Recherche (1918) is an intellectual novel which sets out Piaget's research-programme.

Am I a serious scholar? Are you joking! Try my paper in Brown & Smith (2003) Reductionism and the development of knowledge [Erlbaum] for an elaboration of the view that normativity is central. There are extracts in Gruber & Voneche The Essential Piaget [but the full text is a "must"]. If you want a further defence of my interpretation of "Piaget's theory" [no doubt a misnomer, as he noted] in terms of normativity, try my¡¡paper

Smith, L. (2002. Piaget¡¯s model. In¡¡U. Goswami (ed) Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development. Oxford: Blackwell.

Roughly, my interpretation is that the 1918 text set out a general problem about "Cognitive Development". central to which is how novel knowledge develops. But all three notions - novelty, knowledge, development - have normative properties. It is for this reason that Piaget's model is a normative model. It is also an empirical, and investigable, model. I have set out this argument in

Smith, L. (2004). Developmental Epistemology and Education. In J. Carpendale & U. M¨¹ller (eds). Social interaction and the development of knowledge. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Biology
if I have misconstrued your view, alas: mea culpa. I guess that this type of exchange lends itself to that. My main point is this: any claim about "Piaget's best work" - and by implication, you were taking a position on this - has to deal with normativity. In my view, this is much harder to find in these classic texts on infancy which are all the same such that my admiration for them continues to be unstinting. I took what you said in your email to be along the lines of the standard interpretation of Piaget's work. But that standard interpretation is seriously incomplete, viewed from the normative interpretation above

Normativity
if you have missed this, you have missed this. That is exactly my point: that something important in Piaget's first book has been "lost" in¡¡the standard interpretation. At any event, if you want to find normativity, try the examples in my 2002 + 2003 + 2004 papers. And if you say "You waste your time raking over his stuff", then I say in reply "By all means design new models, even AI models. By the way: how do they deal with normativity - because if this is left out, we will have "Hamlet" without the Prince of Denmark"

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