ABSTRACT
A recurrent theme in recent developmental research, and particularly in the Piaget Society's symposia, has been issues of behavioral continuities and discontinuities. At the level of theory construction, the continuity–discontinuity theme has been presented at length in a comparison of Piaget as the functional Constructivist and Piaget as the Structural theorist (Cocking, 1981). In the present volume, Beilin discusses a prevailing contemporary interest in continuities of function. In the discussion of Katherine Nelson's work, the subject of this chapter, we see an exemplary body of research that is directed toward the issue of functional continuity in her analysis of concepts, classes, categories, and context as the critical elements during the emergence of children's symbolic functioning.
