Unstable Ideas: Temperament, Cognition, and Self

Library Journal

The title refers to the problem of imprecise meaning in the use of scientific language for such terms as temperament, cognition, and self. Kagan (psychology, Harvard) makes a plea for more rigorous and innovative methods and a more powerful vocabulary in child development research, where the interaction of biological, psychological, and contextual features is more finely differentiated. Advocating ``an acceptance of the notion that meanings change with time and are always influenced by the procedure that produced the relevant evidence,'' he insists that researchers should periodically retest their stock of evidence for any particular concept of the essence of human nature. He then goes on to offer his own reconceptualizations of crucial concepts. For specialists in the field.-- William Abrams, Portland State Univ. Lib., Ore.