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La causalité chez l'enfant (Children's understanding of causality)

2009; Wiley; Volume: 100; Issue: S1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1348/000712608x336059

2044-8295

Jean Piaget,

Social Representations and Identity

There are only three ways in which the birth of the notion of cause can be interpreted, if we put on one side for the moment a sociological interpretation to which we return later. The notion of cause results from either external experience, which is from associations imposed by things themselves; or from the feeling of internal experience arising from personal activity; or lastly from our perception of a relationship between things, or between things and oneself, and which then simply results from our deductive capacity. Hume defended the first of these three possibilities: causality, for him, comes from the habits that we acquire through the pressure of things. Maine de Biran supported the second possibility: causality is born out of volition and muscular effort. The third possibility is supported by famous rationalists in general. Here, we are not engaging in philosophy, but child psychology. So, we will not discuss the basis of these possibilities – that is, we will not ask ourselves where they lead for the theory of knowledge. Our task will be simply to investigate their value as working tools in the analysis of the child's mind. Interestingly, all three possibilities are very fruitful. When we examine the young child, aged 2 to 7, we constantly have the feeling that Hume and Maine de Biran are both right, although they contradict themselves. When we examine the evolution of causality as a whole, up until the age of twelve to fifteen, we have the impression that the concept of cause is an instrument of knowledge that reason constantly modifies and rebuilds. We shall briefly explore this paradoxical situation and then find a working hypothesis that will lead us to a description of the facts. When we observe young children, we continually have the conviction that Hume is right: that is, the totally empirical and phenomenist manner in which the young child establishes cause and effect relations. So, he notices that the lights of bicycles and automobiles are switched on at night, and then concludes that it is the lamp that makes the bicycle move. If we ask the child how is it possible that this can happen and how the lamp makes wheels spin he does not know and does not care in the slightest. For the young child, as Hume says, ‘anything can produce anything’. However, at the same time the child behaves in a curious way; he believes that the lamp has causal force. He believes that it is alive and that it moves the bicycle forward on purpose. He says, ‘nice lamp’ or ‘naughty lamp’. In short, he conceptualises it as a kind of person. Now, this is something that cannot be explained if causality is born only from experience and from habit. Indeed, before any experience, the child already perceives things in a particular way. He projects his feelings on the whole universe. He does not distinguish the subjective from the objective: he is much less close to things than we ourselves are. So Maine de Biran is also right. From the cradle, the child experiences his own muscular sensations, his states of pleasure and sadness, his desires and his disappointments. But he cannot discover the external world, that is, he cannot experience the resistance of things, without seeing things in a link with his self. This then gives birth to the notion of force, animism, in short of all elementary forms of causality, which are a great deal closer to the psychological reality than to the objectively conceived physical reality. Only, here again, serious difficulties arise. On the one hand, the child understands his self (his thinking, etc.) only by analogy to what he observes in the external world. On the other hand, the young child has only a very fragile consciousness of his self. He discovers things well before he finds out about his own person; also he discovers the person of others before his own. So, it must be said that he continually confuses the subjective and the objective. It is thus wrong to say that first he discovers his self and that only then he conceives things by analogy to this self. Thus we can propose a working hypothesis, concerning the first years of the child that we will try to verify later on. We note that Hume and Maine de Biran contradict one another. Hume is right to say that children's understanding of causality starts with empirical trial and error, but he does not explain that the child understands things in relation to his self. Maine de Biran is right to say that there are subjective elements in primitive causality, but he does not explain why the child is interested in things well before discovering his self. This being the case, we shall simply take note of this paradox and suppose the following. We should acknowledge that at the beginning of mental life, there is no boundary between the self and the external world. This means that the newborn will not be able to know things in themselves but that, with any primitive knowledge, elements stemming from things and those stemming from the body are indissolubly linked for consciousness. In other words, for the baby, knowing consists of assimilating things to schemas from one's own action, in such a way that, for consciousness, things appear to have qualities, which in fact stem from the organism. If we continue with these assumptions, it seems that we could understand the whole development of the concept of causality. Indeed, two essential consequences can be deduced from this starting point, and observations will show how well founded these two consequences are. The first consequence is that the young child will be at the same time closer to and further away from things than we are ourselves. The child will be closer to things than we are, in the sense that, given that his thinking is not yet aware of