ABSTRACT
Piaget’s picture of the child’s inability to reason logically, think reflectively, communicate fully and act voluntarily corresponds to the broad notion of exculpating unreason sketched in earlier chapters: a pervasive inability to hold and act upon sufficient reasons and to entertain consistent beliefs and desires. The infant is pictured as beginning in total egocentricity and gradually decentring, in a series of stages which is finally complete only at the end of childhood. Piaget describes an extensive want of reason in the child, which persists until adolescence. His notion of prerationality comprises a set of features much more general and pervasive than the particular kinds of ignorance expressed in the legal concept of the guilty mind or tests for criminal insanity. The child’s want of reason rests on a number of interrelated immaturities of affective as well as cognitive development.
