CERTAINTY AND NECESSITY IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF PIAGETIAN CONCEPTS

Piaget has claimed that concepts such as conservation and transitivity are experienced as logically necessary truths and that such feelings of necessity constitute evidence for the underlying cognitive structures postulated in his theory. Four experiments directed to this issue are reported. The first two experiments assessed feelings of certainty and necessity in college students presented with a range of Piagetian tasks. Problems of logical certainty and empirical certainty and empirical certainty were included for comparison. Although certainty was high for all of the Piagetian concepts, it was greatest for the developmentally early concepts. Results from the assessment of necessity were generally congruent with Piaget''s claims: Subjects tended to evaluate the Piagetian concepts as necessary truth, and their response to the Piagetain tasks was in most respects identical to their response to the logical tasks. In Experiments 3 and 4 the procedures were extended to children and to the issue of development origins. The results suggested that children as young as 6 appreciate the logical-empirical distinction and treat Piagetian concepts as necessary truths.