itself (because it proceeds by empirical trial and error and not yet by deduction), he will not be able to free himself from immediate appearances to build a deeper rational reality. However he will be further away from things than we are, in the sense that he will constantly mix into his own subjective conceptions, elements from which we adults have managed to free ourselves. Thus, we can say that the young child is at the same time closer to and further away from his self than we are: closer because he confuses self with everything else and further away because he is not aware of it. It is in this sense that Hume and Maine de Biran are both right even though they appear to contradict one another. The second consequence is that while developing, the child will free himself from the empirical appearance of things as well as from the subjective character of his thought. So, to consider an example, he will no longer believe that the sun and the moon follow him when he goes for a walk and will instead come to appreciate that he is experiencing a simple illusion. At the same time, he will no longer believe that stars are alive and conscious like us. Indeed, by separating his self from things, so to speak, he will need to develop a better understanding of appearances: he will no longer be able to believe that the moon is following him if he discovers that the moon simultaneously seems to follow Peter, James and John. Rather, he will be forced to consider the moon as immobile or as moving independently from us. By separating his thought from things, the child will also stop conflating things with his self. He will no longer believe that inanimate things possess consciousness, life and animated forces. In this case, causality, envisaged dynamically, and not just at its origins, is a product of reason: by separating his self from things, that is, separation at the same time from empirical appearances, and also from subjective illusions, the child is obliged, little by little, to construct a reality deeper than that of immediate experience; and all causality consists of such a construction. Given this, we will set out to analyse the facts. We will try to describe as objectively as possible the stages of children's understanding of causality, and we will try to verify the extent to which our working hypothesis is well founded. Since causality is relevant to nearly all mental processes in the child, we will need to limit ourselves to only one category of explanation, the explanation of movements, even if, occasionally, we venture into related fields. We are going to ask children how clouds, stars, rivers and wind move forward, what waves and drafts are, why clouds stay in the sky and boats on the water, while stones fall to the ground or sink to the bottom of water. By classifying the responses, we will establish the existence of four main stages in the child's understanding of causality. During the first stage, numerous manifestations of which we have shown exist until about the age of three to four with some traces lingering until later in development, children offer explanations that are magical and phenomenist: things are linked to certain gestures that we make without any link that is spatial or intelligible. During the second stage, which spans from approximately the age of three to eight, the cause of movements in nature is moral, and, by analysing this type of causality, we will find a mix of animism and artificialism. This moral causality does not exclude some knowledge of some physical links, but the physical and the moral are still confounded. During the third stage, which spans from approximately the age of eight to eleven, the cause of movements becomes principally physical; however children's notions of physics at that age are impregnated by dynamism: bodies are moved by substantial forces, as in Aristotle's physics, and the child only has a vague idea of the mechanism itself, with its rational principles of conservation. Finally, around the age of ten to eleven, a mechanical explanation of movement appears, as well as certain rational principles such as the conservation of weight. As we can see, this developmental progression seems at first to be linked with what we said previously. On the one hand, causality seems to be progressively de-subjectivised: firstly it is magic, then moral, then it becomes dynamic, and finally mechanical. However, at the same time, rational construction seems to progressively replace empirical association: phenomenism is succeeded by a hidden moral order, then by some forces that the child tries to make intelligible, and then finally by logical principles that experience simply suggests, without imposing them, and that can only be constructed through reason. In a few days, I will have the honour to analyse, in front of the British Psychological Society, the concept of causality in a baby just a few months old. I will try to show that once the baby perceives a link between one of his own gestures and a movement in the external world, he attributes efficacy to this gesture and then uses it to reproduce the movement previously perceived in the outside world. So, a baby will half close his eyes in front of an electrical lamp cord to turn the lamp on, or he will carry out a hand gesture to make an object move from a distance. Thus, it seems that the primitive causality is at the same time both phenomenist and quasi-magical because the baby does not make any distinction between his self and the external world and considers his muscular efforts as extending into things themselves. Curiously, we find many remains of these primitive behaviours in the three and four-year-old child. We will analyse just two of them. First, there are the most primitive explanations of the movement of stars and clouds. The child discovers very soon that when he walks, the stars and often the clouds seem to follow him. Thus there is a link between the child's walking and the movement of the stars and clouds that his experience imposes, and