Overcoming mind-brain dualism. Constructivism, interdisciplinarity, and psychophysiological parallelism in Piaget’s cognitive evolutionary synthesis

Abstract

Throughout his life, Piaget’s biological theorizing was poorly understood. This is because, among other probable reasons, his proposals ran contrary to the rediscovery of Mendelian ideas regarding particulate inheritance (and thus also against the later Neo-Darwinian “modern synthesis”). However, his theory was one of the sources of embodied cognition by showing the sensorimotor origins of knowledge. Leaning on cybernetics, he also later tried to bring psychological and neurological models closer together. However, this cross-referencing never produced a dialogue. His perspective is also largely absent from the history of biology. We present two main reasons to clarify this difficult history: a) Genetic Epistemology argued against reductionism at a time when few imagined that construction could offer a bridge notion to arrive at complex systems; b) this perspective raised transdisciplinary questions addressed to specialists focused on their own fields, at a time when inter- and trans- disciplinary communication were uncommon. For Piaget, the different facets of the objects of biology and psychology could be studied from different angles of a common matrix, and this proposal encountered serious obstacles with biologists’ work agenda, as we will try to show.