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I have two other interpretations of the term 'reflection' (each similar to the other), both taken from Piaget's "Equillibration of cognitive structures". The first is when any activity of the subject, which is already necessarily a structured activity (i.e. not random), effects and imparts changes upon the objects being acted upon, and then the subject assimilates something about the results of those actions back to himself. In other words, his subjective structures impart structural changes upon his objects, and therein he literally sees "reflected" to himself something about his own mental structures. For example, when the two year old puts a collection of small toys into a single neat line on the floor, nothing is making him do this except the structures of his own intelligence. And when he completes it, he sees a new "object", a new structure, before him, which (at this level) he glimpses as something of his very own doing. He therefore sees before him something of his own mental structures reflected back to him. See:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_I2cO0DWUY As another example, when the seven year old puts the same collection of objects successively into various configurations, and yet counts them out as being the same number each time, his activity of counting has enabled him to quantify the objects as being the same "quantity" despite the apparent differences in "global" quantity (i.e. the total apparent size of the collection bundled together). Again, his externalised activity reflects something of his own mental structures back to him. The other kind of 'reflection' is when (an advanced) intelligence itself is already reflective in its own thoughts. Having internalised the kind of external reflection mentioned above (which Piaget terms "pseudo-empirical reflection", I think), intelligence thinks about its own thoughts - and hence is reflective ("reflective abstraction", I think). In this latter sense, there's an interesting analogy (but only a crude analogy) with Microsoft's so-called .NET (pronounced "dot-Net") technology. In this set-up a computer program has access to its own structures and types of the code itself, and not just of the data it operates on. (This is what compilers have been doing for decades, so it's nothing new really.) Nevertheless, it expresses the same idea - which is that intelligence has access to its own internal structures. This stands in contrast to a "lower" level of being whereby the structures doing the activity simply act outwardly and know zilch about their own structure - hence egocentricity. Finally, I would note that (in my humble opinion), the notion of reflection and degrees of reflective abstraction is both absolute and relative. It is absolute in that formal reason is absolutely more reflective and reflexive than the "reason" of a stage 6 sensorimotor toddler. However, it is also a relative notion in that the same principles of reflection apply equally to differences between, say, stages 2 and 6 of sensorimotor development as they do to, say, the differences between concrete opreations and formal operations.