Q: I have an issue with Piaget in that in a number of his sensorimotor & preoperational books (Origins.., Play Dreams & Imitation, etc.), he writes about the changing relationship between assimilation and accommodation throughout the six sub-stages of development for any particular stage.  This is something dear to my heart, and yet I am completely unaware of anyone other than Piaget who might have commented on this issue.

Do you know of any good writers, references, etc. who have written well about Piaget ¯s uses of the concepts of assimilation and accommodation? Obviously I don ¯t want the usual introductions to these concepts ¨C I ¯m more after a critique of them, especially where that critique might be based in Piaget ¯s own terms. Any information would be much appreciated.

A1:1: a good place to start is in Piaget's own writings which are serial, as usual. A useful guide is
PIAGET OR THE ADVANCE OF KNOWLEDGE
Jacques Montangero & D. Maurice-Naville.
Erlbaum, 1997

2: Rule out any commentary that denies either of these
a: assimilation and accommodation are jointly intrinsic to each and every action [act, activit], differing as to their several contributions whose proportions can and do vary
b: these constructs are functional, not structural, and so are always insufficient to fix their own reference - something more has to be brought in for their instantiation.

3: Take stock of Piaget's model. Again, this has gone through serial versions. But if you are reading the infancy texts, then take stock of his model circa the 1930s, when these texts were written in French. If you are reading, say, Piaget & Garcia [such as their English 1991 Erlbaum text], then this was written in the late 1980s and published in French in 1987 - so take stock of Piaget's model then.

4: Of course, constructs have a life [or death] of their own. How these constructs are used in the work of others is another long story.

A2:Rule out any commentary that denies either of these [assimilation and accommodation]

I'm a little surprised at this. I appreciate that assimilation and accommodation are now standard 'terms of art' within the Piagetian universe, but surely they were an unfortunate choice, at least insofar as they are intended to mean that the process of assimilation and accommodation is essentially the same as its biological counterpart.

In strictly biological assimilation, the item assimilated is typically dismembered and absorbed by the organism. Conversely, the process of accommodation implies a change in the organism that does not necessarily either preserve or (a fortiori) transcend its prior state, character, capability, and so on. It certainly can lead to lead to refinement, but that remains simply an improvement of an essentially unaltered 'architecture' of function and structure. Accommodation makes an organism cleverer but not
deeper.

But surely that is precisely what does NOT happen in the case of an intelligent action. Objects are seldom destroyed in order to be reconstructed; on the contrary, a process such as seriation add an element of organisation that was not previously present. Even something as simple as constructing a single object is an act of synthesis, not dissolution. Likewise, we do not simple accommodate to things; rather, we reconstruct ourselves, not only in the sense in which any organism might learn but also in the sense of qualitative advance. A concrete operational child is not simply cleverer than a pre-operational child - there are whole classes of things that the younger child cannot grasp that are obvious to the older child, whole classes of past mysteries that are now self-evidence - and whole classes of new problem that the pre-operational child could not even imagine.

None of this would be true for the accommodations of a non-intelligent organism, any more than, when it assimilates food it makes sense of it.

A3;How people pass between stage is what I thought Piaget meant by accommodation.

Q2: I tend to agree with Richard as and when one wants to take in Intelligence in the fullness of all its glory, and of course, only in such fullness could a science of intelligence truly claim to be "getting there". Nevertheless, mere mortal as I am, I want to continue to focus on Piaget's concepts of assimilation and accommodation because I believe there's just so much in there as yet unappreciated by the audience at large, and I believe it will help us go further than simply round and round the same old circles. Obviously, assimilation and accommodation do not say everything there is about intelligence. Les' work on Necessary Knowledge, for example, makes little if any appeal to them (Les?). And it is well argued that biological adaptation, in the sense of evolution, could never lead to structures which know necessity.
Nevertheless, Piaget persisted with the notions of assimilation and accommodation at some length, in several books, and for me, the interesting thread is the way the relationship between assimilation and accommodation changes as sensorimotor, and then intuitive/preoperational intelligence, develops.  This changing relationship is key to my understanding of the whole point about there being six sub-stages to each main stage of development.
More significantly, however, I suspect (and only suspect, not 'know') that there is an element of self-contradiction in Piaget's descriptions of this changing relationship.  And if not contradiction, then maybe my analysis will bring out what is inadequate about these concepts. My aim is to progress this matter. I certainly wouldn't dream of rubbishing these concepts of assimilation and accommodation. I think that Piaget at the very least found a method with which the entire development of intelligence could at least be tackled - something unprecedented in psychology. Let me end with a quotation from the master:-
"Physiological assimilation is, in effect, entirely centred on the organism. It is an incorporation of the environment to the living body, and the centripetal character of this process is so advanced that the incorporated elements lose their specific nature to be transformed into substances identical to those of the body itself.
....
Rational assimilation, on the contrary, as revealed in judgment, does not at all destroy the object incorporated in the subject, since, by manifesting the latter's activity, it subordinates it to the reality of the former.  The antagonism of these two extreme terms is such that one would refuse to attribute them to the same mechanism if sensorimotor assimilation did not bridge the gap between them.  At its source, in effect, sensorimotor assimilation is as egocentric as physiological assimilation, since it uses the object only to aliment the functioning of the subject's operations, whereas at [the end of sensorimotor development] the same assimilatory impetus succeeds in inserting the real in frameworks exactly adapted to its objective characteristics . How can this transition . be explained, a transition without which the comparison of biological assimilation with intellectual assimilation would only be a play on words?"
Piaget,J. "Origins of Intelligence" (1977)  pp452-453
Piaget's answer to that last question, by the way, was reciprocal adaptation. And therein lies a lot of work...

A4: As I understand Piaget, it is  *reciprocal* adaptation (i.e. reciprocal accommodation and reciprocal assimilation between two or more schemes/schemata) that provided the genesis of new, higher-order structures, as a constructive synthesis of the contributing structures, through their functional overlaps, that leads from one stage to another.  Otherwise the *qualitative* advance that stage development presumes could not occur.
Simple accommodation, on its own, leads to change, which *might* be "better" change, but then only fortuitously so. It couldn't constitute the kind of qualitative development that (for me) Piagetian epistemology (& psychology) is all about. At best, simple accommodation could perhaps accumulate "more of the same", but not progress.