Taking Emergence Seriously: The Centrality of ...

Paper Human Development 2011;54:66–92 DOI: 10.1159/000326814

Taking Emergence Seriously: The Centrality of Circular Causality for Dynamic Systems Approaches to Development David C. Witherington University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N.M., USA

Key Words Circular causality ⴢ Development ⴢ Dynamic systems ⴢ Emergence ⴢ Metatheory

Abstract The dynamic systems (DS) approach has emerged as an influential and potentially unifying metatheory for developmental science. Its central platform – the argument against design – suggests that structure spontaneously and without prescription emerges through self-organization. In one of the most prominent accounts of DS, Thelen and her colleagues [Spencer, Dineva, & Schöner, 2009a; Thelen & Smith, 1994, 2006] have extended the argument against design to a complete ontological rejection of structural explanation. I argue that this antistructuralist stance conceptually undermines the very principle of emergence through self-organization upon which the approach is built, jeopardizing its process focus. Taking emergence seriously entails a strong commitment to circular causality and the reciprocal nature of structure-function relations through the adoption of a pluralistic model of causality, one that recognizes both local-to-global processes of construction and global-to-local processes of conCopyright © 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel straint.

Two decades of theory and research applying principles of nonlinear dynamics to the study of development have convincingly established the dynamic systems (DS) approach as a guiding metatheoretical framework for understanding development [Hollenstein, in press; Lewis, 2000b; Spencer, Corbetta, Buchanan, Clearfield, Ulrich, & Schöner, 2006; Spencer et al., 2009a; Thelen & Smith, 2006; Witherington, 2007]. Core to the DS metatheory for developmental psychology are the twin concepts of emergence and self-organization, for which Thompson [2007] has supplied the unifying term emergence through self-organization. Emergence involves the

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David C. Witherington Department of Psychology MSC03-2220, University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-1161 (USA) Tel. +1 505 277 4805, E-Mail dcwither @ unm.edu

spontaneous coming into being of new, irreducible patterns or forms in a system as a result of self-organizing interactions among the very components that comprise the system. Words like ‘spontaneous’, ‘new’, and ‘irreducible’ critically denote the generation of pattern absent planning or prescription and fundamentally resolve into an argument against design [Oyama, 1985; Smith & Thelen, 1993; Thelen & Smith, 1994]. In its basic form, the argument of DS against design draws a clear ontological divide between pattern and design. Pattern does not presuppose design and consequently does not presuppose a designer; instead, complexity arises in genuinely novel fashion from simpler components, without its being prefigured in those components. However, for some DS proponents, the divorce of pattern from design signifies divorcing pattern from all causal, explanatory efforts. Those who espouse what I [Witherington, 2007] have termed a contextualist DS perspective, such as Thelen and Smith [1994, 1998, 2006] and Spencer [Spencer et al., 2009a; Spencer, Perone, & Buss, in press], refashion the argument against design as a full-blown assault on all forms of structural explanation, effectively splitting pattern (the global or macrolevel order) from process (the microlevel dynamic flux) and rendering pattern in epiphenomenal, byproduct terms relative to the processes that engender and maintain it. This antistructuralist stance of contextualist DS approaches marks the key ontological difference between contextualist and organismic-contextualist DS perspectives [Witherington, 2007]. For those who espouse the organismic-contextualist DS approach, such as Lewis [2000a, in press; Lewis & Ferrari, 2001], van der Maas [1995; van der Maas & Raijmakers, 2009], and van Geert1 [in press; van Geert & Fischer, 2009], a system’s patterning is not merely an end product of more fundamental system process dynamics. Rather, such patterning itself contributes, by means of constraint, to the very processes that give rise to it, just as a whole constrains the coupling of its parts [Moreno, 2008]. Pattern offers explanation without being designed. This contrasts sharply with the ultimately reductionist stance of the contextualist DS perspective, in which microlevel local processes yield a macrolevel global pattern in a one-way fashion [van der Maas, 1995] (see also Walmsley [2010] for a recent discussion of the functional reductionism characteristic of the DS approach of Thelen and Smith). Unfortunately, with few exceptions [Lewis, in press; van der Maas, 1995], DS proponents either downplay [van Geert, 1998a; van Geert & Steenbeek, 2005] or actively ignore the significance of this critical ontological rift between perspectives.

1 Although van Geert, in his ‘Groningen approach’ [van Geert & Steenbeek, 2005], appealed to the inclusive framework of an organismic-contextualist DS perspective, he also evinced a certain degree of agnosticism across his writings – in contrast to Lewis and van der Maas – which makes his approach to causal pluralism less clear. On the one hand, van Geert [1998b, in press; van Geert & Fischer, 2009] highlighted the importance of the Janus principle in systems thinking and argued for the ontological ‘reality’ of all levels of analysis, no matter what the level of abstraction, from lower-order concrete acts to higher-order concepts and representations. On the other hand, he refrained from explicitly endorsing the formal and final explanatory efficacy of these higher-order patterns [van Geert, 1998a], instead opting at times for what amounts to a causal reductionism in which ‘these variables and dimensions will have to be brought to the working of a so-far unknown short-term dynamics that incorporates the embodied acting person that Esther Thelen brought in to the study of human development’ [van Geert & Steenbeek, 2005, pp. 436–437].

Emergence and Circular Causality in Dynamic Systems

Human Development 2011;54:66–92

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This is of particular concern given the defining influence of the contextualist DS perspective. Few if any other DS accounts rival the landmark work of Thelen and Smith in terms of the popularization and promulgation of DS principles within the field of developmental psychology. Their seminal, widely cited book [Thelen & Smith, 1994], handbook chapters [Thelen & Smith, 1998, 2006], as well as their dynamic field theory coconstructed with Spencer [Spencer, Perone, & Johnson, 2009b; Spencer, Smith, & Thelen, 2001; Thelen, Schöner, Scheier, & Smith, 2001] have positioned their contextualist brand of DS at the forefront of any DS discussion and have established the orthodoxy of the contextualist DS perspective in North America. Thus, the deeply entrenched antistructuralist stance of the contextualist DS perspective figures prominently in general articulations of the DS approach to development. In this article, I argue that antistructuralist sentiment – to the extent that it remains part of the metatheoretical manifold of DS – threatens to undermine the explanatory significance of the most foundational, unifying principle of DS: emergence through self-organization. Far from being a side concern over whether psychological constructs are amenable to DS modeling [van Geert & Steenbeek, 2005], the question of whether or not to admit structure into the explanatory canon of the DS approach bears directly on how the approach conceptualizes the very nature of process [Witherington, 2007]. If emergence through self-organization reigns as the core idea of the DS approach, then DS proponents need to take emergence (and self-organization) seriously. But, as I will argue, taking emergence through self-organization seriously entails taking both the structure of emergence and the self and organization of selforganization seriously. In essence, taking emergence through self-organization seriously requires a full appreciation of the reciprocal structure-function cycle that is circular causality [Juarrero, 1999; Lewis, 2000a]. As a fundamental feature of complex systems [Kelso, 1995], circular causality involves a perpetual and simultaneous bottom-up and topdown rendering of emergence through self-organization, or in Thompson’s [2007] words, both ‘local-to-global determination (the formation of macrolevel patterns through microlevel interactions) and global-to-local determination (the constraining of microlevel interactions by macrolevel patterns)’ (p. 336). Despite its prominence in Haken’s [1996] synergetics – which Thelen and Smith [1994] cited as fundamental to the DS approach – and apart from the central role it played in Lewis’ [2000a, b] DS approach, the concept of circular causality is typically marginalized in the DS developmental literature. Instead, the focus largely targets the part-to-whole side of the circular causality cycle – with which emergence through self-organization is most readily identified – and such selective attention quickly yields ontological doctrine under the influence of antistructuralist sentiment. In the sections to follow, I examine how antistructuralist resistance to fullblown circular causality stems from confusion of structural explanation with structural reification. This confusion arises because the contextualist DS approach, rooted in a materialistic reliance on efficient causality, views the invocation of structural explanation in functional, antecedent-consequent terms rather than in organizational, constraint terms [Witherington, 2007]. Taking structure seriously means viewing structural explanation in formal and final causal terms, not as another version of the ‘push-from-behind’ initiating processes captured by efficient causes [Juarrero, 1999; Overton, 1991; van Geert, 1998b]. Thus, circular causality embraces causal pluralism rather than exclusive ontological adherence to efficient cause. When

