Studies In Piaget’s Mental Logic

Piaget described the children’s thinking structure by using the transformed Booleanalgebra, created the mental logic system. He did not approve the view of Gestalt psychologythat “structure is emerged as a integrity”, but from the thought of Baldwin, that the structurehas its occurrence and development process. The children’s cognitive development phase isdivided into perception-sports stage, former operation stage, specific operation stage andformal operation stage by Piaget. Specific operation is the intermediary between formeroperation and formal operation, so the specific operational not only have the characteristics ofoperation, compared with formal operation, but have some limitations. The thinking ofspecific operational stage still need according to the object reasoning. And the formaloperation thought can get rid of specific things bound, to make assumption-deduce reasoning.The formalization of specific operation has the class operation cluster and the relationshipoperational cluster. The formalization of formal operation including proposition combinationsystem,sixteen kinds of conversion between binary proposition and INRC group.The research object of mental logic is the psychological structure of children’s actualthinking, so the mental logic is not a new logic, but still belongs to the research areas ofpsychology. But mental logic is different from general psychology. It more attention to theoccurrence of thinking rather than the result, pay more attention to the production and thedevelopment of the structure. Mental logic constructed the operations logic about children’sactual thinking, and revealed the generation, development and mechanism of cognitivestructure of children in the view of the happened perspective, and then provided the basis forsolving the logic epistemology problems, and finally promoted the development of cognitivescience.