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My apologies for the impression that I was categorizing you as a behaviorist. I intended to refer specifically to your notion of what is observable for the researcher. I believe that underlying many debates about developmental epistemology derives from differences among investigators as to what constitutes the proper object of study in the growth of knowledge in the human subject—whether it can be based in observations of subject’s mental activities as the develop or whether it must be restricted to overt behavior or performance which appears to be yours and other’s position. The definition of observable from developmental epistemology is quite different from that which restricts it to performance. For developmental epistemology, the object of study is not only mental activity but includes living activity at whatever level it is operating—the biological level of behavior, sensory-motor behavior, the internalized behavior at the mental plane, the behavior of scientists at the plane of formalized activity. And from the study of activity at all these levels, developmental epistemology has found that activity at every level is comprised of two poles or aspects, the one due to an internal assimilatory framework (in the case of the child’s thought, the internal aspect are the concepts, pre-concepts, etc. she uses) and the other due to an external accommodation effect imposed on the framework due to the object (the facts and observations she “sees?by using her notion of weight). There is no direct observation that is possible without some assimilatory framework; no observations are?possible that are purely objective or that come only from the object. Every act of knowledge is an assimilation of the object to some prior cognitive system or schema of the subject. The essential principle here (and certainly it is not exclusive to developmental epistemology) is that the facts one sees regarding an object always depends upon the internal, inferential mechanism one uses to record the observations (e.g., the child’s pre-concept of weight produces the strange facts she sees such as the fact that the weight of a ball of clay increased once elongated. Thus, the what is observable changes in correspondence with development of the assimilatory framework upon which it depends. The observables don’t develop but the assimilatory schemata, concepts, relations, whatever upon which the observables depend do develop. So the question remains as to whether we can observe activity as it gradually becomes internalized into mental activity and then forms reversible activities which become organized as operations into systems, and then on to the succeeding developments of mental activity. Developmental epistemologists believe we can observe mental activity and can describe its twin assimilatory and accommodation poles particularly as it develops. Others disagree and therein is the problem of lack of agreement we face. Since the problem is the lack of agreement as to whether researchers can in fact directly observe and therefore investigate mental operations in children, we might fruitfully shift the problem away from children’s activity about which we continue to disagree and attempt to uncover the source of this disagreement. We can study the differences among the psychological and epistemological theories themselves in how they view mental activity: of course some researchers deny mental activity can be the observable of the researcher while others believe it can. (Denying the observation of mental activity itself creates the controversy over which performances might best serve as proxies for verifying the presence or absence of certain mental acts or how to score tasks.) From the point of view of developmental epistemology, the solution is relatively clear since it is merely an extension of previous findings. Since the law of assimilation found in the study of children is general—that every observable depends on the assimilatory instrument and this holds true for every human activity, then it applies up through the most advanced scientific thought as well. Just as with children and their observables, the observables a scientist takes as given are always relative to the development of the scientist’s theoretic framework. In short, we can therefore study the development of scientific frameworks just as we study the development of concepts in children to see what observables each theory or concept takes as given. To apply this analysis to your physics example, what appears to be true is that once a researcher develops a theory of atomic structure, that new theoretic framework brings with it certain new observables that are taken as given but which depend on methods derived from the theory for making experimental observations about the spins, shells, valence levels or whatever facts the researcher observes. The finding once again confirms that observables, even at this advanced mental activity of research in physics, are not pre-given or absolute facts since they depend at all levels of thought on the relative development of the assimilatory framework of the subject whether she be a young child or an atomic physicist. There is simply no way to gain direct access to the physical properties of objects or even to know that the object even exists except as something appears due to our activity. What we see is the result of our activity, not some prior datum untainted by the human subject. We should clarify an essential distinction between perception and observation. Perception consists of direct sensory contact with an object that is present. Observation involves the recording of facts whether an object is perceptually present or not or even whether it is a material object or not; and in addition it (or rather its inferential aspect) serves to correct perceptual activity. Observation goes beyond perception and not derive from it. It is in this sense that we metaphorically use the word “see? “Do you see what I mean??Regardless of the level of abstraction of the theoretic framework—the child’s notion of weight or the scientist’s theory of atomic weights—the facts that we see depend on the level of the theory, and they constitute the object of study for the subject. If our theoretic framework has no “ability?to conceptualize and therefore to record certain observables, then those observables remain unobservable. They simple are not observables for the theory in question and those observables must await development of a more advanced theoretic framework that can then constitute them as observables. The classical notion of what are observable and what are theoretic is not fixed but are both relative to the theory in question.