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given foundational status, circular causality allows us to effectively close the processpattern divide created by antistructuralist sentiment, revealing both process and pattern – function and structure – as two equally legitimate and unique explanatory sides of the same complex coin. Within this inclusive framework, process cannot be understood without pattern any more than pattern can be understood without process. How we establish distinctions between these ‘complementary pairs’ [Kelso & Engstrøm, 2006] – whether we view a phenomenon as a pattern to be explained or as a process by which we explain – depends on the vantage point we adopt. Taking Emergence Seriously

Modern conceptualizations of emergence arose in the early 20th century amid longstanding debate over the reducibility of life to nonliving matter [Schröder, 1998]. For vitalists of the time, living things differed fundamentally from the nonliving by dint of a special, additional substance or force termed an ‘entelechy’. Mechanists of the time, in contrast, viewed living matter as wholly reducible to the physicochemical level of the nonliving. Emergentists, such as Broad [1925] and Morgan [1923], sought a means of transcending both the vestiges of Cartesian substance dualism evident in vitalist accounts and the atomistic elementarism of mechanists. Through the principle of emergence, they argued, science could abandon the notion of vital substances but maintain the irreducibility of the living to the nonliving, adopting a layered view of nature consisting of ascending levels of qualitatively distinct organizational complexity dependent upon, but inexplicable in terms of, the properties of lower levels [Broad, 1925]. Materialist reductionism supplanted the emergentist doctrine for much of the 20th century as systematic breakthroughs in the microlevel study of living and nonliving matter ostensibly reasserted the ontological primacy of the molecular over the molar in biology and physics. For the past 20–30 years, however, the concept of emergence has once again figured prominently in scientific and philosophical discussions, due in no small part to the increasingly widespread influence of nonlinear dynamics and the sciences of complexity [Davies, 2006; Kim, 1999]. Yet, despite their role in revitalizing the concept of emergence, proponents of DS approaches rarely pursue in any systematic fashion the philosophical underpinnings of the very concept that centrally defines the approach. Silberstein and McGeever [1999] noted how ‘talk of emergence is ubiquitous among those who study non-linear dynamical systems,’ yet it is ‘often difficult to determine what complexity theorists are claiming, especially regarding emergence’ (p. 191). Modern philosophical treatments provide an invaluable conceptual framework for articulating the nature of emergence in the DS approach to development. The next section provides a broad overview of such treatments. Epistemological versus Ontological Emergence Two general conceptualizations divide treatments of emergence in science today: ‘epistemological’ or ‘weak’ emergence on the one hand, and ‘ontological’ or ‘strong’ emergence on the other [Bedau, 1997; Silberstein & McGeever, 1999]. Both



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epistemological and ontological approaches to emergence treat higher-order forms arising in systems as neither fully predictable from nor fully expressible in terms of the lower-order components of the system [Silberstein & McGeever, 1999]. Those who embrace epistemological emergence emphasize that the unpredictability of some emergent properties may reflect little more than deficits in our existing knowledge base; with sufficient empirical and technological resources, the unpredictable, higher-order phenomena of today may tomorrow become perfectly predictable from the lower-order parts upon which they are built [Rothschild, 2006; Silberstein & McGeever, 1999]. But epistemological emergentists, like ontological emergentists, also acknowledge the genuine irreducibility of many emergents. The nature of emergence is such that something new – some new property of a system – comes into being, having not previously existed in any of the parts that comprise the system. Such novelty derives from the dynamics of the system itself, in no way prefigured by any of the components or previous forms of the system. Although the broad notion of irreducibility assumes a fundamental role in both epistemological and ontological conceptualizations of emergence, the specific nature of this irreducibility marks the key difference between the two [Clayton, 2006a]. For both conceptualizations, higher-order form is irreducible to lower-order forms and can never be fully predicted or explained by these temporally prior forms. However, for epistemological emergence, higher-order form itself causally reduces to the lower-order, local process dynamics that engender it, maintain it, and into which it falls out of being. In other words, an emergent pattern may not be reducible to other patterns but is ultimately reducible to the processes that gave rise to it [Gregersen, 2006; Silberstein & McGeever, 1999]. Epistemological emergentists hold to a strict, ontological distinction between causal processes and emergent products. New and increasingly complex forms and patterns emerge, in development and over the course of evolution, but the processes that engender such novel levels of organizational complexity remain constant and ultimately exist independent of these new forms, whereas the emergent forms themselves remain fully dependent upon and reducible to the processes themselves [Clayton, 2006a, b]. Thus, at the heart of the conceptual division between epistemological and ontological emergence lies the core issue of causal reducibility. For epistemological emergence, the forces or laws that govern emergents exist solely at lower levels of explanation, the level of local here-and-now process, of real-time dynamics in the physicochemical world; all causality involves micro- to macrolevel determination, not the reverse. As a result, novelty – according to the epistemological view of emergence – applies only to noncausal features of the world. Silberstein and McGeever [1999] wrote that ‘epistemologically, emergent properties are novel only at the level of description’ (p. 186). In effect, for epistemological emergence, ‘nothing new really emerges; there are just a number of subsystems “doing their own thing,” creating the illusion of something new’ [Silberstein, 2006, p. 215]. Higher levels of organization, as ‘epiphenomenal byproducts of fundamental, lower-order processes’ [Gregersen, 2006, p. 279], ultimately reduce causally to lower-order, invariant principles of physical causation, consistent with the causal closure of the physical world. The explanatory force behind the emergent pattern resides solely in the local processes and hence is ontologically reducible to these local processes. The ontological – in contrast to the epistemological – conceptualization of emergence fully embraces causal irreducibility. Rather than privileging a bottom-up,

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microdeterministic view of cause, ontological emergence affirms both microlevel and top-down, macrolevel determinism [Silberstein, 2006; Sperry, 1986]. Emergence from an ontological perspective thus simultaneously espouses ‘downward causation’ (or in Silberstein’s terms, ‘systematic causation’) and eschews causal reductionism [Campbell, 1974; Murphy, 2006; Silberstein, 2006]. O’Connor [1994] wrote: An emergent’s causal influence is irreducible to that of the micro-properties on which it supervenes: it bears its influence in a direct, ‘downward’ fashion, in contrast to the operation of a simple structural macro-property, whose causal influence occurs via the activity of the micro-properties that constitute it … it exerts a causal influence on the micro-level pattern of events that is not reducible to the immediate causal potentialities of the subvening properties. (pp. 97–98)

By embracing downward cause as ontologically real and irreducible, ontological emergence endows the emergent organization of a system – its structure, form, pattern – with causal significance and removes it from the throes of epiphenomena, thereby rendering the novelty such organization represents in real rather than illusory terms [Silberstein, 2006; Silberstein & McGeever, 1999]. Macrolevel patterns are just as causally real as the microlevel dynamics that give rise to them. Ontological emergence establishes an inclusive, pluralistic approach to causal explanation in contrast to the exclusivist framework endorsed by sole reliance on epistemological emergence and the privileging of microdetermination [Silberstein, 2006]. The causal pluralism of the ontological emergentist reflects her/his strong commitment to the notion that multiple levels or orders of reality coexist, separate yet interdependent [Bickhard & Campbell, 2000; Ellis, 2006; Emmeche, Koppe, & Stjernfelt, 2000; Finnemann, 2000]. Higher-order levels of organization arise from and depend upon lower-order levels of organization, but this emergence from and reliance upon lower-order levels renders higher-order organization no less real and no less causally effective than its generative foundations. Adherence to levels of organization undermines reductionist notions of a fundamental reality: cultural, social, and psychological levels of organization are as real as the physicochemical levels of organization upon which they are built [Bickhard, 2008; Bickhard & Campbell, 2000; Peacocke, 2006]. As Silberstein [2006] wrote, ‘New processes, properties and systems, such as those we designate “self,” “phenomenal experiences,” and so on, really do come into being and are best characterized in terms of ontological emergence’ (p. 214). In essence, from the standpoint of ontological emergence, organization truly matters, and qualitatively different, irreducible levels of organization exist such that the understanding of process must always be framed in terms of the level of organization at which it occurs and in terms of bidirectional movement between these levels. Reality assumes both a vertical and a horizontal dimension, both in terms of pattern and in terms of process. Kim [1993, 1999] suggested that the explanatory pluralism of ontological emergence, evident specifically in the endorsement of downward causation, either violates the causal closure of the physical world or invokes useless explanatory redundancy. If higher-order, emergent structures exert causal powers in their own right, irreducible to lower-order cause, then an ontological emergence account seems to advocate a new kind of vital force or entelechy and the charge of dualism can be readily leveled against it. If, on the other hand, ontological emergence adheres to the principle of causal closure, such that every physical event has a physical cause, then these higher-



