The Development of Implication-Reasoning in Children and Adolescents.

The concept of "structure" is discussed in connection with the biological and psychological sciences and shown, through a short historical analysis, to have been subject to imprecise use. The recent "structuralist movement" in the social sciences has also tended to cloud the meaning of structure rather than to clarify it. Using Whitehead's and Russell's logic, the concept of "structure" is analyzed in terms of "relations" and "elements", and it is emphasized that neither one can be reduced to the other. The remainder of the paper considers the question of how the concept of cognitive structure enters into Piaget's global vision of intellectual development. Differences between Piaget's vaguely typological conception of cognitive structure and the analytic uses of structure as developed earlier in the paper are pointed out. The premise that "different structure=different stage" is questioned as a working hypothesis for researchers. Recent developmental studies of Piaget's stage-related reasoning skills have failed to confirm the structure-stage connection. (CS)