ABSTRACT
It is perhaps of some surprise to Genevans that the current debate of Piaget’s theory in the United States almost exclusively surrounds the stage theory. That is, the proper characterisation of pre operational, concrete operational and formal operational thought is debated, and, even more fundamentally, the very existence of domain general changes in the course of cognitive development is discussed. That Piaget’s position has been identified with a commitment to domain general developmental differ ences is shown by the use of the term neo-Piagetians. So-called neoPiagetians such as Case, Pascual-Leone and Halford dub themselves as such because they hold that there are domain general developmental changes, although they conceive of these changes as increases in information-processing capacity, rather than as changes in inferential structure or power. On the other hand, others deny the existence of stages, in either the information-processing or inferential structure sense, and therefore consider themselves non-Piagetians.