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order, emergent systems must ultimately work through the lower-order, local dynamics of their birth and maintenance to effect downward causation. Consequently, the causality of emergent pattern ultimately reduces to the causality of lower-order process. As Kim [1999] argued, ‘If an emergent, M, emerges from basal condition P, why can’t P displace M as a cause of any putative effect of M? Why can’t P do all the work in explaining why any alleged effect of M occurred?’ (p. 32). Appeals to downward causation under these circumstances amount to causal overdetermination: ‘All causal relations are implemented at the physical level, and the causal relations we impute to higher-level processes are derivative from and grounded in the fundamental nomic processes at the physical level’ [Kim, 1993, p. 208]. Proponents of ontological emergence predominantly adhere to the principle of causal closure and suggest that challenging the hegemony of microdetermination in no way yields the dualistic frame of vitalism [Clayton, 2006b; El-Hani & Pereira, 2000]. Accepting that higher-order form remains grounded in lower-order form need not entail complete conjunction of higher and lower levels because the organization of form – the nature of its complexity – makes an explanatory difference [ElHani & Pereira, 2000]. As Ellis [2006] explained, ‘The higher-level explanations rely on the existence of the lower-level explanations in order that they can succeed, but they are of a quite different nature from the lower-level ones; they are neither reducible to them nor dependent on their specific nature’ (pp. 83–84). Kim’s [1993, 1999] either-or challenge to ontological emergence falsely dichotomizes the issue: higherorder form’s grounding in the material in no way precludes its unique explanatory significance. In fact, Kim’s charge of causal overdetermination presupposes a causal monism. For Kim, the only real form of explanation is efficient causal explanation, and as a result, the notion of downward causation from Kim’s vantage point is framed in the same push-from-behind, antecedent terms as the bottom-up dynamics of microdetermination [El-Hani & Pereira, 2000; Emmeche et al., 2000]. Ontological emergence, however, by embracing causal pluralism, moves beyond the narrow confines of efficient causality to invoke other means of causal explanation – specifically formal and final causes – thereby remaining consistent with the efficient causal closure of the physical world while simultaneously offering unique explanatory insight that more accurately reflects the complex nature of systems [Juarrero, 2009]. Downward Causation as Formal and Final Cause: Closing the Circular Causality Loop The reductionism characteristic of scientific orthodoxy since the 17th century carries with it a monistic view of all causation as temporal exchanges of energy from an antecedent to a consequent – in other words, as cause-effect relations, with ‘causes’ and ‘effects’ clearly and spatiotemporally demarcated [Emmeche et al., 2000; Murphy, 2009]. As Jonas [1966] suggested, ‘The scientific concept of causality is inseparably bound up with spatiality: in space, entities are isolable; by reference to its coordinates they can be measured and positionally identified; by means of this reference, velocity and acceleration can be determined, and in this way “effect” can be quantitatively correlated with “cause” ’ (p. 132). This narrow, concrete conceptualization of cause reflects modern science’s dual commitment to prediction as the hallmark of scientific knowing and to mechanistic explanation attendant upon Descartes’ and

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Newton’s tremendous influence [Howard, 1990]. It also reflects an a priori rejection of teleology [Jonas, 1966]. However, in the wake of challenges to orthodox science’s reductionist position – such as the challenge offered through general systems theory [von Bertalanffy, 1933, 1968] – a renewed scientific openness to pluralist notions of cause has taken shape. Proponents of ontological emergence actively embrace such causal pluralism, as previously detailed. This causal pluralism is best exemplified in the Aristotelian explanatory framework of formal, final, material, and efficient causes. Within the Aristotelian framework, fully explaining how a phenomenon comes into being requires a multifaceted understanding of its form and its function, its material substrate and the surrounding contexts in which it is embedded, its antecedent circumstances and the processes that initiate its becoming. Aristotle’s four modes of explanation – formal, final, material, and efficient – represent unique, equally legitimate, and simultaneously applicable perspectives from which to understand change in natural phenomena. Each causal perspective characterizes a self-contained explanatory set in its own right and is consequently irreducible to all other casual perspectives. Similarly, no one perspective constitutes the gold standard of understanding; only when brought together as four unique vantage points taken relative to a phenomenon will the phenomenon be open to complete understanding. Formal and final causes invoke abstraction as a means of explanation. Formal causes abstract a pattern – a form, structure, organization – from the specific, realtime content of a phenomenon and employ that pattern to explain real-time actions in real-time contexts. This pattern has explanatory value because it ‘introduces order and organization into the domain under investigation’ [Overton, 1991, p. 220]. Final causes explain phenomena in terms of the future ends, purpose, or function served by the phenomena. At the level of real time, final cause invokes an actor’s goals or intentions – more generally, the function served by the action, conscious or otherwise – as a means of explaining action. At the level of developmental time, final cause invokes ideal endpoints and directional sequences of organizational change as meaningful contexts in which to embed the understanding of a phenomenon at any given time. As an illustration, explaining real-time behavior by means of cognitive and personality structures or mental schemes or through appeals to a particular stage or developmental level of organization involves formal causes. Explaining real-time behavior by means of Werner’s [1957] orthogenetic principle – by which development proceeds in terms of increasing differentiation and hierarchic integration – involves final causes. In contrast to the abstraction of formal and final causes, material and efficient causes are concrete in their level of explanation. Material causes invoke the material substrate underlying a phenomenon to explain the phenomenon. Efficient causes invoke the antecedent conditions for a phenomenon to explain it. Efficient causes are the classic propelling or initiating force explanations of a phenomenon, considered the centerpiece of the scientific enterprise and the privileged lens of scientific inquiry since the 17th century [Bates, 1979]. As an illustration, explaining real-time behavior by means of the neurological structures with which it is correlated involves material causes. Explaining real-time behavior by means of inertial forces and muscle interactions or by means of particular stimulus events or environmental factors involves efficient causes.



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Each of these four causes provides a unique explanatory view, and together they fully capture the nature of causal understanding. However, the orthodox approach of modern science, with its exclusivist privileging of efficient cause, treats formal and final levels of explanation as temporary heuristics devoid of any true explanatory power and only rendered as legitimate forms of explanation when ultimately reduced to or reframed in terms of an efficient cause [Overton, 1991]. By the orthodox approach, in other words, explanation counts only when filtered through the narrow lens of efficient cause. This ultimately results in a reification of the abstract structural/functional causes provided by formal and final cause, wherein abstractions – like goals, mental schemata, personality structures – are characterized as concrete objects or things in their own right. These concrete entities, in turn, are viewed as directly causing, in efficient causal terms, the real-time performance of an organism in context (e.g., an individual’s goal of being respected, as an initiating, antecedent physical ‘force’ materially localized in the brain, causes him to hit another person). Such structural reification allows for formal and final cause to be set up as straw men and summarily rejected since abstractions cannot possibly operate in this fashion. Jonas [1966] captured the extent to which structural reification revolves around a fundamental Rylean category mistake: The idea of efficient causation in its quantitative aspect (which is the decisive one) refers to conditions of representation and verification that obtain in the res extensa only, and is therefore not really dissociable for the possibility of mathematical analysis. It makes sense only where motion in space is involved … Consequently, the naïve transfer of ‘cause’ from its native to a foreign field resulted in a ludicrous concept of psychological determinism in which ‘motives’ were treated, not as elements of meaning in a context of meaning, but like causes of ascertainable size and vector magnitude in an extended continuum, and the ageold problem of free will degenerated into a sorry ontological misunderstanding. (pp. 132– 133)

