe as multiplayer online games. But even more sophisticated things like being a lawyer or working at McDonald's or any of those things. Those are also forms of game. People negotiate the rules and that game is nested inside sets of broader games. For Piaget, the games the children play kind of transform inexorably and incrementally into the games that adults play. A game that's playable as an adult is a functional game. It's an acceptable game. Piaget claims that not only do people start playing games unconsciously in a sense and implicitly, they start to play games more consciously. They represent the games to some degree at least in their actions. They start to learn the explicit rules of the game, but only later after they know how to play it. And then at the highest stage of moral development, they start to realize that not only are they players of games and followers of rules but they're also producers of rules. You start out not being able to play a game at all, then you can play a game with yourself, then you can play a game with a few other people, then you can play rule-governed games with lots of people, and then you realize that you make the rules and you can make new games. That's the highest level of moral development according to Piaget. It's brilliant. He's the first person that I ever really encountered who was able to put the notion of an emergent morality on something broadly commensurate with a scientific perspective. But you have to understand that in order to do that he had to sacrifice a little bit of his notions of scientific realism. And that's what makes him a constructivist.

 

 

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* Reference

2017 Personality 06: Jean Piaget & Constructivism - YouTube

(17:22)