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The purpose of this paper is to explore the social psychological basis of pathologies, from which result neuroses and behaviours like corruption and sociopathic behaviour. It takes the perspective that social collectives have normative minds and can be explored in terms of their social psychological processes.

Knowledge cybernetics will be used to show how pathologies can develop from the interconnection between such noumenal attributes as ideology and ethics.

Social entities have similar psychological pathologies to individual ones. Piaget's notions of how the mind operates can be applied to corporate personality, and their inability to create and coordinate different perspectives can be seen as an organisational pathology.

The paper is a theoretical construct that explores corruption and sociopathology at a deep conceptual level. It requires elaboration through case examples to provide pragmatic meaning.

The capacity to create a methodology that is able to explore the existence and development of pathologies.

This is the first approach of this type using cybernetics to explore at a high conceptual focus the development of pathologies like corruption and sociopathic behaviour.

One of the least studied aspects of information retrieval is the relationship, on the linguistic plane, between the language of enquirers and the terms used by indexing systems. Much of the writing about system structure assumes that these are equivalent, that every enquirer is honest enough to call a spade a spade, and that the problems of designing descriptor languages for use in indexing he in the field of definition. This partly accounts for the sudden leap to fame of the thesaurus; for while a dictionary merely gives definitions of words one by one, a thesaurus, being slightly more refined, gives descriptive analyses in terms of synonyms and near‐synonyms, sometimes grouping them into sets based on some common characteristics.

For many public libraries true collection development representing service to the full range of individuals within the community will never come as long as the literature and behavior of the library profession continue to ignore the existence of adolescents. Consigning an entire group to the category of non‐persons is unworthy of a profession purporting to be a service‐based, client‐oriented operation. When the literature of librarianship ignores adolescents, as I hope to demonstrate below, it reinforces the mind‐set of all too many librarians that service to this group is not essential and its absence from a library's program of service is at least tacitly approved of by higher authorities in librarianship.

Passages, seasons, turning points—all of these popular terms refer to periods of transition in our lives. I am careful to say “our lives” because these stages are universal; for the most part, they are expected and accepted.

A welcome sign of the growing recognition of the need for more attention to research and documentation in the social sciences can be found in the Report of the Committee on Social Studies under the chairmanship of Lord Heyworth. Not that the report has a great deal to say on the documentation aspect; it has a few fairly cordial references to libraries, and a paragraph mentioning their inadequacies, with a recommendation that national lending facilities should be provided. But the committee were evidently aware of the need for better collection and dissemination of information, and regarded this as one of the major tasks of the Social Science Research Council, of which Dr Michael Young, Director of the Institute for Community Studies, has now been appointed chairman.

Undergraduate and graduate teacher education students in a culturally diverse, urban university consume and construct knowledge as they engage in a Piaget WebQuest and subsequently construct their own Individual WebQuests. The activities involved in these assignments are underpinned by a combination of complementary theoretical frameworks: Cognitive Constructivism, Social Constructivism, Information Processing, and Situated Learning. The chapter describes how all of these theoretical frameworks are applied in the WebQuests. It includes detailed descriptions of how students engage in and create their own WebQuests. Descriptions include details of how scaffolding is used to support students in their work. Scaffolding that occurs during the Piaget WebQuest process sets the stage for creation of Individual WebQuests, while additional scaffolding is provided during the Individual WebQuest creation process. This chapter also emphasizes teaching metacognition in the design and revision of WebQuest requirements and students’ metacognition as they engage in the Piaget WebQuest and create their own Individual WebQuests. The processes of engaging in and creating WebQuests are described and examples of students’ WebQuest authentic products shared with a community of learners are provided. Products include Piaget WebQuest-based quizzes, lesson analyses, handouts, and instructional activity designs. They also include individual WebQuests in a variety of academic subjects. Sharing authentic products in a community of practice reflects situated learning theory. Consuming and constructing knowledge through WebQuests involves a complex synthesis of current theories of learning and instruction which facilitates meaningful learning and transfer.

A deeper understanding of cognitive development in the situation of a neither‐nor‐dilemma is the purpose of this paper.

The approach is an evaluation of experimental studies of Montessori, Lewin, Piaget and my own studies of mental development under conditions of neurological and psychological syndromes with the help of von Foerster's mathematical models. Von Foerster suggested the use of specialized knowledge of mathematics and natural sciences – but without their methods of reduction – to solve the hard problems in humanities. One of the hardest problems in humanities is the question: How does a new pattern arise in the mind of an observer? Piaget theoretically influenced von Foerster and agreed with von Foerster's order‐from‐noise model as a principle of explanation for the equilibrium of cognitive structures.

The finding is an improved game‐theoretical simulation of Piaget's equilibrium theory: a remarkableness matrix. This matrix shows the way, in which a new cognitive pattern – or in other words: a new worldview – can arise by the reiteration of always the same experience.

The research implication is a new way of mathematical description of this process.

The practical implications are improvements of educational settings and a basic research for a diagnostic manual for Eigen‐behaviors.

The newness of this paper is the connection of von Foerster's deductive simulation of Eigen‐behavior with Piaget's inductive probability model. The results may be helpful for educators, therapists, psychologists and other researchers in the field of cognitive sciences.

G. H. Mead's social, developmental, and emergent conception of language and mind is a foundational assumption that is central to the interactionist tradition. However, the validity of this model has been challenged in recent years by theorists such as Albert Bergesen, who argues that recent advances in linguistics and cognitive psychology demonstrate that Mead's social theory of language learning and his theory of the social nature of mind are untenable. In light of these critiques, and drawing on Chomsky's debates with intellectuals such as Jean Piaget, John Searle, and Michael Tomasello, this chapter compares Chomsky's and Mead's theories of language and mind in terms of their assumptions about innateness and the nature and source of meaning. This comparison aims to address the major strengths and weaknesses in both models and shed light on how interactionists might frame these conceptual challenges in future theoretical and empirical research.