Formal and final causes do not ‘cause’ the way efficient causes cause. Appealing to final causes and future levels of organization in the understanding of current form does not mean that the organism actually moves toward these levels of organization, that some potential future outcome or end state is pulling the organism toward it. Instead, final causes serve to contextualize our understanding of current organismic patterning in terms of a developmental sequence as a whole; final causes order our sense of the directional flow of development [Overton, 1991; Tolman, 1991; Valsiner, 1997]. Similarly, appealing to a formal cause does not mean that an organismic structure – a cognitive scheme, a developmental stage – precedes or initiates the actual behavior of an organism [Lourenco & Machado, 1996]. Instead, formal causes serve to contextualize our understanding of an organism’s specific behavior in terms of the organization or structure that behavior evinces. In contrast, efficient cause serves to contextualize our understanding of an organism’s specific behavior in terms of the physicochemical events and conditions that temporally and regularly precede it. From the standpoint of formal and final causality, the orderliness that characterizes behavior at a macrolevel (e.g., goals, cognitive structures) is itself an abstraction from the specifics of real-time action in context and constitutes an explanation by means of its abstraction. Formal and final causes are not meant to explain the incessant variability in real-time behavioral content or to identify the antecedent conditions for such content. They are not merely

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‘convenient auxiliary variables that summarize physical microstates’ [Ellis, 2006, p. 102]. Formal and final causes instead provide an abstract explanatory framework within which specific actions in specific contexts can be systematically organized and examined. Or as Ellis wrote, ‘Our understandings of meaning and purpose are abstract entities that form the highest level in the hierarchy of causation in the mind and in organizations’ [Ellis, 2009, p. 73]. The confusion of formal and final cause with efficient cause makes the notion of downward causation easy fodder for dismissal, as is evident in Kim’s [1993, 1999] attack on ontological emergence. In fact, conceptualizing downward cause as efficient cause amounts to a revival of vitalistic dualism [Emmeche et al., 2000]. However, modern advocates of ontological emergence uniformly reject the notion of strict ‘efficient’ temporal causality from an independent higher level to a lower one, arguing instead for an identification of downward causation with formal and final cause [Campbell, 1974; El-Hani & Pereira, 2000; Emmeche et al., 2000; Juarrero, 1999, 2009; Moreno & Umerez, 2000; Sperry, 1986, 1987]. When viewed as formal and final cause, downward causation involves a whole-to-part constraint, in which ‘the whole at least partially determines what contributions are made by its parts’ [van Gulick, 1993, p. 251]. Through downward causation, systems qua systems coordinate and control the properties of their lower-order components and the interactions of those components with one another, preserving their very organization despite flux, renewal and turnover in the lower-order components that comprise them. In ontological emergence accounts, constraint involves the selective effect that higher-order pattern has on its lower-order foundations [Campbell, 1974; Moreno, 2008]. Downward causation does not operate by generating new physicochemical forces or by altering existing forces but through the ‘selective activation of physical powers’ [van Gulick, 1993, p. 252]. The higher-order form and function of a system topologically constrain the efficient causal interactions between the system’s components by selecting among a wide set of interactional possibilities [El-Hani & Pereira, 2000; Moreno, 2008]. As Emmeche et al. [2000] wrote, ‘The higher level constrains which higher level phenomenon will result from a given lower level state … The same lower level constituents may correspond to a series of different higher level phenomena’ (p. 25). A system’s organization affects the distribution of its components by activating certain lower-order processes and not others; thus, the nature of local interactions cannot be fully understood in the absence of the organizational whole in which they are embedded [Murphy, 2009]. The components of a system take on new identities by virtue of their part-to-whole embeddedness in the system qua unified system, not solely through their part-part interactions with other components of the system. Thus, downward cause, via formal and final cause, offers explanation at the level of systems as wholes, capturing causality in the system qua system. The system as a whole cannot be fully understood through decomposition into temporally sequenced part-to-part relationships. It must also be simultaneously understood as a totality, in its own terms, by means of its organization and invariant ordering across the particularities of specific time and context. In effect, efficient causality becomes meaningful only in the presence of formal and final cause via the organizational complexity that characterizes the system qua system [El-Hani & Pereira, 2000]. As Thompson [2009] wrote, ‘Complex system causality is not a matter of a higher level acting downwards on a lower level. Rather, the whole entangled system moves at once



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and always as a result of both local interactions and the way the system’s global organization shapes the local interactions’ (p. 194). Wholes explain parts as much as parts explain wholes [Thompson, 2007], but within different explanatory frames. Causal pluralism frames system behavior simultaneously in terms of its antecedent and material conditions and in terms of its higher-order patterning, the forms and functions of the behavior abstracted from the particularities of its specific content in context. This in turn breaks down the arbitrary divide between process and pattern, cause and effect. Emmeche et al. [2000] explained that ‘upward and downward causes are not temporally distinct (the lower level does not cease to make up the higher one while this is assumed to “cause back”) … The same phenomena are at the same time cause and effect for each other’ (p. 21). Bottom-up and top-down causes offer different but simultaneous levels of explanation, with neither level privileged either temporally or ontologically [Ellis, 2009]. Emergence in the DS Approach to Development The concept of emergence, as detailed above, assumes different elaborations depending on the ontological framework one espouses. Emergence can narrowly and exclusively apply to the bottom-up generation of higher-order pattern from lower-order, local processes – processes to which the higher-order pattern causally reduces – as captured in epistemological emergence. Alternatively, emergence can incorporate both local-to-global and global-to-local causality via the interdependence and interpenetration of micro- and macrolevels of reality, wherein ‘part and whole co-emerge and mutually specify each other’ [Thompson, 2007, p. 38], as captured in ontological emergence. What conceptualization guides the field of nonlinear dynamics and the sciences of complexity? Bedau [1997] has argued that complex systems theory predominantly espouses an epistemological or weak emergence view, conceptualizing emergence in exclusively bottom-up, dynamic constructive terms and eschewing notions of downward causation. Yet Kelso, a key figure in complex systems theory, bases the science of coordination dynamics on the inclusive framework of complementary pairs and reciprocal interplay of wholes and parts, resulting in an approach that embodies an ontological or strong emergence view [Kelso, 1995; Kelso & Engstrøm, 2006; Kelso & Tognoli, 2009]. Complementary pairs such as structure~function, process~product, and process~structure are ‘coexistent, mutually dependent, and inextricable’, with neither member of the pair considered more fundamental than the other, and with both needed to adequately capture the dynamics of life [Kelso & Engstrøm, 2006, p. 2]. Ontological variability and open contradiction thus mark what is otherwise considered a foundational principle in nonlinear dynamics. Similar variability in metatheoretical allegiance persists with respect to the DS approach to development. The contextualist DS approach privileges local process and the particularities of real-time, here-and-now actions in context, rejects higherorder forms as explanatory, and considers emergent patterns in illusory, epiphenomenal terms, causally reducible to the local processes that give rise to it [Witherington, 2007]. These are all the earmarks of an epistemological emergence perspective. The organismic-contextualist DS approach, in contrast, focuses on the mutual interdependence of wholes and parts via circular causality, embraces causal pluralism and

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the irreducibility of formal and final causes to efficient cause, and fully admits higher-order forms into its explanatory framework [Witherington, 2007]. These are all the earmarks of an ontological emergence perspective. If taking emergence seriously means taking structure seriously, only the organismic-contextualist DS approach fully embraces the concept of emergence in its ontology. All DS approaches, whether contextualist or organismic-contextualist, claim to be neither mechanistic nor reductionist in their orientation, yet the contextualist DS perspective’s adherence to an epistemological view of emergence renders this core construct in reductionist terms and promotes novelty while systematically explaining it away. By the contextualist DS perspective, what exactly emerges? Certainly not the dynamics of DS – these dynamic processes constitute the fundamental, elemental, invariant bedrock upon which all structure is built. Patterning emerges, and higher-order patterning is irreducible to lower-order patterning. Yet all patterning is fundamentally reducible to its process origins [Thelen & Smith, 2006]. All patterning is consequently epiphenomenal, completely reducible to process. So that which emerges is epiphenomenal, illusory, and devoid of causal impact. Novelty is thus epiphenomenal within this framework. Endorsement of epistemological emergence constitutes no endorsement of emergence at all, or at best, constitutes an endorsement of epiphenomenal emergence. Consequently, taking emergence seriously means rejecting the exclusionist, antistructural position of the contextualist DS perspective in favor of the inclusive, fully relational framework captured in the organismic-contextualist DS approach. DS approaches to development do themselves no favors in adhering to an epistemological emergence point of view, for in doing so, their core concept of emergence does nothing to set these approaches apart from the rest of the reductionist pack. Taking Organization Seriously

