Dayton & MacReady (1980). Guttman ...... essays (William Mark Hohengarten, Trans.). Cambridge, ..... In P. Moen, G. H. Elder, & K. Luscher (Eds.),. Examining ...
CHAPTER 3
Developmental Psychology: Philosophy, Concepts, and Methodology WILLIS F. OVERTON
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THE CONCEPT OF DEVELOPMENT 109 The Expressive-Constitutive Person and the Instrumental-Communicative Person 109 Transformational Change and Variational Change 111 SPLIT AND RELATIONAL MODELS OF DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGE 114 The Neo-Darwinian Split Metanarrative 117 The Relational Developmental Metanarrative 124 EPISTEMOLOGICAL/ONTOLOGICAL ISSUES 127 Plato and Aristotle and the Relational-Developmental Tradition 129 Galileo and Descartes: Origins of the Split Tradition 130 Newton and the Objectivist Split Tradition 132 Locke and Hume, and Later Forms of the Objectivist Split Tradition 133 Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and the Relational Developmental Tradition 134 Kant and the Phenomena-Noumena Split 139
Hegel's Relational Developmental Reconciliation of Mind and Nature 139 The Marxist Split Tradition 142 Habermas, Bakhtin, and the Marxist Split Tradition 144 Gadamer, Taylor, and the Leibnizian-Hegelian Relational Developmental Tradition 147 Pragmatism 152 METHODOLOGY: EXPLANATION AND UNDERSTANDING 154 Aristotle's Relational Methodology: The Nature of Scientific Explanation 156 Baconian-Newtonian Split Methodology 156 Positivism 157 The Legacy of Positivism and Research Methods 160 Toward a Contemporary Relational Methodology 171 Contemporary Relational Methodology 172 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 175 REFERENCES 176
The broad basic question I address in this chapter concerns the nature of contemporary developmental psychology and how it functions. We know that developmental psychology is a knowledge-building enterprise of some type, but it is important to begin inquiry with a question, rather than with a particular definitional answer. A definition tends to close, rather than open, some fundamental features of inquiry. Any specific definition of developmental psychology and its mission necessarily emerges out of some complex set of concepts. This set forms a platform, a context, or a conceptual base for the entire domain. The base, like the
foundation of a building, gives form to the structure that arises from it. Design the foundation in one fashion, and the building that emerges has a particular shape and functions in a particular way. Construct the foundation differently, and a different building and alternative functions emerge. Fail to create a sound foundation, and risk the later collapse of the whole enterprise. When texts begin with the words "Development is ... " or "Developmental psychology is ... ,"that definition points backward to the nature of the specific conceptuat base and forward to the nature of the mission to be accomplished. In its forward-looking function, such a definition signals the empirical, methodological, and theoretical dimensions of the complete edifice. In building a house, or a domain of knowledge, special differentiated skills are needed. One may, of course, be a
The writing of this chapter was partially supported by a research leave granted by Temple University.
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master builder who possesses all the necessary skills for all phases of the construction process, but even in this case, there is a recognition of the functionally differentiated nature of groups of skills. In this functional differentiation, the empirical investigator is much like a building contractor who has characteristic skills in the pragmatics of manipulating materials that operate in the service of discovering the best possible fit, given the suggested design. Many a design has been modified and even discarded in the process of trying to actually build a house-or a domain of knowledge. The theorist is the architect, creating designs that suggest an order and an organization that are more or less expected to work for the contractor. Although designs get modified, few contractors would be without a design when working on any complex activity. Designs guide and give meaning to projects. Along with the design and building functions and their associated skills, a third function and set of skills-those of the structural engineer-are of critical importance in building a house. The structural engineer ensures that the foundation will successfully carry the planned weight load. The structural engineer's skills lie in analyzing foundations and selecting, rejecting, and modifying foundations according to issues of internal coherence and the functions that the building will ultimately serve. Structural engineering in the world of inquiry is the domain of philosophy. Philosophy's traditional function has been conceptual clarification-exploring conceptual foundations and ensuring that they can carry the intended load. The aim of this chapter is to examine and explore several diverse contexts that have constituted the source of our understanding of the nature and functioning of developmental psychology. We will see that these lead and have led to quite different knowledge edifices, and we will ask whether these alternative structures are all equally viable. Thus, this chapter is primarily a work of structural engineering. However, as already suggested, the functions of the three roles of knowledge building should never be, and, in fact, can never be isolated. As a consequence, foundations will be examined in the context of their implications for the concepts, theories, methodology, methods, and procedures of developmental psychology. Before directly addressing fundamental presuppositions that carry the load and give shape to the domain of inquiry called developmental psychology, it is important at the beginning to try to remove an obstacle that could impede this
