Handbook of Integrative Developmental Science

Essays in Honor of Kurt W. Fischer

Michael F. Mascolo, Thomas R. Bidell, Michael F. Mascolo, Thomas R. Bidell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138670730
• eBook ISBN: 9781000041095
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Although integrative conceptions of development have been gaining increasing interest, there have been few attempts to bring together the various threads of this emerging trend. The Handbook of Integrative Developmental Science seeks ways to bring together classic and contemporary theory and research in developmental psychology with an eye toward building increasingly integrated theoretical and empirical frameworks. It does so in the form of a festschrift for Kurt Fischer, whose life and work have both inspired and exemplified integrative approaches to development.

Building upon and inspired by the comprehensive scope of Fischer's Dynamic Skill Theory, this book examines what an integrated theory of psychological development might look like. Bringing together the work of prominent integrative thinkers, the volume begins with an examination of philosophical presuppositions of integrative approaches to development. It then shows how Dynamic Skill Theory provides an example of an integrative model of development. After examining the question of the nature of integrative developmental methodology, the volume examines the nature of developmental change processes as well as pathways and processes in the development of psychological structures both within and between psychological domains. The team of expert contributors cover a range of psychological domains, including the macro- and micro-development of thought, feeling, motivation, self, intersubjectivity, social relations, personality, and other integrative processes. It ends with a set of prescriptions for the further elaboration of integrative developmental theory, and a tribute to Kurt Fischer and his influence on developmental psychology.

This book will be essential reading for graduate students and researchers of developmental psychology and human development, specifically developmental science.

PART I

Foundations

1

Philosophical Background to Integrative Theories of Human Development¹

Thomas R. Bidell

Philosophical Background to Integrative Theories of Human Development

Typically, an essay on the philosophical background to developmental psychology would discuss early theories about mentality and questions about stasis versus change, beginning with philosophers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle. Then it would follow a more or less linear line of ascent to contemporary theories of mind and development. However, the philosophical background to integrative theories of human development needs to do more than this. It must also deal with the question of why we need integrative approaches to development and, by implication, it must take a critical approach to traditional narratives of the history of developmental psychology. This means addressing the origin of the fragmented world view that dominates so much of social science in the 21st century, and considering alternative philosophical frameworks that can serve to support and contextualize integrative models of developmental science.

The history most relevant to this project does not begin with the early Greek philosophers, although precursors of it can be found among them. Instead, we will start with Descartes who, with his panoply of dualisms, is frequently singled out as the culprit responsible for launching our fractured world view. However, to understand how we arrived at our current state of affairs, we must do more than point the finger at an individual philosopher. We must also understand the nature of the social circumstances from which Descartes drew his perspective and we must understand the sequence of philosophical and scientific positions by which Descartes’ legacy has come down to us historically, and why it continues to hold such sway over philosophy and scientific theory in the 21st century. But even this is insufficient. To stop at a critique of the Cartesian tradition would be to leave the job half done. Understanding the historical trajectory leading to a world view of “splitting,” to use Overton’s (2015) metaphor, is a useful tool for integrative theorists in orienting ourselves negatively—that is, in relation to the viewpoint we seek to overcome. But we also need to orient ourselves positively by understanding the history of thinkers who have rejected the Cartesian worldview and contributed to an alternative philosophical tradition that can serve to inform integrative developmental science.

Therefore, this chapter will consist of two main sections. The first will examine the roots of the Cartesian world view, lay out the essentials of Descartes’ conception of mind, and then trace its development up to the beginning of the 21st century through the positions of key philosophers and psychological theorists. The second section will examine the development of an alternative philosophical tradition, which I will term the relational-dialectical tradition, as it emerged through the efforts of thinkers who reacted against the Cartesian tradition and attempted to construct positions that re-unified what the Cartesians had rent asunder. As Thomas Kuhn (2012/1962) has pointed out, textbook accounts tend to portray the history of a field as a linear sequence of ideas leading up to the dominant paradigm of the day. The net effect of the present chapter, I hope, will be to suggest that instead of viewing the philosophical background to developmental psychology as a single chain of ideas and philosophers, leading to the dominant contemporary framework, it is possible to view the philosophical background in terms of two major, fairly self-consistent, and mutually opposed philosophical traditions: one of Cartesian fragmentation and one of relational-dialectical unification.

