One of Piaget’s first texts, Recherche, published in 1918 – a sort of autobiographical novel – contains a series of epistemological insights that will be developed later. In 1925, in an introductory lecture, he opened the field of genetic epistemology, according to which knowledge is forged through the construction of new instruments in a process of interaction between subject and object. To this end, he articulated a historical-critical method with a genetic approach. Later, Piaget will develop his logical research to identify the operatory bases of behaviour in various activities of the subject. In this sense, a fundamental step was the publication of the three volumes of the Introduction to Genetic Epistemology, in 1950, in which he defined the genetic conditions of the constitution of scientific knowledge. Thus, interdisciplinarity became necessary. Genetic epistemology became a distinct discipline in 1955 with the founding of the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology, which sought to respond to the problems of the constitution of science by studying the processes underlying the development of notions and concepts in children and science.  Benefiting from the genetic and experimental approach to address the processes of knowledge production, the solutions that genetic epistemology provides to the problems of the foundations of the sciences are different from the traditional answers of the philosophy of science, and are presented as a tertium, a third constructivist path.

Serialization: an activity present both in children and in science. Photo Florence Cornu-Windisch