ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the reflecting abstraction it is essential to give an example of this process at the sensorimotor levels, for it plays a role wherever novel patterns of behavior are drawn partly or wholly from prior coordinations of the subject's actions. The first problem is to specify how the idea of rotation becomes established between Levels 1 and 2. The active construction, which is manifest from Level 2 onward, is at first limited. At Level 3 there is progress in both empirical and reflecting abstraction. As far as empirical abstraction is concerned, the capacity to extend a partial rotation to some degree is a sort of extensional generalization, made by the subject when he begins to pull on the handle; the generalization remains empirical. Reflecting abstraction plays a notably greater role at Level 4. Finally, while pepole must remind themselves that empirical abstraction never stops being indispensable, Level 5 exemplifies inversion of the direction of actions at its maximum.
