John M. Broughton and D. John Freeman-Moir, eds. The cognitive developmental psychology of James Mark Baldwin: Current theory and research in genetic epistemology. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing, 1982. xx + 460 pp. $32.00
✍ Scribed by Robert B. Cairns
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1984
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 298 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
More than any living psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg deserves credit for having brought attention to the remarkable theoretical contributions of James Mark Baldwin. Other influential writers have drawn upon Baldwinian insights in one form or another. But they, including Jean Piaget, seem to have obscured, forgotten, or been unaware of the source. So it is altogether fitting that Kohlberg's chapter in The Cognitive Developmental Psychology of James Mark Baldwin should contain some of its most noteworthy passages. On this score, Kohlberg supplies a succinct answer to the question that has puzzled many who are acquainted with both Piaget's and Baldwin's cognitivedevelopmental theories; namely, what is the real difference between the two? Kohlberg tells us, "In the end, the fundamental distinction between Baldwin's moral psychology and Piaget's is that Piaget's psychology has no self" (p. 31 1). Kohlberg continues:
Piaget starts with an ego knowing objects, but knowing them first egocentrically. Development is a progressive movement toward objectivity. In contrast, for Baldwin all experience is experience of a self, not just of a bodil and cognitive ego. that from the start experience is social and reflective.
This means first that central to the self is not cognition but wi r 1. Second, it means It is also integrative; Baldwin himself called his theory a " 'Self' or . . . 'Self-Thought' theory of social organization."'