Challenges in Piaget’s Legacy

The publication of After Piaget (Martí and Rodríguez 2012) hopefully triggers a new effort to understand the richness of the efforts of that major psychologist of the 20th century.
Piaget was consistently concerned with part/whole relationships throughout his life. He addressed this issue philosophically,
epistemologically, and psychologically. Conceptually Piaget struggled with the issue of continuity/discontinuity in development
and changed his mind about how to reconcile the discontinuities of stages with his concept of development. I also attribute
his variability to the implications of his important work on perception, and to his willingness to get involved in widespread
concrete applications of his approach to education including the education of children with special needs; his center for
genetic epistemology, and his interest in psychoanalysis. Benefiting from all the authors of After Piaget, I want to point out that Piaget has identified many major issues that will continue to constitute challenges to psychology
in this century. These include specifying terms such as ‘development;’ methodological issues such as sampling both quantitatively
in one culture and across cultures; comprehensive inclusion of the psychological processes covered by introductory textbooks
in psychology; and conceptual issues such as the relationships among all these parts within a whole. I make a distinction
between an ‘issue’ and a ‘problem’—problems have solutions; while issues refer to controversies in science generally as well as in psychology that have persisted for centuries.