Chapter 3: Argumentation in the Piagetian Clinical Interview: A Step Further in Dialogism

Educators have long been concerned with how to encourage children to become independent and critical thinkers. These skills are fundamental for successful participation in social communities but are often limited to poor forms of reasoning or constrained by social and emotional factors that may prevent independent and creative thinking in school, family, or professional life (Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2009). In this chapter we will turn back to some aspects of the contribution of Piaget to the study of the development of independent thinking in children and revisit them in the light of dialogical perspectives. More precisely, we will revisit the “clinical” or “critical” interview he employed in his investigations of children’s cognitive competence (for the purposes of this discussion, we will use the term critical interview; Inhelder, 1943). For Piaget, a child’s argument is the sign of a child’s thinking. In response to careful questioning, the child is prompted to provide reasoning and justification of concepts (such as the conservation of quantities). Piaget considered these as allowing access to the cognitive structures that support such thinking.