From De-contextualized to Situated Knowledge: Revisiting Piaget's Water-Level Experiment

By presenting two approaches to a well-known Piagetian experiment, the water-level task, I emphasize the importance of two complementary views of knowledge acquisition. The first is Piaget's developmental approach, often referred to as “stage theory,” and the second, I call the “differential” approach. Stage theory captures what is common in people's ways of thinking at different levels of their cognitive development, while the differential approach captures what is different between individuals with similar cognitive abilities. Stage theory stresses the progressive de-contextualization of knowledge during ontogeny, while the differential approach provides a more situated perspective on knowledge construction. Finally, stage theory emphasizes the role of cognitive invariants in the structuring of local contexts, while the differential approach stresses the importance of local context in the construction of cognitive invariants. I suggest that integrating both perspectives helps illuminate the processes by which individual children make sense of their experience, gradually optimizing their interactions with the world.