Children’s understanding of the idea of logical necessity: The effect of counter-suggestions

Orlando Lourenço

Abstract


This study examined the child’s understanding of the idea of logical necessity in 40 preoperational and 40 operational children in the context of a number conservation task and a liquids conservation task. The first task followed the typical Piagetian clinical method. The second task also used this method, but it employed counter-suggestions that Piaget, in a surprising way, rarely, if ever, used in his experiments. Children’s performance on the number conservation task allowed us, in a pre-experimental phase, to classify those children, aged between 5 and 7 years, as preoperational (40) or operational (40). Results show that: (1) from the number conservation task to the liquids conversation task, there was a significant change in preoperational and operational children’s epistemic status and its corresponding idea of logical necessity; (2) children refused a non-justified counter-suggestion coming from a putative knowledgeable adult less than a justified contra-suggestion coming from a hypothetical child; (3) operational children often invoked the identity argument on both tasks and the reversibility argument was practically absent; (4) children invoked the compensation argument on the liquids conservation task more than on the number conservation task.

Keywords


Piaget, Children, Counter-suggestions, Logical necessity, Operational arguments.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14417/ap.1576

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