I focus on how, for me, big questions such as, “How can we tell whether something is true?” were funneled by haphazard influences into specific interests. Classes on logic got me interested in the origins of concepts. Contact with Piaget’s theory of concept acquisition added a developmental dimension. Wondering about the meaning of words led to the problems of opaque contexts like belief reports. A brush with artificial intelligence made me focus on the distinction between implicit and explicit mental representations and consciousness. My thesis supervisor’s expertise in game theory led me to explore children’s perspective-taking. Work with Heinz Wimmer on the false belief task got me firmly entrenched in theory of mind research, focusing on simulation theory as its main opponent. And to get beyond documenting children’s flourishing achievements I turned to mental files theory to understand how perspectival thinking grows from our basic ability to think about objects.

A popular refrain in many countries is that people with mental illnesses have “nowhere to go” for care. But that is not universally true. Previously unexplored international data shows that some countries provide much higher levels of public mental health care than others. This puzzling variation does not align with existing scholarly typologies of social or health policy systems. Furthermore, these cross-national differences are present despite all countries’ shared history of psychiatric deinstitutionalization, a process that I conceptualize and document using an original historical data set. I propose an explanation for countries’ varying policy outcomes and discuss an empirical strategy to assess it. The research design focuses on the cases of the United States and France, along with Norway and Sweden, in order to control for a range of case-specific alternative hypotheses. The chapter ends with brief descriptions of contemporary mental health care policy in each of the four countries examined in this book.

The chapter ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias on Concepts’ by Frans A. J. de Haas takes up another aspect of concept theory, that is, the endeavour to define what a concept is. Furthermore, he explores the interactions between the Peripatetics and the Stoics, as they are evidenced by Alexander, on ontological as well as psychological and epistemological issues. De Haas also offers a systematic study of part of Alexander’s rich vocabulary denoting concepts, thoughts, and universals, and of a correspondingly rich collection of verbs referring to the human activities of abstracting or constructing concepts. Importantly, this analysis sheds light on Alexander’s understanding of ennoia and noêma, and on Alexander’s views concerning the epistemic reliability of concepts and the unity of concepts in the human soul.

What is the a priori principle of the new faculty? Kant apparently gives two answers in the Critique: First, he presents a ‘principle of systematicity’ that is supposed to authorize us to regard nature as a system with respect to its particular, or empirical, laws. This is also paraphrased as the principle that for every object in nature an empirical concept can be found, and Kant provides a transcendental deduction for it. Satisfaction of the principle is accompanied by pleasure, but it seems clear that this cannot be the pleasure of taste. A second principle is later entitled the principle of taste. The relation, if any, between these principles is a long-standing problem. I focus in this chapter on the first formulation and attempt to elucidate the role it plays in guiding the imagination in the process of concept formation and discuss the relation of the principles in Ch.7.

It became almost a cliché to say that in the twenty-first century education cannot be based on teaching specific content and skills but should focus on “learning how to learn” and on the development of more general cognitive abilities. There are two major proposals for handling this problem. The first suggests focusing on students’ general cognitive and problem-solving skills which can then be applied in any content area. The second proposal is to develop cognitive strategies “inside” the curricular areas. The first approach thus calls for an addition of a new learning subject – “cognitive lessons” – while the second presupposes a rather radical reform of curricular teaching/learning that would assign cognitive goals to subject lessons. “Instrumental Enrichment” is analyzed as an example of a standalone cognitive program that develops such general skills as analytic perception, comparison, and classification that can then be “bridged” to curricular material. The cognitive infusion approaches propose to infuse cognitive skills into the curricular lessons without significant changes in the curricular material itself. Finally, the developmental education approach presupposes a rather radical change in the curricular material that would allow every curricular lesson to be turned into a cognitive lesson.

This chapter focuses on how children’s everyday knowledge when entering school is different from subject matter knowledge and argues that children’s emotional imagination and motive orientation is a foundation for their acquisition of subject matter knowledge. We discuss how imagination supports children’s generalizations of experience, so that it becomes possible for them to move between the general and the concrete in analyzing and using knowledge about the world. We also argue for a dialectical relationship between the culturally developed content the children’s encounters in their interactions in the world and the formation of mind. Within the cultural-historical approach to learning and development Davydov was the first to clarify how concepts, within a subject matter system, that are related through the historical development of its content may become the foundation for children learning in school. Supporting the development of theoretical thinking among school pupils serves both to develop thinking with subject matter knowledge, and support children’s person formation.

This chapter presents an approach to the study of learning which analyzes small groups – such as a dyad, a group, a classroom – or large groups – for example, a community or a social movement. This approach is based on a situativity or sociocultural theory of cognition and learning, where learning is “situated” within complex social and material contexts known as activity systems. Sociocultural theories are related to cultural-historical activity theory, situated learning theory, distributed cognition theory, and cultural psychology. These theories suggest that a full account of learning must extend beyond individualist psychology to analyze and explain social practices, technological artifacts, interactional patterns, and the different roles occupied by the participants.

