Conceptual Structures Simplified

Some time ago, I read Michael Basseches' book, Dialectical Thinking and Adult Development. In the book, he describes his view on adult cognitive development past the formal operational stage.

He makes the argument that humans tend to learn to think first about concrete things, then about relationships between things, and finally about fluid processes. (To this list, I would add qualities of things, such as warm, blue, short, and so on. I suspect qualities fit in between things and relationships in the sequence.)

From those four basic conceptual structures, you can derive just about all of the memetic conceptual structures I listed the other day.

[Read on for Basseches' list of 24 dialectical "moves in thought"]