To refocus on Bertrand's response reproduced in the Introduction (p. 21): obviously, it could not have been provided by a seven-year-old. Such a child cannot be expected fully to understand that TV news item, let alone respond to it in a sophisticated way. It will come as no surprise that RCR develops from a rudimentary beginning to intermediate levels before reaching the quality of Bertrand's response. To anticipate (chapter 4), there are five developmental levels: (i) only one description / explanation / model / theory / interpretation can be right, the other(s) must be wrong; (ii;) maybe, there is something valid to both (all) of them; (iii) both (all) are definitely needed to account for the phenomenon under study; (iv) here is how they are related to each other; (v) the overarching synopsis is as follows.

In this chapter, I first evoke the anthropology adopted, put in place the developmental background with some general remarks on cognitive development, explicate RCR development against that background, discuss unreflected, object-reflecting, and means-reflecting thought as a particular, not so well-known feature putatively inherent in the development of RCR, continue with the Piagetian concept of intra-inter-trans – the ‘logic’ of RCR development – and indicate the impact of previous developmental work on the design of the present study before summarising.