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Jean Piaget (1896–1980) is known for his contributions to developmental psychology and educational theory. His name is associated especially with Stage Theory. That we believe him to have focused solely on cognitive development, however, is not because he did. This is instead the result of the popularization of his writings in the United States during the Cold War. (A period of crisis and subsequent education reform.) The overpowering influence of those interests blinded us to his larger framework, which he called “genetic epistemology,” and of which his stages were just a part. To address the resulting and continuing misunderstandings, this entry essay presents original historical scholarship—distilling over a thousand pages of archival documents (correspondence, diary entries, budgets, and reports)—to provide an insider’s look at Piaget’s research program from the perspective of the Rockefeller Foundation: genetic epistemology’s primary funding agency in the United States from the mid-1950s through the early-1960s. The result is therefore an examination of how a group of interested Americans came to understand Piaget’s writings in French in the period just prior to their wider popularization in English, as well as of how Piaget presented himself and his ideas during the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. My goal, however, is not to summarize the whole of this misunderstood program. Instead, I aim to provide a source of archivally-grounded perspective that will allow for new insights about the Genevan School that are unrelated to American Cold War interests. In the process, we also derive new means to see how Piaget’s experimental examinations of the development of individual knowledge served to inform his team’s investigations of the evolution of science (and vice versa).

This essay is about Jean Piaget’s late theory, but it is also an advance of my broader historiographical argument regarding the role of intellectual history in uncovering our science’s still-relevant “neglected invisibles” (introduced in Burman, 2015). It does this by building on recent scholarship in the History of Biology to show how Historians of Psychology can contribute to contemporary science without falling prey to “presentism” (i.e. the bias introduced into historical narratives as a result of the framing afforded by contemporary concerns). To wit: when the present itself has been biased by past disciplinary politics, then it is not “presentist” to show that this bias exists. Nor is it presentist to follow the consequences of this biasing back to the original sources, and then highlight the resulting neglected invisibles that have continuing contemporary relevance. I do that, here, by leveraging recent scholarship showing that development was actively suppressed from the evolutionary discourse during the 20th century. Because this is starting to change, with the rise of “evo-devo” (the new synthesis of evolutionary and developmental biology that augments the old synthesis of Darwin and Mendel), and because the biological discourse provides meta-theory for evolutionary thinking in adjacent areas, the conditions of possibility for theory in psychology and epistemology are also changing: ideas that were once dismissed as unthinkable can be reconsidered in new light. Therefore, here, I turn to what Piaget called his “hazardous hypotheses,” and reexamine his long-neglected proposals—building on Baldwin and Waddington—for a single unifying evolutionary, developmental, psychological, and epistemological mechanism. PLAN FOR THE BOOK The handbook will cover how psychological ideas have evolved from past to present. The book will be organized much as an introductory-psychology text is, except that the goal of each chapter will be not merely t

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) is known for his contributions to developmental psychology and educational theory. His name is associated especially with Stage Theory. That we believe him to have focused solely on cognitive development, however, is not because he did. This is instead the result of the popularization of his writings in the United States during the Cold War. (A period of crisis and subsequent education reform.) The overpowering influence of those interests blinded us to his larger framework, which he called “genetic epistemology,” and of which his stages were just a part. To address the resulting and continuing misunderstandings, this entry essay presents original historical scholarship—distilling over a thousand pages of archival documents (correspondence, diary entries, budgets, and reports)—to provide an insider’s look at Piaget’s research program from the perspective of the Rockefeller Foundation: genetic epistemology’s primary funding agency in the United States from the mid-1950s through the early-1960s. The result is therefore an examination of how a group of interested Americans came to understand Piaget’s writings in French in the period just prior to their wider popularization in English, as well as of how Piaget presented himself and his ideas during the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. My goal, however, is not to summarize the whole of this misunderstood program. Instead, I aim to provide a source of archivally-grounded perspective that will allow for new insights about the Genevan School that are unrelated to American Cold War interests. In the process, we also derive new means to see how Piaget’s experimental examinations of the development of individual knowledge served to inform his team’s investigations of the evolution of science (and vice versa).

This essay is about Jean Piaget’s late theory, but it is also an advance of my broader historiographical argument regarding the role of intellectual history in uncovering our science’s still-relevant “neglected invisibles” (introduced in Burman, 2015). It does this by building on recent scholarship in the History of Biology to show how Historians of Psychology can contribute to contemporary science without falling prey to “presentism” (i.e. the bias introduced into historical narratives as a result of the framing afforded by contemporary concerns). To wit: when the present itself has been biased by past disciplinary politics, then it is not “presentist” to show that this bias exists. Nor is it presentist to follow the consequences of this biasing back to the original sources, and then highlight the resulting neglected invisibles that have continuing contemporary relevance. I do that, here, by leveraging recent scholarship showing that development was actively suppressed from the evolutionary discourse during the 20th century. Because this is starting to change, with the rise of “evo-devo” (the new synthesis of evolutionary and developmental biology that augments the old synthesis of Darwin and Mendel), and because the biological discourse provides meta-theory for evolutionary thinking in adjacent areas, the conditions of possibility for theory in psychology and epistemology are also changing: ideas that were once dismissed as unthinkable can be reconsidered in new light. Therefore, here, I turn to what Piaget called his “hazardous hypotheses,” and reexamine his long-neglected proposals—building on Baldwin and Waddington—for a single unifying evolutionary, developmental, psychological, and epistemological mechanism. PLAN FOR THE BOOK The handbook will cover how psychological ideas have evolved from past to present. The book will be organized much as an introductory-psychology text is, except that the goal of each chapter will be not merely t

The future of the History of Psychology is bright, and the recent historiographical debates in this journal play an important role in that. Yet Araujo's recent contribution could be misunderstood: ignoring context is not the way to do a philosophical history. Instead, philosophical assumptions can be presented as part of the context that informed an historical subject. Hence the necessity, here, of a response: the History of Psychology is becoming disciplined, but slowly. There are still plenty of non-specialists who will misunderstand Araujo’s contribution as a step forward in its rhetoric (many of whom teach the history course in their department). And because even specialists also sometimes dismiss methods-talk as a false step toward methodolatry, there is a danger in leaving such misunderstandings unaddressed. Simply put, then, ideas are never just lights in the attic: as the Historian looks in, we must always remember that—at the time—someone was looking out.