ABSTRACT
I shall take the view in what follows that the development of human intellectual functioning from infancy to such perfection as it may reach is shaped by a series of technological advances in the use of mind. Growth depends upon the mastery of techniques and cannot be understood without reference to such mastery. These techniques are not, in the main, inventions of the individuals who are “growing up;” they are, rather, skills transmitted with varying efficiency and success by the culture – language being a prime example. Cognitive growth, then, is in a major way from the outside in as well as from the inside out. Two matters will concern us. The first has to do with the techniques or technologies that aid showing human beings to represent in a manageable way the recurrent features of the complex environments in which they live. It is fruitful, I think, to distinguish three systems of processing information by which human beings construct models in their world: through action, through imagery, and through language. A second concern is with integration, the means whereby acts are organized into higher-order ensembles, making possible the use of larger and larger units of information for the solution of particular problems.
