Piaget, Genetic Epistemology (quoted in ‘Evocative Objects: things we think with‘ by Sherry Tuckle Page 38) ‘To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active. To know is to assimilate reality into systems of transformations. To know is to transform reality in order to understand how a certain state is brought about. By virtue of this point of view, I find myself opposed to the point of view of knowledge as a copy, a passive copy of reality. In point of fact this notion is based on a vicious circle – in order to make a copy we need to know the model that we are copying, but according to this theory of knowledge, the only way to know the model is by copying it, until we are caught in a circle unable ever to know whether or not our copy of the model is like the model or not.
To my way of thinking, knowing an object does not mean copying it – it means acting upon it. It means constructing systems of transformation that can be carried out on or with this object. Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond more or less adequately, to reality….Knowledge, then, is a system of transformations that become progressively adequate….
But let us ask what logical and mathematical knowledge is abstracted from. There are two possibilities. The first is that when we act upon an object, our knowledge is derived from the object itself….But there is a second possibility: when we are acting upon an object, we can also take into account the action itself, or operation is you will, since the transformation can be carried out mentally. In this hypothesis the abstraction is drawn not from the object that is acted upon, but from the action itself.
Slingshot