Piaget’s Structural Developmental Psychology

Piaget’s psychology of the decentered epistemic subject, with its cybernetic competence theory of cognition, generates two related problems. First, the possibility of subjectivity is ruled out, and with it, both consciousness and self-consciousness. Second, the dynamic transformation of society through history is diminished to a trivial level. Dispensing with self and society in this way seriously constrains the potential of Piagetian theory for explaining human development.