which, as such, is of a phenomenist nature at least in its origins. In view of such an observation, we can take at least three possible attitudes, which are interesting in terms of causality because they reveal clearly the orientation of the child's mind. One of these attitudes is the critical one. We notice that trees or a wall move behind us when we walk beside them and that landscapes flee from us when we are on a train. So the child, who is at first fooled by these appearances, quickly frees himself from them. Regarding the stars, he could wonder what the moon will do if he goes in one direction and his brother goes in the opposite one. In this way, he will end up considering the movements of the stars that follow us as pure appearances. The second possible attitude is the animist one. If the sun and the moon follow us, it is that they want to follow us. They look after us, watch us, keep an eye on us, wait for us when we enter a shop, and so on. But, if they wanted to, they could go away. If they follow us, it is therefore because they wish to do so. The third possible attitude is the magical one, or the attitude of believing in one's own role and own personal efficacy. If the stars follow us, it is because we force them to follow us. They obey us. We make them go forward, or stop, and adjust their speed. They cannot disobey us. The first of these three attitudes is definitely the most cognitively demanding, because it assumes critical thinking. Therefore, it is quite natural that it is the one that appears last. Indeed, it is only around the age of eight, on average, that it becomes common (in three quarters of the children), that is, in our third stage, the stage of dynamism. The second and third of these three attitudes seem logically to be of equal difficulty. Nothing in our experience tells us whether the moon follows us because it wants it, or whether it follows us because we force it to do so because it follows us all the time. So, it is interesting to wonder which of these two modes of thought is most primitive. The statistical results are very clear. The child begins by believing in his own personal efficacy and by thinking that that he forces the stars to obey him. The animist attitude only appears second. Chronologically speaking, responses favouring a belief in personal efficacy are thus characteristic of our first stage, and are particularly frequent around the age of four. Answers, which reveal that the stars follow us because they want to, are especially frequent between the ages of five and eight, and are characteristic of moral causality, as we will see later. We move on to the second example, which will serve at the same time, as a counter-proof. To verify our previous analyses of beliefs, we have imagined a display presenting the child with a convergence between one of his gestures and an external movement. The task is comparable, therefore, to the case of the stars that seem to follow us. We show the child a pipette full of water that naturally excites his interest. Then we say: ‘When you want the water to fall, make a little sign with your finger’. The child moves the finger and, without allowing him to see how we do it, we let a small amount of water fall from the pipette. The child repeats the gesture and once again we allow some drops to escape, and so on. Here, as previously, three orientations of mind are possible in the presence of this mystery. The child can have a critical attitude and say: ‘I don't understand it, but there must be a trick. It must be you and not me who makes the water fall’. Or, the child can take a purely phenomenist attitude, and say: ‘There is a link between the movement of my finger and the fall of the water, but I have nothing to do with it. Probably, my finger moves the air, or something similar is happening’. Or, finally, the child can take the attitude of believing in personal efficacy, and say: ‘It's me who makes the water fall because I forced it to fall and it obeys me’. Interestingly, it is once again the belief in personal efficacy that is the most primitive. Young children, from age three to four, are immediately convinced that they have power over the water in the pipette. If it is, for example, a boy who does the task, and a girl pupil subsequently does the finger sign without success, the boy merely says: ‘She doesn't know how to do it. It's not for girls; it's only for boys … ’. On the other hand, around the age of seven the child considers that there is a trick behind it and that it is the experimenter who makes the water fall. Between the two stages, we can see a progressive decrease in the belief in personal efficacy. Thus, we can see that these results parallel those relating to how children explain the movements of stars. In short, it seems that for the baby, from six to eight months to around two years old, primitive causality takes the form of a kind of belief in the causal value of the gesture, a belief that is encouraged by the successes obtained during all empirical or phenomenist experiences. It seems, furthermore, that this form of causality reappears each time the opportunity is given to the child until a time that is difficult to specify; nonetheless these remaining traces of primitive causality are frequent until around the age of four. We need to add, before we leave this first stage, that magico-phenomenist causality would appear to correspond to a representation of things that reminds us of the famous notion of ‘participation’ so well described by M. Levy-Bruhl in the mentality of so-called primitive people (Where participation is concerned with people's feelings towards things around them as well as with the evaluation of the thing's relation to the speaker). I do not wish to raise here the question of the genesis of these participations of the baby; a question that is very complex because it touches on the development of the concept of things. However, it is worth noting the explanations four-year-old children give to account for the appearance and disappearance