Ideational Movements: Developmental Patterns

Abstract

Ideational movements involve forms of collective, self-reflective and primarily internally motivated judgment development. I show how we can reconstruct their qualitatively different developmental stages in terms of the related, successive sets of judgment criteria. Furthermore, the resulting patterns of judgment criteria can be formulated and made precisely comparable, in a logic of development. This is illustrated by analyses of the movements of French Impressionism in painting, meta-ethics in moral philosophy, and Generative grammar in linguistics. I suggest that the number of possible moves and steps in ideational movements is limited, and that there may be a basic structure common to their developmental patterns. © 2001 Academic Press.