understanding would be at the higher level of representational mappings if he or she employed an expression describing a'' linear'' relationship, such as'' If you don't do what your father tells you to do, he will be really mad at you.'' But determining the level of such responses is by no means a transparent process. For one thing, there is no one-to-one relationship between developmental level and form of speech. A child might say,'' If I go camping, I have fun'' and still be at the level of single representations, if the statement really boils down to'' Camping is fun'' because the child cannot actually coordinate relevant single representations in a mapping relationship. Dawson (2006) herself noted that meaning is'' central'' to the scoring procedure and gave an example concerning the interview question,'' Could you have a good life without having had a good education?'' In this example, a rater found it difficult to score a response that included the word'' richer'' because it was not clear whether this word referred to having more money or having a life with broader/deeper significance.
Dawson (2006) claimed that the'' developmental ruler'' provides a way to'' look through'' content in assessments of structure, but in my view, the brief remarks I have just offered point to a crucial sense in which hierarchical integration is a concretely meaningful idea. When we apply the developmental ruler to a new domain, we have to discover not only whether the developmental sequence holds in that domain but also what counts as single representations, representational mappings, and so forth in this context. The'' ruler'' provides us with valuable ideas about how to think about complexity, but in itself it is empty. To use it, investigators have to proceed with the crucial steps of designing an assessment procedure and preparing scoring manuals for each domain. These steps reflect the investigators 'rich appreciation of the concretely meaningful practices in the domain, including what kinds of connections can obtain within this range of phenomena. This rich appreciation is largely prereflective understanding. Hence, the procedures and scoring manuals for each domain play a truly central role that is not'' given'' by the general principles. Furthermore, they do not offer exhaustive concrete specifications of the phenomena of interest. Raters have to draw on their own prior familiarity with the way things work.
Some further comments are in order concerning the fact that most or all of the studies under consideration were based on assessing individuals 'developmental level in a structured interview or by means of some other similar structured procedure. These assessments provide measures that have considerable precision. Moreover, they unquestio...