of certain phenomena, especially difficult to conceive of as things, permanent and identical to themselves, such as the explanation given for drafts and shadows. Using a fan to create a draft, we ask the child how the draft that he just experienced was formed. Let us make sure, however, that the experiment is done in a room where the window was closed before the child arrived. From the age of six to seven, the child gives some explanations that do not interest us here, and which amount to saying that the fan has created air by its own movement, because the child does not know that there is motionless air in the room. However, children of the age of four and often also five give us a much more curious interpretation. Naturally, they do not know, and a fortiori, that the room is full of air and so they think that the fan, by its movement, created the appearance of a draft, which, at the same time, comes from the wind that blows outside the window. Indeed, the child, feeling the draft, says straightaway: ‘that's wind’, and when asked where the wind comes from, he claims that it comes from ‘outside’. It is pointed out to the child that the window is closed, but that does not bother him. He maintains that the wind from the fan is nothing other than the wind from outside, which is guided by the fan when it is working. When the fan stops, the wind leaves, when the action is repeated, it comes back. It is the same for shadows. The child naturally thinks of a shadow as a substance, and not as an absence of light. But it is also a substance that, like air, has the power to move itself instantly. When one produces a shadow on the table with a book, the four-year-old child recognizes fully that it is the book which produces the shadow but, at the same time, he claims that the shadow comes from outside. There is a lot of shadow under trees; there is also some in the sky, in the clouds that produce the night. So, when one puts a book on the table, this shadow from the trees or the sky is channelled there. It disappears when the book is lifted, and returns when it is put down again! It is clear that these strange beliefs simply come from the child establishing an identity where we only make a comparison. Instead of saying: ‘this shadow of the book is similar to the shadow of the trees’, or ‘This draft is similar to the wind’, he says: ‘This shadow is that of the trees’, and ‘This draft is the wind’. But, it is really difficult not to perceive in these responses a stage prior to our properly logical identifications, since here the identity is established without any worry about spatial contact: the shadow, which was in the sky, is now under the book, and returns then to the sky, and so on. One could almost argue that things are simultaneously in different places, if it were not better to simply say that the child establishes a link without caring at all for geometrical connections. Thus, there is something here that is similar to participation. As was seen earlier, such representations are the natural extension of magico-phenomenist causality, as just described, and whose essential characteristic is precisely not to take into account spatial relations. If our analysis of the first stage of explanation in the child is correct, we have verified one part of our working hypothesis: causality starts with the maximum of phenomenist empiricism together with the maximum of subjectivist dynamism. The child who believes that he makes the sun move forward is, in fact, closer than we are to the direct experience of things, but at the same time he attributes to his personal efficacy greater powers than he will do later. At the limit, the baby projects his self on to the whole universe while being very susceptible to the influence of his immediate experience. What will become of this situation during the second stage of causality, roughly from the age of three to seven to eight years? On the one hand, the child will continue to be seduced by the appearance of things, but a little less than during the first stage. Thus, he will continue to believe that the stars follow him, but he will believe it less easily for clouds. He will continue to put stars and clouds on the same spatial plane, but he will situate them higher in the sky than previously. He will no longer believe that he only needs to close his eyes to produce the night, but he will still think that if everybody goes to bed in the middle of the day it would become dark straightaway. In short, he will remain very phenomenist but to a lesser degree than previously. When it comes to the subjective aspect of causal links, the child's belief in his own personal efficacy will gradually diminish into a link that is simply moral. In fact, the sooner the child learns to distinguish his self from that of others, the less he will attribute to the efficacy of his own gestures. By learning to imitate others, and then, thanks to language, by learning to obey his parents, the child has an essential experience which will impact upon his representation of the world. He will conceive of the universe as a vast society of living beings subject to a set of duties and constraints, and causality will then be construed as coercion, half-physical and half-moral, analogous to the control that adults exert over their children. To verify that, we asked children aged from seven to eight about the movement of the wind, clouds, stars and rivers. In this way, we will find a really clear result confirming what the sadly missed Prof. James Sully had outlined in his well known ‘Studies on childhood’: it is that these bodies are conceived of as big well-behaved children, who accomplish their duty correctly. In fact, during this stage of moral explanation, we find two different types of answers, which characterise two successive sub-stages. During the first sub-stage, which spans mainly from three to six years, the child represents things as living beings directly obeying Man (or God, which amounts to the same because they define God as a ‘Mister’). During