Taking emergence seriously means taking organization seriously. By an ontological emergence account, the explanatory framework of emergence is as much about top-down organizational constraint as it is about bottom-up dynamic construction, as much about whole-to-part relations as about part-part and part-towhole relations. The organization of a system assumes explanatory significance in its own right by constraining the very processes – the interrelations among parts of the system – that gave rise to it. In other words, a system’s organization – the unitary structure of the whole – imparts meaning to the very components and relationships among components that comprise the system, providing a critical backdrop against which part-part system relations are fully understood. In contrast to the epistemological emergence stance of the contextualist DS perspective, structure informs our understanding of process as much as process informs our understanding of structure. In effect, the serious pursuit of a process orientation in the study of development – an orientation to which all DS approaches are firmly committed – must coevolve with an equally serious pursuit of a formal or structural orientation, by way of an appreciation of formal and final cause. Prima facie, by arguing that there are no structures and that all is process, the contextualist DS approach aligns itself with quantum field theory [Thelen & Smith, 1994]. This is predicated on the assumption that all matter and organization ulti-



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mately resolve into ‘pure’ quantum field processes, into a ceaseless continuum of activity involving repeated initiations and terminations of quantum excitations [Bickhard & Campbell, 2000]. But a fuller reading of quantum field theory reveals that process and organization go hand in hand at all levels of analysis, as two sides of the same coin [van Gulick, 1993]. In this light, the idea that everything is process resurfaces as the idea that everything is organization of process [Bickhard, 2008; Bickhard & Campbell, 2000]; thus, organization, far from being built on the fundamental, ‘really real’ level of process, comprises the very nature of process. Bickhard and Campbell [2000] elaborated: Everything is quantum field processes. But the critical point is that quantum field processes have no existence independent of the configuration of process: quantum fields are process and can only exist in various patterns. Those patterns will be of many different physical and temporal scales, but they are all equally patterns of quantum field process. Therefore, there is no “bottoming out” level in quantum field theory – it is patterns of process all the way down, and all the way up … consequently, there is no rationale for delegitimating larger scale, hierarchical, patterns of process – such as will constitute living things, minds, and so on … The point of quantum field theory in this discussion is to eliminate the temptation to devalue pattern so that pattern does not support emergence. In quantum field theory, pattern is everything because there is no level at which something unique and bottoming out, e.g., particles, can be found. (p. 331)

At every level of analysis, from micro to macro, process is patterned and, at different levels, differentially so, such that process at all levels of organization offers legitimate causal explanation, with no level more causally privileged or ontologically ‘real’ than any other. Yes, ‘the system is dynamic all the way down and all the way up!’ (p. 307), as Thelen and Smith [2006] exclaimed, but just as important is an understanding that the system is organized all the way down and all the way up. If all is organization of process, then an understanding of system process must be embedded within an understanding of system structure. Getting to the heart of developmental process does not arrive by reducing all organization and pattern to process, but by broadening the notion of process to conceptually envelop organization. This not only requires the expurgation of antistructuralist sentiment in DS approaches, it also requires the reexamination of a tenet generally shared by all DS approaches: that of a common, system-general dynamics for any and all far-from-equilibrium systems. In essence, this DS tenet suggests that the same basic processes are at work in pattern formation for any dissipative system – that is, for any open system that exists under conditions far from thermodynamic equilibrium – irrespective of the level of organization involved. Consequently, a common pattern-forming principle – embodied in the core construct of emergence through self-organization – cuts across the living and nonliving divide in matter, establishing continuity across and a uniform foundation for open systems in the physical, chemical and biological domains. However, a critical distinction between kinds of open system rarely surfaces in these accounts. This distinction – between physicochemical dissipative systems and autonomous, or autopoietic, systems [Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2004] – points to different levels of organization in the very nature of emergent, self-organizing process and highlights the need to take more seriously a layered notion of the world, beginning with the qualitative organizational divide between living and nonliving matter.

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Dissipative and Autopoietic Systems In open systems – those which exchange matter and energy with their environments – pattern and order can spontaneously emerge and increase in complexity by means of incorporating free, low-entropy energy from the environment into the system, and by means of expelling high-entropy energy from the system into the environment. The continual influx and outflow of matter and energy through such systems establishes far-from-equilibrium conditions and counteracts, for a time, otherwise irreversible increases in entropy and the breakdown of order consistent with the second law of thermodynamics [Brent, 1978; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984; von Bertalanffy, 1968]. What controls this flow of energy and matter critical to the establishment and maintenance of far-from-equilibrium conditions, however, depends on the open system in question. In standard physicochemical dissipative systems, both the self-organization and maintenance of spontaneous pattern formation depend on boundary conditions external to the system itself; in the absence of such exogenously controlled conditions, the patterning or organization disappears [Juarrero, 2009; Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2004]. Living systems, in contrast, evidence autonomous self-organization in that ‘the constraints that actually guide energy/matter flows from the environment through the constitutive processes of the system are endogenously created and maintained’ [Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2004, p. 238]. In the typical physicochemical dissipative structures discussed in the DS literature, such as the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction, cloud formation, Bénard cells, or the mountain stream metaphorically offered by Thelen and Smith [2006] to capture ‘behavioral development as an epigenetic process’ (p. 263), the control of energy/matter flow rests in external boundary conditions, created ‘either by the scientist in the lab or by some natural phenomenon that is not causally dependent on the self-organizing one’ [Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2004, p. 238]. When DS approaches conceptualize biological emergence through self-organization in physicochemical dissipative structural terms – presumably in an effort to explain pattern generation without recourse to any semblance of agentive design – external, here-and-now contextual factors assume a ‘special status’ [Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 216], which accounts for the predominance of focus on the ‘task-specific context’ and ‘task-specific assemblage’ in DS accounts generally and the contextualist DS approach in particular. By appealing to physical and chemical systems when instantiating the process dynamics of pattern formation in developing biological systems, DS approaches ultimately promote a view of biological pattern formation as weakly emergent, with system pattern arising and disappearing on the basis of boundary constraints ‘exogenously imposed’ on the system [Juarrero, 2009, p. 91]. However, living systems are not merely physicochemical dissipative systems. As autopoietic systems, living systems construct themselves by generating the very boundary conditions necessary for the creation and maintenance of their self-organization. Living order, Jonas [1966] wrote, consists of ‘systems of matter that are unities of a manifold, not … by the mere concurrence of the forces that bind their parts together, but in virtue of themselves, for the sake of themselves, and continuously sustained by themselves’ (p. 79). Or as Weber and Varela [2002] wrote,



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In its original formulation as well as in the subsequent literature it has been customary to see the central concept of autopoiesis as just one more self-organizing mechanism (which it undoubtedly is), and even to conflate it with dissipative structure or autocatalytic cycles, or mere open systems. These ideas basically stay within the perimeter of a physicalist view of nature and understand these new developments as necessary extension of classical physics. However, there is an essential difference between these views and autopoiesis: autopoiesis proposes an understanding of the radical transition to the existence of an individual, a relation of an organism with it-self, and the origin of “concern” based on its ongoing selfproduced identity ... Thus, autopoiesis is a singularity among self-organizing concepts in that it is on the one hand close to strictly empirical grounds, yet provides the decisive entry point into the origin of individuality and identity, connecting it, through multiple mediation with human lived body and experience, into the phenomenological realm. (p. 116)

