ABSTRACT
My aim, in this chapter, is to describe some origins of Piaget’s thought and some problems that flow from these origins. I show how Piaget made growing children an instrument for the empirical study of epistemology and used children as evidence for the validity of his own brand of epistemology: genetic epistemology. I do this by tracing the origin of his ideas about genesis and development in other intellectual traditions and describing their subsequent assimilation and transformation by Piaget. Piaget’s forging of genetic epistemology in turn raised theoretical and empirical questions for future psychologists to address.