the second sub-stage (from six to eight years), things are subordinated one to another and the whole of nature is subordinated to moral rules, which are still anthropocentric, but in which explicit and mythological artificialism of the beginning of the stage no longer appears directly. From the point of view of causality, described here, the structure of the explanation is thus the same during both sub-stages. Beginning with the first sub-stage, which is thus characterised by a mix of animism and artificialism, we asked four to six-year-old children how the wind is formed and why air moves forward. The answers are always the same. The wind ‘It's someone who has blown – Who did that? – Some people – Which people? – People who had this job’ (a six-year-old), or ‘It's when we whistle; that pushes the air out’, or it is God and people who produce air with a bicycle's pump. As for knowing why air moves forward, the cause is physical on the one hand, as we have just seen, but it is mainly moral: the wind blows ‘in order to break down trees to make a fire’ (a six-year-old), or ‘to make lots of waves that then pushes the little boats so that we don't need to row’ (a six-year-old), or ‘to bring clouds, to bring rain’, and so on. The wind is thus thought to have a set of functions in the economy of the movements of nature, as we will see subsequently. Then we asked the child how clouds move forward. We find here, as for the wind, a series of transitions between the explanation by personal efficacy and the moral and artificialist explanation. Thus, my daughter, at twenty months, said while seeing clouds: ‘fog smoke Daddy’, expressing in this way that she assimilated the clouds to the smoke from her father's pipe. In these conditions it is obvious that the movement of clouds will very early on be explained by the action of adults. Thus, a three-year-old child said to me about clouds: ‘It is the train driver who makes them move’, because he had seen smoke coming from the funnel of a train. Other reasons will involve workers, masons, or even God, who will be intermingled with children's explanations more or less according to the example along the lines of the hypothesis that we make the clouds advance by walking, or they follow us as we walk. Here again whatever the physical means put forward, the causality of movement very quickly becomes moral. Clouds move forward in an orderly rather than random fashion because they have a series of roles to fulfil. They move forward because they must make or forecast rain. They must, in certain cases, push the sun and the moon, hold up the sky, and so on. Above all, they have a function, really unexpected for the adult, but to which the child often gives thought: they make the night. Indeed, for the child as for the first thinkers from Greece to Empedocles, the night is a substance, a kind of black steam, which fills up the entire atmosphere. Besides, as we have already seen, it is the same thing for shadows, and children believe until around the age of nine that things also produce shadows even during the night, only we cannot see the evidence precisely because it is night time! This black substance constituting the night is conceived of as stemming from clouds, or as a big dark cloud. Consequently, one of the functions of clouds is to make the night; thus, when asked point-blank why clouds move forward, children often answer: ‘to make the night’, or simply ‘because of the night’. The movement of stars is explained in a similar manner. On the one hand, it is humans or God who makes them move forward. On the other hand, if they move, their purpose is to give warmth and light and to keep an eye on us, to lead us. The star guiding the Wise Men to Jesus' cradle is obviously a vestige of this stage of the explanation of movement. Finally, the movement of water in rivers is explained in a similar way. On the one hand, it is the boats or the oars that make the river move forward. On the other hand, the water of the river is conscious and alive: it flows to make boats and swimmers move forward; it also flows to go to the sea or to give us water. In short, in all these primitive explanations of the second stage, one observes the same mix of artificialism and animism. The explanation is artificialist in the sense that it is people who constitute the first and ultimate cause of all natural activity. But, this artificialism assumes animism, in the sense that in order to serve men, things need to be alive, conscious of their duty, and intelligent enough to accomplish it. That is what I am trying to convey in claiming that the causality of this stage is essentially moral. If now we pass on to the second sub-stage, to the explanations of children who are on average between six to eight years old, we find a similar type of causality, but transposed to nature itself. In other words, it is no longer people who are thought to cause the movement of things, but the things themselves. At first sight, this appears really very different since the explanation seems to have become purely physical. But, as soon as we analyse the responses more closely, we notice that nature is still conceived of as a society of living beings subject to rules; therefore only the form of the explanation has changed, while in fact the underpinning has always stayed essentially moral and anthropocentric. Here are some examples. When one asks the child how clouds move forward, he answers that it is the night, or the rain, or the cold and bad weather, or the sun and the moon, which make the clouds move, or finally that they move on their own. All this at first appears strangely fanciful and incongruous. In reality, all these explanations amount to saying that clouds must move forward to fulfil their own function towards men. To say that the night causes the movement of clouds is again to simply state that clouds must move forward to make the night. To say that the night or the cold makes clouds run is effectively saying that clouds must come to give us rain or to