An autopoietic system produces the very components that give rise to it, establishing its own self-maintaining processes [Thompson, 2007; Weber & Varela, 2002]. This is not to suggest that autopoietic systems construct themselves independently from their surround. The autopoietic system exists as thermodynamically open, engaging in incessant exchange of energy and matter with its surround, yet establishes organizational closure in that it metabolically maintains itself as an individual unity, as an invariant organization of patterning, in the face of continuous turnover and renewal of its material and energetic constituents [Jonas, 1966; Moreno & Umerez, 2000; Varela, 1979; Weber & Varela, 2002]. Autopoietic systems thus embody complete circular causality, actively regulating the very external boundary conditions that produce them – by regulating the flow of energy and matter – thereby incorporating external boundary conditions into their own dynamics [Juarrero, 2009; Thompson, 2007]. As Thompson [2007] wrote, the ‘self-perpetuating whole emerges out of local processes while subsuming those processes so that they no longer have a merely local and independent identity’ (p. 138). The living cell exemplifies autopoiesis, functioning as a self-producing, metabolic system wherein ‘every molecular reaction in the system is generated by the very same system that those molecular reactions produce’ [Thompson, 2007, p. 92; Varela, 1979]. The cell dynamically and continuously constructs its own membrane – the semipermeable boundary that establishes self-other distinction, the divide between itself and its surround – through metabolic processes which exist and operate only by means of the membrane they construct [Thompson, 2007]. Cells maintain themselves through incessant generation and dissolution of their material constituents, both those that comprise the interior of the cell as well as those that make up its membrane. The products of cellular process are necessary conditions for the enactment of the process itself [Juarrero-Roque, 1985]. Autopoiesis takes the ‘self’ in self-organization seriously. It establishes agency – and consequently downward causation – as a central property of living systems and requires the framing of living phenomena in final causal, teleological terms, wherein ‘purposiveness’ or ‘that for the sake of which’ provides a key component of scientific explanation. Autopoietic systems construct themselves by generating the very constraints that establish far-from-equilibrium conditions, demonstrating an agency through self-determination. Such systems cannot be adequately explained by sole reliance on the temporal dynamics of efficient cause, for – as Kant [1790/2007] classically established – something that organizes itself is a ‘natural purpose’, which means that it is ‘both cause and effect of itself’ (p. 199). The temporal, antecedent-

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consequent explanation from parts to wholes under which efficient causality operates dissolves from the vantage point of the system as a whole, necessitating instead a teleological explanation in terms of end or purpose because ‘every part is thought as owing its presence to the agency of all the remaining parts, and also as existing for the sake of the others and of the whole’ [Kant, 1790/2007, pp. 201–202]. As JuarreroRoque [1985] and Weber and Varela [2002] have persuasively argued, Kant’s insistence on a teleological account of the organism as self-organizing and self-producing finds ontological validation in the empirically grounded theory of autopoiesis. The language of purposiveness and teleology is critical to the nature of whole-to-part relations [Thompson, 2007], and living systems, autopoietic in nature, embody in circular causal fashion both part-part, part-whole, and whole-part relations. To quote Jonas [1968], ‘Teleology comes in where the continuous identity of being is not assured by mere inertial persistence of a substance but is continually executed by something done and by something which has to be done in order to stay on at all’ (p. 247). Agency characterizes the autopoietic system qua system, controlling its own organizational integrity in the face of material and energetic turnover. As downward causation, agency involves formal and final – not efficient – causes. Agency does not consist of a central executive housed within the system dictating what the organism does in homunculus fashion. Neither is it imposed on the organism from outside. Rather, agency captures system functioning as a whole – it captures the relational dynamics of the system in total – and is causally fundamental to the study of selforganization in life, not an epiphenomenal byproduct of it. As a foundation for all life, such agency should not be confused with the deliberative, reflective agency associated with higher-order, emergent forms of psychological functioning like consciousness [Gentile, 2008; Martin, 2008; Martin, Sugarman, & Hickinbottom, 2009]. Agency exists at different levels of organization, and the basic agency of self-production, as a formative characteristic of living systems, organizationally and developmentally precedes deliberative, reflective forms of agency. With each level of organization in the agency of living systems arrive increases in the endogenous self-organization of the individual, pointing to ‘the progressive “internalization of regulatory processes” that marks the evolution from the proto-autonomy of physical dissipative structures to the strong autonomy present in biological hereditary autonomous systems and finally to that displayed in the exercise of human free will’ [Juarrero, 2009, p. 93]. Self-organization in physicochemical dissipative systems requires no self – no autonomous agency – for the explanation of its emergent patterning, for patterning in such systems is essentially assembled from without. Self-organization in autopoietic systems, in contrast, requires a self – the system’s organizational integrity – within which the local dynamics of the system are contextualized to explain system patterning. Thus, self-organization as a process assumes different levels of organizational complexity depending on the system in question, with the difference between physicochemical dissipative and autopoietic systems reflecting a ‘transition from self-organization to self-producing or self-constructing systems’ [Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2004, p. 239]. With respect to autopoietic systems, Juarrero [2009] wrote that ‘by reversing the exergonic direction of classically thermodynamic processes and bringing a measure of control inside the systems, the appearance of endergonic processes creates an integrity and self-direction that were previously absent’ (p. 92). By confining its typical metaphors of self-organization in living systems to descrip-



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tions of self-organization in physicochemical dissipative systems (e.g., the BelousovZhabotinski reaction or the mountain stream), the DS approach to development both conflates different levels of system organization and couches developmental process in heteronomous, not autonomous, system terms. In doing so, the DS approach critically ignores defining features of process and pattern characteristic of living systems. Adopting a heteronomous perspective on autopoietic systems, although a legitimate perspective in its own right [Thompson, 2007], is necessarily incomplete in its articulation of process and of development in general. To adequately characterize developmental process, proponents of the DS approach cannot rely solely on a physicochemical dissipative system model of process. Different levels of system organization entail different levels of emergence, of self-organization, as the following summary of Deacon’s hierarchical approach to emergence process demonstrates. Illustrating Organized Process: Deacon’s Three Levels of Emergence Deacon [2003, 2006] provided a useful taxonomy for different levels of organization in the process of emergence based on ‘the constitutive role played by temporal change’ [Deacon, 2003, p. 277]. The lowest order of emergence, first-order emergence, characterizes the organizational nature of thermodynamically basic systems like the physicochemical phenomena of flame or water. These phenomena are weakly emergent in that they are irreducible as properties to their lower-order constituents. But such emergence – Deacon terms it ‘synchronic emergence’ – remains highly local in its temporality and lacks any kind of historical organization. Deacon [2006] argued that these systems are fundamentally delimited in the extent to which the nature of their emergent property organization introduces any biasing conditions into future component interactions. Such properties come into being, fall out of being, and come into being again without any evidence that the history of such emergences impacts the nature of the organization. Deacon [2003] exemplified this historical atemporality as follows: ‘A raindrop analyzed two hundred million years ago and another analyzed five minutes ago would be vastly more similar than two individual vertebrates even from the same lineage’ (p. 278). The next level of organization in Deacon’s [2003, 2006] emergence hierarchy, second-order emergence, introduces system history and downward causation into the nature of emergent form as distinguishing features relative to first-order emergence. In second-order emergence, prior levels of system growth exert a constraining influence on subsequent growth, revealing the influence of prior system history and initial conditions of the system on current system patterning. In other words, via downward causation, the macrolevel of emergent property organization constrains the dynamics that comprise it. Second-order emergence features at least minimal levels of organizational closure in that the thermodynamic flow of energy through the system is shaped by configurational constraints held over from past emergent organizations. Time is now featured diachronically in the system’s dynamics, producing the first signs of sequence in emergence as newly emergent phenomena successively build on prior emergent phenomena [Deacon, 2003]. Second-order emergence characterizes the minimal forms of self-organization involved in snowflake formation as well as the more complex forms of self-organization characterizing au-

