Piaget’s last writings, particularly those coauthored by Garcia [Piaget and Garcia, 1974, 1989, 1991], contain both a coherent constructivist account of explanation in science [Piaget and Garcia, 1989] and specific suggestions for revising the logic of operations as a logic of meanings, based on the relevance logic of Anderson and Belnap [1975] – see Piaget [1980] and Piaget and Garcia [1991]. The aim of the present article is to demonstrate the interdependence of these two significant developments in Piaget’s later work, by examining the merits of Piaget’s revised logical competence model as a logic of causal explanation. Whereas the logic of operations is sufficient as a logic of hypothesis testing, its basis in truth-functional logic provides too narrow a treatment of semantic issues to properly model causal explanation, a form of thought characterized by a strong interdependence of form and content. The logic of meanings, as an intensional logic, rejects the reduction of meaning to truth conditions and introduces issues of relevance and context into logic.

Keywords:
Causality, Explanation, Hypothesis testing, Implication, Logic, Meaning, Relevance, Truth Function
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© 1993 S. Karger AG, Basel
1993
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