ABSTRACT
THE systematic and thorough work reported in Willbrand and Rieke’s chapter is a useful pilot study for a larger subject. The outcome of their work, however, illustrates not merely the power of their questionnaires, but also the limited capacity of such procedures to penetrate behind the “language games” that children and adults employ in answering questions, and reach deeper (“mental”) levels of thought or feeling. The central aims of this comment are to place their inquiry in a broader framework and to ask why the significance of their results is so hard to assess. To summarize: It is not clear what weight we can put on the answers they report and analyze – whether these come from American or French people, adults or children – without “unbracketing” the contextual factors that they have chosen to “bracket off” in their present study.