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topoietic systems generally. Deacon [2006] used the example of a snowflake as illustration, wherein a snow crystal’s particular history of exposure to temperature and humidity couples with the first-order emergent properties of ice to yield the historydependent structure of the snowflake: ‘So even identical conditions of pressure, temperature and humidity, which otherwise produce identical lattice growth, can produce different patterns depending on the prior growth history of the crystal’ (p. 133). In second-order emergence, history matters, but only to the extent that new patterning in the system is influenced by patterning immediately preceding it, such that whole-to-part influence is temporally bound to particular system structuring. By contrast, third-order emergence extends the influence of system history – in the form of system ‘memory’ or ‘information’ – beyond the preceding level of organization to ‘exert a cumulative influence over the entire causal future of the system’ [Deacon, 2006, p. 137]. Third-order emergence involves the system’s redundant sampling of second-order emergent organizational constraints, drawn from its own extended history and applied or re-presented via the system’s lower-order dynamics to new system contexts and patterning over time. Essentially, processes organized by second-order emergence become available for selection via process organized by thirdorder emergence – a higher-order selection among self-organizing systems – ultimately leading to increasing decontextualization from the immediacy of local dynamics. Deacon [2003] called third-order emergence ‘a sort of self-referential self-organization, an autopoiesis of autopoieses’ (p. 299), with second-order emergent organization serving as the aliment for these higher-order emergent processes. It is at this level of organization in the emergence process – a level that, for Deacon, characterizes prototypical developmental and evolutionary change – that the need for teleological explanation arises as ‘organisms evolve and regulate the production of multiple second-order emergent phenomena with respect to some third-order phenomenon’ [Deacon, 2006, p. 139]. Deacon’s [2003, 2006] three levels of emergence illustrate what it means to view process in terms of different levels of organization and the attendant increases in complexity such a view engenders. For the DS approach to fully capture the enormous emergent complexity that characterizes living, autopoietic systems in their development and evolution, such a ‘levels of reality’ approach demands ontological priority. By repudiating the antistructuralist stance of the contextualist DS approach and embracing different levels of organization in process, the DS approach not only takes emergence and organization seriously, it also takes the very subject of its application to developmental science seriously. Taking Development Seriously

A focus on process – the question of ‘how’ [Anastasi, 1958] – lies at the heart of all developmental analysis and, for most developmental scientists, embodies what it means to take development seriously. But, as I have argued, process involves different levels of organization and consequently cannot be understood independently of its organization. The structure or patterning of process imparts meaning through the organization it provides, via formal and final cause. As author of its own activity, the organism, an autopoietic system, establishes perspective and defines itself in relation to the world, which, in turn, renders the world in terms of personal meaning,



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now an ‘Umwelt’ [Merleau-Ponty, 1942/2008; Weber & Varela, 2002]. Thompson [2007] wrote that ‘the informational stimulus is the stimulus as informed by (the form or structure of) the organism’ (p. 69), and again that ‘something acquires meaning for an organism to the extent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the maintenance of the organism’s integrity’ (p. 70). In other words, without organisms and the autonomous organization they embody, the world has no meaning [Weber & Varela, 2002]. Organization at the level of the organism – by its very nature abstract and formal – transcends the particularities of real-time contexts and actions and constitutes the background of meaning against which all of the particularities of action in context are foregrounded. Some level of organization – more or less stable – always characterizes the organism qua organism and serves as the only means by which we can render the organism in unified whole terms, in terms of invariant identity maintained across actions and contexts. Thus, full appreciation of the meaning of an organism’s activity within its world requires an embedding of that activity in the current, dynamically maintained structure or organization of the organism, taken as a whole across contexts. The study of development embeds an organism’s current level of organization within a transformational sequence of prior and subsequent levels of organization across developmental time. To study a phenomenon developmentally means, first and foremost, to embed that phenomenon in time. But simply studying phenomena temporally does not yield developmental study any more than equating the process of development simply with ‘change over time’. It is the embedding of a phenomenon in sequence that is fundamental to the explanatory framework a developmental perspective provides [Mascolo, Pollack, & Fischer, 1997; Murray, 1991; Overton, 1991, 2010]. A developmental context is a context of temporal sequence, of structured time, so to study a phenomenon developmentally means to place it in the context of previous or prior forms and potential subsequent forms. Note that simply establishing a history for a given phenomenon is insufficient to fully establish a developmental perspective. Embedding a phenomenon in sequence requires giving the phenomenon a future as well. A developmental perspective thus entails first charting the sequential transformations that characterize organizational change in a phenomenon over developmental time, and by this an interpretive framework is established for organizing what organisms do in their real-time encounters with specific contexts. Developmental analysis begins, as a result, with formal and final levels of causality. With its privileging of the task-specific particularities of action, the contextualist DS approach never satisfactorily establishes an organized sense of the organism across time and context, as a system totality in itself and as a sequence of transformations in system organization [Witherington, 2007]. Proponents of the contextualist DS approach search for meaning not by abstracting higher-order organizational properties or by embedding organismic action in a developmental sequence, but by embedding action in a task-specific context. The ‘task’ of the task-specific context characterizes the context itself – such that the meaning of the context inheres in the context itself – and is an outgrowth of the heteronomous stance of contextualist DS toward self-organization. In effect, the very notion of a task-specific context presupposes a context whose task or function is defined a priori, by an outside observer, and, consequently, independent of an organism’s engagement with the context. The task and its meaning – identified with the external context – not only preexist prior to an organisms’ encounter with the context, but also play a privileged role in orga-

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nizing the organism’s activity, the momentary, context-specific content of which constitutes the organism’s ‘knowing’ [Witherington, 2007]. As Thelen and Whitmeyer [2005] wrote, ‘Our take-home message is that knowledge of objects is created by the particular spatial and temporal properties of the task, and that concepts do not exist independently of those tasks’ (p. 248). Knowing is always ‘in the service of a task’ [Thelen & Smith, 2006, p. 303], never a means by which the very task nature of a context is defined. Development resolves to little more than ‘a history of past here and nows’ [Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 216], an ‘accrual of real-time events’ (p. 244) – in other words, a quantitative accumulation of real-time change involving a succession of task-specific adaptations [Witherington, 2007]. Developmental time is bound to and defined by the task-specific context in the same way as real-time activity is. The contextualist DS approach regards as superfluous the characterization of organisms and their development in integrated whole terms. But without such a characterization, the meaning of an organism’s action remains obscure; the task-specific context alone is ill suited to fully convey the individualized meaning of a context for an organism. As the organism is an active agent – in Weber and Varela’s [2002] words, ‘an autonomous being who does not suffer passive world encounter but fashions a world of meaning from within’ (p. 115) – its organization imparts meaning to its action. Any system qua system constitutes a critical mode of explanation in its own right, as its own context of whole to parts, in addition to the view of that system from the standpoint of its embeddedness within a wider context, as a part to other parts [Overton, 2010]. Part-to-part relations gain meaning against a backdrop of the system as a whole and are in the service (for the sake of) the system as a whole. The whole cannot be fully understood through decomposition into temporally based lines of part-to-part relations, for such relations gain meaning through their very embeddedness within the whole. Wholes are not simply something to be explained but in fact serve as an explanatory context for their parts. The very nature of the task itself and the functional significance of an organism’s action in the task context derive meaning from that organism’s particular level of developmental organization. Thus, every action of the organism speaks both to task-specific adaptation and to organism-specific organization [Piaget, 1952]. Any approach to developmental science is explanatorily incomplete without an appreciation of action in both these instrumental-communicative and expressive-constitutive terms [Overton, 2006, 2010]. Yet proponents of the contextualist DS approach seem perfectly content to explain action solely in terms of its instrumental-communicative functions, as taskspecific adaptation. By their approach, the context-general organization that characterizes the organism as an integrative whole – what van Geert and Fischer [2009] term ‘the person in his characteristic multitude of contexts’ (p. 327) – holds no explanatory significance due to its abstraction and divorce from the real-time particularities of specific actions in specific contexts. For the contextualist DS approach, the only kind of ontologically viable organization is the organization that characterizes here-and-now action in context – the ‘organism-in-context’ level of analysis [Spencer et al., in press; Thelen & Smith, 1994, 2006]. But why should DS theorists privilege one level of analysis over another? What makes one level more ontologically ‘real’ than another? Such privileging flies in the face of one of the most fundamental tenets of general system theory: the Janus principle, whereby every whole is itself a part and every part a whole, depending on the perspective one assumes. Any system level of analysis – from systems within the organism over the organism as a system in itself