project. For years, psychology in general-and developmental psychology, specifically-has taught students that structural engineering does not count. Psychologists in training have long been taught that philosophical issues do not count; and if philosophical issues do not count, why in the world should one proceed to examine the arguments presented in this chapter? Traditionally, students of psychology have been instructed that while conceptual clarification may be the province of philosophy, conceptual application is the province of psychology, and the two domains must be kept separate and distinct. More broadly, the claim has been that philo~phy is the province of reason and its general form, reflection, and that psychology is a science and consequently limits itself to observation and experimentation. This negating of the importance of examining fundamental presuppositions is often reinforced by a narrative of the 19th-century historical split when psychology broke away from philosophy to pursue its own observational and experimental aims. Another chapter in the same story tells of psychology's allegiance to a "scientific method" of observation, causation, and induction, and only observation, causation, and induction. The point of all of this instruction is to warn students to distrust and avoid reflective activities involved in conceptual clarification. This warning itself, however, derives from the basic conceptual presupposition that reason and reflection are mysterious and can only be clarified after sufficient empirical observations have been compiled. Morris R. Cohen, a philosopher, captured the spirit of this point of view as far back as 1931: Modernistic anti-rationalism is bent on minimizing the role of reason in science .... According to the currently fashionable view, it is of the very essence of scientific method to distrust all reason and to rely on the facts only. The motto, "Don't think; find out," often embodies this attitude. Scientific method is supposed to begin by banishing all preconceptions or anticipations of nature. In the first positive stage it simply collects facts; in the second, it classifies them; then it lets the facts themselves suggest a working hypothesis to explain them. (1931, p. 76)
Over the past 40 or so years, many powerful arguments have been mounted against this split between reason and observation and the subsequent denial of reflection. Some of these arguments will be discussed later in this chapter. Indeed, enough arguments have emerged that the attitude
The Concept of Development
itself has often been declared dead, as, for example, in the frequently made claim that positivism is dead. And yet, like the mythical hydra, new forms of this split continue to appear and exert a contextual shaping effect. Sometimes the split is found in the disparagement of reason itself, as in some contemporary versions of what has been called "postmodern" thought. Sometimes the split is found in various explicit and implicit attacks against theory, as in a particular rhetoric that states that all theories must be induced directly from observations or be "data-based." Sometimes it is found in a dogmatic retort given to any reflective critique-"That's just philosophy." Often it is found in the celebration of the analytic over the synthetic, as when analytic methods are presented as the only acceptable tools for expanding our knowledge domain. Frequently it is found in valuing the instrumental over the expressive, as when behavior is understood only in the context of success or failure of adjustment to some external criteria, and never as an index or expression of an embodied self-organizing system that constitutes the person (see Overton, in press). In whatever of these or other multiple forms it appears, the most significant point to emphasize is that the split between reason and observation, along with the subsequent disparagement of reason and reflection, is itself the direct consequence of a conceptual presupposition favoring a particular type of knowledge building. The presupposition operates as a specific foundation for building. It is not, in itself, a given in any self-evident or directly observational fashion. That is, it is simply a specific claim and, as with any claim or argument, reasons must be presented for the value of the claim. These reasons and the claim itself require reflection on and clarification of the conceptual foundation on which they rest before they can be rationally accepted as valid or invalid. It is just possible that the split between reason and observations is part of a very bad foundation for our discipline, but this cannot be decided without further exploring foundational issues.
THE CONCEPT OF DEVELOPMENT We can start our exploration of the nature of developmental psychology and its mission by first focusing on development broadly and later discussing psychology. We begin with the one feature of development that receives universal agreement. Above all else, development is about change.
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Whatever disagreements may arise-and they do arise very rapidly-change is our foremost concern and is therefore the focus of our inquiry. The recognition that change is fundamental immediately leads to the question of the characterization of change that should frame our understanding of development. One of the most popular characterizations of developmental change, at least among developmental psychologists, has been the idea that development is defined as "changes in observed behavior across age." This understanding is certainly a
