Sociology of Science and Sociogenesis of Knowledge

In the very first volume of the Etudes d’épistémologie génétique (Beth, Mays & Piaget, 1957), Piaget defines genetic epistemology as follows:

the empirical as well as theoretical positive science of the becoming of positive sciences as sciences. ¹

This definition is followed by a very clear-cut statement:

As a science is at the same time a social institution, a set of psychological conducts and a sui generis system of signs of cognitive behaviours, a rational analysis would bear on the three aspects jointly. There will be a primacy of the epistemological aspect, since this aspect is the phenomenon whose laws and explanation must be elucidated. ²

Ten years later, in a well-known volume of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (Piaget, 1967), ³ he adds something else. After stating that an epistemologist cannot clarify the meaning of what he calls “a system of notions or a method”, [“un système de notions ou une méthode”] without retracing historically its formation, he adds:

Reconstituting the development of a system of operations or experiments is first of all establishing its history. The epistemological goals thus pursued could even be fully reached by using the historical-critical and socio-genetic methods if such methods were complete, that is, if they could go beyond the history of science and back to the collective origin of notions, i.e. to their prehistoric sociogenesis. ⁴