diff --git a/books/psicologia/psychology-of-intelligence.mdwn b/books/psicologia/psychology-of-intelligence.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..b4a3538d590b73bb4694dbf4d8c3822dcf288817 --- /dev/null +++ b/books/psicologia/psychology-of-intelligence.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +[[!meta title="The Psychology of Intelligence"]] + +* Author: Jean Piaget + +## Logic and psychology + + An axiomatics is an exclusively hypothetico-deductive sci- + ence, i.e., it reduces to a minimum appeals to experience (it even + aims to eliminate them entirely) in order freely to reconstruct its + object by means of undemonstrable propositions (axioms), + which are to be combined as rigorously as possible and in every + possible way. In this way geometry has made great progress, + seeking to liberate itself from all intuition and constructing the + most diverse spaces simply by deï¬ning the primary elements to + be admitted by hypothesis and the operations to which they are + subject. The axiomatic method is thus the mathematical method + par excellence and it has had numerous applications, not only in + pure mathematics, but in various ï¬elds of applied mathematics + (from theoretical physics to mathematical economics). The use- + fulness of an axiomatics, in fact, goes beyond that of demonstra- + tion (although in this ï¬eld it constitutes the only rigorous + method); in the face of complex realities, resisting exhaustive + analysis, it permits us to construct simpliï¬ed models of reality + and thus provides the study of the latter with irreplaceable dis- + secting instruments. To sum up, an axiomatics constitutes a “pat- + tern†for reality, as F. Gonseth has clearly shown, and, since all + abstraction leads to a schematization, the axiomatic method in + the long run extends the scope of intelligence itself. + + But precisely because of its “schematic†character, an axiomat- + ics cannot claim to be the basis of, and still less to replace, its + corresponding experimental science, i.e. the science relating to + that sector of reality for which the axiomatics forms the pattern. + Thus, axiomatic geometry is incapable of teaching us what the + space of the real world is like (and “pure economics†in no way + exhausts the complexity of concrete economic facts). No axi- + omatics could replace the inductive science which corresponds + to it, for the essential reason that its own purity is merely a limit + which is never completely attained. As Gonseth also says, there + always remains an intuitive residue in the most puriï¬ed pattern + (just as there is already an element of schematization in all intu- + ition). This reason alone is enough to show why an axiomatics + will never be the basis of an experimental science and why there + is an experimental science corresponding to every axiomatics + (and, no doubt, vice versa). + + -- page 30