Structure without genesis

When Piaget speaks of theories which involve the idea of structure without genesis he probably has in mind Gestalt Theory in particular; for the Gestaltists have laid great weight on nativism as opposed to empiricism (to use the terms employed by Wolfgang Köhler, one of the leading proponents of that theory). I have discussed that movement and its origins elsewhere, ¹ and I shall not repeat that discussion here, as it is not strictly relevant to my present concerns. In the context of learning the Gestaltists have emphasised such notions as that of 'insight', a notion which has some similarity to Aristotle's notion of 'intuition'. In employing that idea they have sought to oppose the empiricist view that I discussed in the last chapter: that learning is simply a matter of the building up of linkages or connections between atomic items. They have also laid great weight upon the role played by principles of structure in the genesis of insight. That is to say that they have emphasised the tendency of the mind, whether human or animal, to see things in terms of whole structures or gestalten, rather than in terms of individual items which can be additive only. Such tendencies are due, in their view to the innate structuring of the mind, due in turn to innately determined brain structures. The Gestaltists have always played down the part or role performed by the contingencies of experience in human and animal development, and their view is thus rightly set against the view discussed in the last chapter. It would, of course, be impossible to discount the role of experience altogether in any such theory, but this does not rule out the possibility of viewing experience merely as providing the occasion for the application of principles of structure, rather than as the source or cause of such principles. On this view experience would function merely as a catalyst, so to speak. In so far as they accept such a view, it is thus not unfair to say that the Gestaltists embrace the idea of structure without genesis; for according to that view there is in experience no true development or progression, merely the working out of what is already implicit in the innate structures.