The Piagetian roots in Roger Lécuyer’s thinking

Ramiro Tau, Christelle Aymoz, Édouard Gentaz et Marc Ratcliff

Roger Lécuyer’s academic work is deeply rooted in the core of the Piagetian research programme. Much of his publications focuses on the problem of change and its explanation, arguing that developmental psychology needs to study variational and transformational processes that cannot be captured through isolated, synchronic and modular models of competence. This perspective is part of his systematic critique against reductionisms. His dialectical approach, opposed to nativism and empiricism, highlighted the risks of forgetting the interactive processes through which knowledge emerges: it leads to the fetishisation of age or test scores as sufficient markers for diagnoses and pedagogical prescriptions, to the split between theory and practice, or to the systematic omission of the social contexts in which these processes take place. On all these aspects, Lécuyer has raised various calls for attention, in line with a complex epistemology that did not seek to disaggregate phenomena or to fragment the psychological field into ad hoc micro-theories. Often against the dominant trends and fashions of Anglo-Saxon psychology, this perspective can be found in all his publications, and in this article, we will try to synthesize it in the form of a legacy that can be read in between the lines.

KEYWORDS: PIAGET, DEVELOPMENT, CONSTRUCTIVISM, DIALECTICS, REDUCTIONISM

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