Professor Paul Bloom: So, most of what we do these days – our methods, our theories, our ideas – are shaped, to some extent, by Piaget's influence.
And so, what I want to do is begin this class that's going to talk about cognitive development by talking about his ideas.
His idea was that children are active thinkers; they're trying to figure out the world.
He often described them as little scientists.
And incidentally, to know where he's coming from on this, he had a very dramatic and ambitious goal.
He didn't start off because he was interested in children.
He started off because he was interested in the emergence of knowledge in general.
It was a discipline he described as genetic epistemology – the origins of knowledge.
But he studied development of the individual child because he was convinced that this development will tell him about the development of knowledge more generally.
There's a very snooty phrase that--I don't know if you ever heard it before.
