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One of the reasons why a certain number of logicians and mathematicians hold aloof from or sometimes mistrust psychology is that, according to their conception of it, genetic analysis is held to be relevant only to "intuitive" thought, which alone is considered as "natural". Formalisation being only the prerogative of a small élite (as opposed to the majority of other people, all capable of "intuition") then appears as "artificial" if not as going "against human nature" (Pasch) in a similar sense in which, before scientific sociology, social institutions were considered with Rousseau as outside nature (freely set up by contracts) and the individual alone was considered as "natural". But on the one hand, the thought of a small élite is at least as interesting, if not more so, than that of the majority for the psychology of the development of human thought. On the other hand, as the object of genetic studies is not introspective consciousness but the mechanism of the successive constructions which lead to the adult state, we must examine closely, before we can come to a decision about it, whether the passage from intuitive thought to axiomatisation is not prepared by the preceding development; and especially whether the gap thus bridged is so great that it is not comparable to the yet very large gap separating the baby's sensory-motor activities from the hypothetico-deductive thought of the normal adolescent in our society, possessing merely a certificate of primary education.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2193-6_10

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