Heurs et malheurs d’une tentative de modélisation. Jean Piaget et la formalisation des structures de l’esprit (1937-1972)

In the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophy of science, logic and experience have often been seen as two separate orders of rationality. In the thought of Jean Piaget (1896-1980), however, logic and experience are not dissociated, but structurally and genetically articulated. In the early 1940s, Piaget published numerous works on logic, culminating in his 1949 Traité de logique , in which he used the notion of grouping to model all of the basic operations of the mind. These works are the logical equivalent of his unifying text on the development of cognition, La Psychologie de l’ntelligence , published in 1947, which synthesized three decades of developmental psychology. These works represent the two sides of a vast attempt to model the genesis and structures of the mind. However, they have had very different fates. La Psychologie de l'intelligence , the first major synthesis, has become a reference work. On the other hand, the reception of the work of logic, far from being unanimous, served to reveal the yawning rifts between the European and Anglo-Saxon logical worlds and prefigured the continental and analytic positions of the philosophy of science. In this paper I present the main lines of Piagetian modeling and, based on unknown printed and handwritten sources (notebooks, correspondence), its reception by different audiences, continental and Anglo-Saxon, in order to highlight the resistance but also the influences on the human sciences and on the Piagetian project of a naturalized genetic epistemology.