Rationality and Reversibility in Jean Piaget’s Theory of Reasoning

Rationality has long been considered the quintessence of humankind. However, psychological experiments revealing reliable divergences in performances on reasoning tasks from normative principles of reasoning have cast serious doubt on the venerable dogma that human beings are rational animals. According to the standard picture, reasoning in accordance with principles based on rules of logic, probability theory, etc., is rational. The standard picture provides the backdrop for both the rationality and irrationality thesis, and, by virtue of the competence-performance distinction, diametrically opposed interpretations of reasoning experiments are possible. However, the standard picture rests on shaky foundations. Jean Piaget developed a psychological theory of reasoning, in which logic and mathematics are continuous with psychology but nevertheless autonomous sources of knowledge. Accordingly, logic, probability theory, etc. are not extra-human norms, and reasoners have the ability to reason in accordance with them. In this paper, I set out Piaget’s theory of rationality, using intra- and interpropositional reasoning as illustrations, and argue that Piaget’s theory of rationality is compatible with the standard picture but actually undermines it by denying that norms of reasoning based on logic are psychologically relevant for rationality. In particular, rather than logic being the normative benchmark, I argue that rationality according to Piaget has a psychological foundation, namely the reversibility of the operations of thought constituting cognitive structures.