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to systems at the level of organism in context – constitutes a legitimate frame of understanding for the DS approach, and all levels of organizational abstraction are ontologically real [van Geert, in press; van Geert & Fischer, 2009]. Perhaps the organism in context represents a more inclusive and all-encompassing level of analysis than that of the organism qua organism. But, as proponents of the contextualist DS approach use it, the ‘organism’ component of the relational organism-in-context level of analysis lacks the integrated, context-general characterization of an organism as an organized whole. Consequently, proponents of the contextualist DS approach really should employ the term ‘action in context’ to frame their privileged level of analysis, and under these terms, it becomes clear that such a level, though legitimate and important in its own right, does not substitute for the explanatory perspective yielded by an organism-qua-organism level of analysis. Neglect of the organism as a whole – in its own right and as an integrative component of an organism-in-context level of analysis – results in the reduction of developmental time to real time through the conflation of different levels of analysis. From the vantage point of action in context, every change from one act of an organism to another points to a new, emergent organization of relationship between the organism and its environment. Each act is unique and specific to a whole host of contextual parameters, both intra- and extraorganismic. Yet from the vantage point of the organism qua organism, some changes in acts point to new, emerging levels of developmental organization in the organism itself – to a developmental transition between levels of organization – whereas other changes in acts point to an established, stable level of developmental organization – real-time transitions from one act to another within an organizationally invariant repertoire of acts. A visually guided reach of a 3-month-old – for whom reaches that terminate in grasps are novel – signals a transformation and new level of emergent organization in the organism in a way that a visually guided reach of a 5-month-old – for whom reaches that terminate in grasps form a stable part of her/his action repertoire – does not. Any given act, when viewed from the level of action in context, will always constitute a new, emergent form, but when viewed from the level of the organism qua organism, may or may not constitute a new, emergent form, though its content relative to a context is newly emergent. Every act thus exists both as a whole with respect to the part-part relations between organism and environment and as a part within the whole that is the organism qua organism – both defined in terms of the organism and definitive of the relation between an organism and its environment. Emergent form at one level of analysis is perfectly compatible with organizational stability at another level, and both represent distinct, equally legitimate ways of explaining the action of a system. To fully understand emergent transitions in developmental form, however, requires abstraction from the real-time particularities of action in context to the context-general, organizational characterization of the organism. Developmental transitions involve the framing of an individual’s existing level of organization – abstracted from the specifics of action in context – within a sequence of that individual’s previous level(s) of developmental organization and subsequent level(s) of organization. Abstracting such organizational sequences is fundamental to the developmental perspective and establishes a critical frame of meaning within which to embed the particulars of any given action in any given context. The contextualist DS approach derails the uniqueness of the developmental perspective, the unique lens of inquiry it brings, by eschewing the explanatory role of

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organization both at the synchronic and diachronic levels. It treats fundamental explanatory principles of development like directionality, teleology, sequence, and irreversibility as epiphenomenal illusions, as ‘appearances’ to be explained by the reality of real-time dynamics rather than as formal and final organizational frames within which to contextualize those very dynamics. Developmental-time-organized process both emerges from real-time-organized process and constrains in circular causal fashion, via formal and final cause, the very real-time dynamics that gave rise to it. Taking development seriously thus entails taking the level of developmental time organization seriously, as an explanation in its own right. Just as the antistructuralist stance of the contextualist DS approach marginalizes organization in process and, in doing so, severely undercuts the concept of emergence through self-organization, so this stance severely undercuts the concept of development and ultimately undermines the explanatory potential in principles of nonlinear dynamics for uniting developmental science. Maintaining such a stance in the metatheoretical repertoire of the DS approach to development threatens to unravel the whole enterprise of understanding development in DS terms. In the contextualist DS approach, the narrowed conceptualization of emergence through self-organization, and of development in general, raises a new dichotomous stance through the privileging of process over pattern and through the privileging of lower-order systems relative to higher-order systems by denuding higher-order systems of their causal significance and relegating these systems to the appearance end of an appearance-reality divide [Witherington, 2007]. At the core of this exclusivist worldview rests a failure to take circular causality seriously. But such a narrowed conceptualization is unnecessary, as evidenced by organismic-contextualist DS accounts. As Lewis [2000a, in press; Lewis & Ferrari, 2001], van der Maas [1995; van der Maas & Raijmakers, 2009], and others [Fischer & Bidell, 1998, 2006; Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 2006; Lickliter, 2008; Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2010; Mascolo & Fischer, 1999, 2010] have amply demonstrated through their inclusive DS worldview, the antistructuralist stance of the contextualist DS approach in no way constitutes an inevitable metatheoretical outgrowth of nonlinear dynamics. Similarly, Kelso [1995; Kelso & Engstrøm, 2006] fully embraced an inclusive approach to complex systems theory, as the following quotation attests: To the extent that it is aimed at understanding the spontaneous self-organized emergence of patterns that form without the necessity of agency, coordination dynamics is like other nonequilibrium, nonlinear theories such as Ilya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures … n the other hand, coordination dynamics is a theory of directed self-organization in which both spontaneous pattern formation and agency coexist and complement each other. In coordination dynamics, agentlike entities are not mindless but meaningful by virtue of the very self-organizing processes that created them. [Kelso & Engstrøm, 2006, p. 106]

The organismic-contextualist DS approach embodies a fully relational, circularly causal approach to the study of systems and their development, marked by causal pluralism and an emphasis on the relativity of perspective and vantage point, not a privileging of one level of organization or analysis over another. The inclusivity of the approach engenders what Overton [2006, 2010] termed relationism, a relational developmental metatheory. Relationism establishes an inclusive ontological framework within which classic polarities such as structure-function and process-



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pattern are recognized as distinct, alternative, yet equally legitimate perspectives taken on the same whole, each ultimately being contextualized with respect to the other and neither assuming an absolute foundational status. Overton [2010] wrote that relationism ‘frames a general scientific research methodology … that promotes a truly multidisciplinary, multimethod approach to inquiry in which each individual approach is valued not as a potentially privileged vantage point, but as a necessary line of sight on the whole’ (p. 18). The antistructuralist stance of the contextualist DS approach is fundamentally incompatible – at an overarching, metatheoretical level – with the inclusive, relational approach of the organismic-contextualist DS approach. By reductively narrowing its frame of explanation and by privileging certain vantage points over others, the contextualist DS approach embodies what Overton [2006] termed a ‘split metatheory’ [Witherington, 2007]. The contextualist DS approach bridges the false dichotomies of orthodox developmental psychology by privileging one side of a polarity – process over pattern – which ultimately reinforces a dualistic, either-or approach to reality rather than transcending it. Its monistic view of DS, in other words, still rests on dualistic, dichotomous foundations [Jonas, 1966]; no new synthesis of existing dualities has arrived via the contextualist DS approach. The organismiccontextualist DS approach, in contrast, bridges and ultimately transcends false dichotomies by framing them in both-and terms, transforming them into complementary pairs [Kelso & Engstrøm, 2006]. The only way to transcend opposites is to first transcend an oppositional, eitheror construal of opposites by embracing explanatory pluralism. The contextualist DS approach is thus viable only through encapsulation as a particular perspective within the more inclusive framework of the organismic-contextualist DS. Its narrowed explanatory frame, absent the absolutism of its antistructuralist stance, is best suited to existence as one of many vantage points within a more inclusive, causal pluralism. Otherwise, the contextualist DS approach, taken as an overarching ontology for studying development, undermines the very synthesis DS approaches seek to provide and dramatically weakens the core concept of emergence through self-organization. Adopting the organismic-contextualist DS approach as an overarching metatheory allows developmentalists to embrace circular causality and to take emergence, selforganization, and development seriously. As an exclusionist ontology, the contextualist DS approach yields an explanatory frame insufficient and inadequate to deal with the complexity of life and its development. DS approaches to development must abandon all vestiges of antistructuralist doctrine and exclusivist thinking. Only by doing so will DS approaches – through principles of nonlinear dynamics – actualize a true developmental science, which pioneers of development like Piaget, Werner, Baldwin, and Vygotsky were ‘on the verge of establishing’ [van Geert, 1998b, p. 145]. References Anastasi, A. (1958). Heredity, environment, and the question ‘how?’ Psychological Review, 65, 197–208. Bates, E. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press. Bedau, M.A. (1997). Weak emergence. In J. Tomberlin (Ed.), Philosophical perspectives: Mind, causation and world. Vol. 11 (pp. 375–399). Malden: Blackwell. Bickhard, M.H. (2008). Emergence: Process organization, not particle configuration. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 15, 57–63.

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