CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This presentation revisits a common place in Piagetian literature where the ideas of Piaget about child psychological development are contrasted to those of Lev Vygotsky, usually seen as incompatible and rival frameworks, and focusing on the comments Piaget made on the 1962 US edition of Thought and Language. That focus on epistemic differences has shaped an assumption that the Geneva school and Soviet research program have worked as bulkheads, working in parallel yet mostly unconnected. Shifting the attention away from the purely theoretical and methodological discussions, the aim is to reconstruct when and how Piaget started to have contacts with Soviet scholars and what they meant from the perspective of scientific international exchanges and the disciplinary organization of psychology. The focus is on how Piaget was able to interact and promote scientific exchanges beyond the specific epistemic differences himself and his research team had with their Soviet counterparts. Hence, we highlight Piagets role in the international institutionalization of psychology, his organizational skills, and the kind of conditions he favored for promoting the articulation of psychological research done in different contexts. This presentation will be centered in the years following the Soviet Thaw begun in 1953, though it will present some information on Piaget early contacts with Soviet psychologists and psychoanalysts in the 1920s, and some exchanges with Marxists psychologists and philosophers during the 1940s, such as Henri Wallon and Lucien Goldmann, that provide the background for his later engagement with Soviet scholars after Stalins death. The presentation is centered on two of his trips to the USSR; the first in 1955, when he was invited as President of the International Union of Scientific Psychology to meet the leading figures of Soviet psychology and be informed about their research agendas and installations. That visit was made as a series of increasing exchanges among scientists from the socialist block and western countries, after two decades of ostracism, both to exchange knowledge and to serve as an example of peaceful and productive coexistence. In that context, it is possible to consider Piagets involvement with Soviet scholars as a form of scientific diplomacy, where the exchange of research information and the promotion of collaboration was heavily determined by ideological struggles and exceeded the disciplinary boundaries as a form of political stance in itself. This first institutional visit was followed by a regular correspondence among Piaget and Soviet scholars such as Leontiev, Luria and Rubinstein, and further exchanges with French Marxist philosophers and psychologists, that show some basic agreements on a proper scientific outlook for psychology. It was during this period that Piaget wrote the commentary on Vygotskys book, an intervention that showed his pivoting position between East and West, rather than a one-time commentary from a estranged position. The presentation closes with Piagets prominent presence in the XVIIIth International Congress of Psychology, held in Moscow in 1966. There, Piaget talked in both the opening and closing lectures, and he and his team from the Centre international d'épistémologie génétique were part of several symposia. In conclusion, the aim of this presentation is to provide newly revised evidence from the documentary funds of the Jean Piaget Archives in Geneva, and arguments to broaden the representation of Piaget as a scientist and intellectual, from the usual consideration of him as a psychological and epistemological theorist, to his involvement into institutional organization, research policies. and intellectual stances towards ideological debates. All which points toward a major stance of scientific diplomacy.

enviar mensaje