Race, culture and intelligence / edited by Ken Richardson and David Spears; associate editor, Martin Richards.

Date:
1972
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Race, culture and intelligence / edited by Ken Richardson and David Spears; associate editor, Martin Richards. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    30 Changing Intelligence man as a very complex machine, responding to stimuli in a mechanical way. For Piagetj it is only meaningful to speak of be¬ haviour as a two-v^ay interaction between the organism and its environment. Consider man^ his brain and his mind, as a tree: its growth can only be understood as a process of interaction be¬ tween the tree and the nutrient or harmful aspects of the en¬ vironment. One thing to follow from this is that the organism is essentially organized: not just a set of parts making up a whole, but an entity all of whose aspects are essential to the others. Another point is that in biological development, there is as it were no zero point, no point before which the organized inter¬ action with the environment is lacking. When does a tree begin its life ? - with thé seedling, or the seeds, or the parent flower ? Rather, there is always a structure, evolving by interaction with the environment into a more complex structure. This is Piaget's answer to the nature-nurture issue. He develops it through the immensely complex and detailed theory of stages. As to what in¬ telligence isj Piaget rejects any account of it as a set of capacities - such as Burt's, or Spearman's, or Guilford's. 'I would define intelligence,' he says, 'as a form of equilibration, or forms of equilibration, towards which all cognitive functions lead.' And then: 'I define equilibration principally as a compensation for an external disturbance.' Furth, puts it thus: '. . . intelligence is the totality of behavioural coordinations that characterize be¬ haviour at a certain stage . .. intelligence is the behavioural analogue of a biological organ which regulates the organism's behavioural exchange with the environment.' The organism interacts with the environment, in Piaget's view, in certain fundamental ways, termed functional invariants. The first we have already stressed: it is organization. The second is adaptation, which has two complementary aspects, assimila¬ tion and accommodation. Assimilation occurs whenever the organism utilizes something from the environment and in¬ corporates it - food, stimulation of any appropriate kind. Ac¬ commodation is the process of changing the organism's internal structures to suit and make use of the input from the environ¬ ment. Now we might expect that Piaget would be particularly interested in the environment, since he lays so much stress on it. In fact, he has tended to treat it merely as a necessary condition.