Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget, the great developmental psychologist, viewed consciousness as
central to psychological study. Therefore, he sought to find ways to make its
study scientific. To do so, Piaget dealt in great detail with the meaning of the
subject-object and mind-body problems. Piaget argued that consciousness is
not simply a subjective phenomenon; if it were, it would be unacceptable for
scientific psychology. Indeed, Piaget maintained that conscious phenomena
play an important and distinctive role in human behavior. Moreover, he directed
research to examine the way in which consciousness is formed, its origins,
stages, and processes. Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, nor
can psychologists reduce it to physiological phenomena. For Piaget, consciousness
involves a constructed subjective awareness. It is a developmentally
constructed process, not a product. It results from interaction with the
environment, not from the environment’s action on it: “[T]he process of becoming conscious of an action scheme transforms it into a concept; thus becoming
conscious consists essentially in conceptualization.”
There are two relationships necessary for the understanding of consciousness.
The first is that of subject and object. The second is the relationship
between cognitive activity and neural activity. Both are essential to getting
at the process of cognition and its dynamic nature.