Your statement is an unfair caricature of what I said. To see Piaget's view of intelligence as exclusively biological would be just as in accurate as doing what Professor Robinson did in equating it with an insight-theory. What I actually said is plainly true.

I also want to comment on your characterization of Piaget's equilibration theory. You call it a "working name;" nevertheless Piaget never described it in such terms, and instead saw it as a real although partial explanation of developmental change. You may be right that Piaget associated normative features with this term in *Recherche.* But that was a fictional work and has never been seen by Piaget or any serious Piaget scholar as reflecting his mature view of development. I have not read all of the mature Piaget's enormous corpus of writings on equilibration but I have read a great deal of it and I cannot recall a single reference to normative standards in any discussion of this topic. [He does discuss the relationship between "normatif" and "constatif" but not in this context. In fact, he goes to great lengths to characterize equilibation as "teleonomic" not "teleological" precisely to distinguish it from anything normative.]

Certainly there are AI systems directed at their own improvement. But I don't see much point in using them (or any other model) to try to clarify Piaget's theory. If we want something clearer than what Piaget actually wrote, it seems to me more productive to offer new theories of our own, of course acknowledging our debt to Piaget when it exists. There surely is fine work in AI that seeks to do exactly that.

(by Laurence Miller)

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(This article is from email discussions through owner-piaget-list@interchange.ubc.ca)