If case study comparison is useful in the social sciences, it should be at least as useful as a way of understanding the political preferences and participation of individuals as it is for larger and more complex social categories such as organizations, parties, militaries, or states. Thus, qualitative comparisons involving the political preferences and activity of American billionaires will serve as a benchmark for the plausibility of various comparative frameworks. The chapter will demonstrate that applying Mill’s method-type comparison to billionaires generates inferential absurdities and also shows that regression-type logics of control are a poor fit for individual-level qualitative analysis. More feasible frameworks for understanding qualitative comparison at the individual level come both earlier and later in the inferential process. Cross-case comparisons are highly valuable for concept formation and theory building prior to any systematic effort at causal inference and also play a meaningful role in inferences about moderation effects after process tracing has been successful within each case. Furthermore, multi-case qualitative analysis that is not structured as explicit comparison can make crucial contributions to multi-method research on individuals.

Situating Cassirer in a historical perspective, Daniel D. Dahlstrom's chapter casts light on prominent lines of convergence and divergence between Husserl’s phenomenological analyses and Cassirer’s philosophical studies. The general topic of the first line of convergence is logical theory, as Husserl and Cassirer both argue for the autonomy of logic, the promise of set theory, and the intensionality of concepts.Other lines of agreement include their common rejection of empiricist accounts of abstraction and universals, their embrace of a Kantian philosophical legacy, and their respective commitments to the primacy of meaning and self-described versions of idealism. Nevertheless, the philosophies of Husserl and Cassirer diverge from one another in significant ways, primarily in view of the thematic range of their investigations and their respective insistence upon intuition and the sign or symbol as the basis of human consciousness and cognition. Dahlstrom focuses on differences in Husserl and Cassirer's analyses of intuitions and perceptions that Cassirer himself also pronounced.

The new English statistics entered into American social science chiefly through Columbia University, as a result of Giddings’ enthusiasm for the work of Pearson and of other faculty members visiting and remaining in close touch with Pearson. Ogburn, as a graduate student at Columbia, was introduced to the new statistics, and made use of correlation and regression in early research in the fields of social class and politics and the social consequences of business cycles. After taking up a chair at Chicago in 1927, he became involved in debates over the nature of sociology and argued explicitly for its understanding as science. He insisted on the importance of the precise, statistically informed description and analysis of social phenomena, on concepts being made operational for research purposes so as to allow for measurement in some form, on theory being open to empirical test, and on the need for sociologists, even when involved in public policy issues, to maintain their professional objectivity. But Ogburn did not himself show any great interest in theory development, being perhaps, under the influence of Pearson, disinclined to ‘look too far behind phenomena’ and also finding little of value to him in the theoretical approaches prevailing at Chicago.

Broadly speaking, there are two contrasting attitudes towards common sense prevalent in ancient Greek philosophy. On the one hand, there is a dismissive attitude: common sense, understood as what people in general routinely think, is regarded as simply misguided and out of touch with the way things really are. On the other hand, there is a tendency to regard human beings as such as having cognitive capacities that can afford them correct insights – if only they will let these capacities operate as they could or should, without being distracted or misled by various factors that throw them off course. Although these two attitudes are in a clear tension with one another, we frequently find them together in the same philosophers. Indeed, it is not too much to say that we find both strands present, to varying degrees, almost throughout the history of Greek philosophy. This chapter pursues these themes chronologically, touching on several Presocratic thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, and the Pyrrhonian sceptic Sextus Empiricus. Of these, Aristotle is the most sympathetic to common sense, and the Presocratics perhaps the most dismissive, with the others somewhere between these extremes.

outlines the history of citizenship as a political concept, showing that the dominant view of citizenship today is still primarily seen as nationally provided and tied inextricably to legal status, despite global and urban scholars challenging its claims of exclusivity and immigration scholars challenging its singular focus on legal status. The limited power of these critiques is due, in part, to the fuzziness of claims regarding rights and identities. The authors make a fresh start in the systematic conceptualization of citizenship, showing that legal status is not the gateway to rights as is often assumed. In its place, they develop a concept of federated citizenship as a parallel set of rights along five key dimensions, with the provision of those rights varying by jurisdiction – federal, state, and local. They also lay out important differences between progressive citizenship, regressive citizenship, and reinforcing citizenship. Finally, they move from concept formation to the development of indicators for state citizenship regimes, which sets the stage for the empirical analysis is subsequent chapters on Black citizenship rights and immigrant citizenship rights.

The main metaphor of cognitive psychology is a computer metaphor, explains Bruner who, along with Piaget and Vygotsky, is one of the three most important cognitive psychologists whose theories have implications for theories of learning. The chapter describes how this computer metaphor is basically an information-processing metaphor, a comparison that seeks to clarify how information is modified, stored, and retrieved. Bruner’s model deals with how the mind has evolved to make symbolic representation possible, how concepts (categories) are formed, and how, as a result, we are able to go beyond the information given. Piaget’s developmental theory describes how assimilation and accommodation make adaptation possible, leading to the development of the cognitive skills and capabilities required for progressively more advanced forms of thinking. And Vygotsky champions the role of culture and language in cognitive development. The chapter emphasizes the clear pedagogical implications of each of these theories. It also makes the point that these three theorists were leaders of the so-called cognitive revolution, bent on replacing behaviorism.