Talcott Parsons
Review of Piaget

In 1976, Parsons was asked to contribute to a volume to celebrate the 80th birthday of Jean Piaget. Parsons contributed with an essay, "A Few Considerations on the Place of Rationality in Modern Culture and Society". Parsons characterized Piaget as the most eminent contributor to cognitive theory in the 20th century. However, he also argued that the future study of cognition had to go beyond its narrow encounter with psychology to aim at a higher understanding of how cognition as a human intellectual force was entangled in the processes of social and cultural institutionalization.

In 1978, when James Grier Miller published his famous work Living Systems, Parsons was approached by Contemporary Sociology to write a review article on Miller's work. Parsons had already complained in a letter to A. Hunter Dupree that American intellectual life suffered from a deep-seated tradition of empiricism and saw Miller's book the latest confirmation of that tradition. In his review, "Concrete Systems and "Abstracted Systems", he generally praised the herculean task behind Miller's work but criticized Miller for getting caught in the effort of hierarchize concrete systems but underplay the importance of structural categories in theory building. Parsons also complained about Miller's lack of any clear distinction between cultural and non-cultural systems.
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