The Cartesian Tradition

Descartes lived at a moment of great transition and social upheaval. The world of feudalism, dominated ideologically by the Church with its religious dogma and concomitant interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy, was giving way to the new complex of social relations being generated by nascent capitalism and a new mechanical science. Traditional feudal relations of communal production and accumulation, based on connection to the land and an interdependent hierarchy within the feudal community, were breaking down. The growth of cities, trade, and a money economy had given rise to a powerful and independent bourgeoisie on whom the agriculturally based aristocracy was becoming increasingly dependent. Along with this new-found power and independence among a rising bourgeois class, came a new sense of themselves and their place in the world. Increasingly a new ideology of “freedom” was coming to compete with the feudal ideology of belonging to a fixed place in a chain of being (Lovejoy, 2009/1936). Central to the new ideology was what would become a founding theme of the Enlightenment: “the notion of the independent, rational, reflective individual” (Pippin, 2005, p. 2). Many intellectuals at the time were struggling to develop philosophical accounts that could codify the experience of this new-found individualism. But it was Descartes’ radical formulation that would come to hold sway, even if, ironically, it was to eclipse the very freedom and agency it hoped to defend.

Descartes synthesized a new world view based on what would later come to be called external relations (cf. Kitchener, 1985; Ollman, 1971). From the point of view of external relations, objects, people, and processes are conceived of as pre-existing their relations. This is a fundamentally static world view because, lacking relations, there is no way to account for change or process. Unrelated objects, in order to move, would have to be brought into relation by some external force. Artificial and mechanical objects conform to this view. David Hume, a major proponent of this view, was fond of the metaphor of billiards in which an object must strike another to create motion. However, natural processes, including biological, psychological, and social processes do not conform to this view. These processes conform to a contrasting way of thinking that has come to be called internal relations. From the perspective of internal relations, the parts of natural wholes are always intrinsically related and there is never a time when the parts pre-exist their relations to other parts of the whole. The philosophy of internal relations was first synthesized by Hegel but it has roots going all the way back to Descartes’ time. This is the worldview at the root of the relational-dialectical tradition and will be taken up further in the second section of this chapter.

In developing his general philosophy, Descartes sought to provide a philosophical rationale for the new mechanical science to which the world view of external relations seemed to apply. However, Descartes also applied his version of external relations, sometimes called Cartesian reductionism (Levins & Lewontin, 1985) to his model of mind. In developing his model of mind Descartes rejected the Aristotelean epistemology maintained by the Scholastics of his day. Aristotle’s view of knowledge was essentially participatory and was closely tied to his hylomorphic ontology according to which objects were composed of a unity of an underlying substance and an “essential form,” which turns an amorphous substance into a specific object like a frog (Rorty, 1979). Knowledge of objects, in this view, arises from the intellect’s direct participation in the essential form of the object. That is, for Aristotle, the form of the object comes to exist both in the object and in the mind simultaneously (Alanen, 2003; Rorty, 1979). Descartes recognized that this participatory model could not support the instrumental thinking needed for the development of the new mechanical science and ridiculed the idea of essential forms attaching to underlying substances “like so many little souls to their bodies” (Descartes quoted in Alanen, 2003, p. 52). However, Descartes’ radical alternative would come to be seen by many as no less absurd.

In a famous move, Descartes advanced a model in which the mind and the body consist of two separate unrelated “substances,” one material, existing in space and time, and one mental, somehow lacking extension in space and time (Cottingham, 2006; Searle, 2004). This “substance dualism” as it has come to be called (Searle, 2004) allowed Descartes to treat the body as a mechanical device, devoid of messy things like thoughts and feelings, and therefore falling under the purview of mechanical science. Substance dualism is the most famous of Descartes’ dualisms and has been the main target of critics such as Gilbert Ryle (1949) who famously portrayed the Cartesian mind as a “ghost in a machine.” However, substance dualism is only one consequence of the application of external relations to the problem of mind. A number of other dualisms arise as consequences or corollaries of the division of mind and body. For instance, if the mind is separate from the body, then thought is necessarily cut off from action. How can a mind cut off from its body somehow impel that body to act, or receive feedback from the results of such actions? This means that a mind cut off from the body is a mind cut off from the world in which the body must act. If the mind cannot control bodily action, it has no way of grasping the nature of and results of transformative actions on the world (Bidell & Fischer, 1997). In what follows we will examine the model of mind Descartes built around these premises and its influence on later thinkers.

The Cartesian Mind

As Rorty (1979) has pointed out, Descartes’ overthrow of the Aristotelian framework essentially created the modern conception of mind. Even for philosophers and psychologists who do not subscribe to the idea of a mental substance, the notion of a separate “mind space” has persisted among mainstream models of mind. In this view, the mind consists of a sort of “inner arena” (Rorty, 1979) in which the “mind’s eye” inspects a continuous parade of images, ideas, and representations passing before it. Moreover, despite his reputation as a rationalist champion of innate ideas, Descartes’ model of mind actually contained all the fundamental components of both the modern nativist and the modern empiricist conceptions of mind. Indeed, the modern traditions of nativism and empiricism so often portrayed as mutually exclusive, may be seen as two sides of the same Cartesian coin and constitute, not two opposing traditions, but sub-currents within the main Cartesian tradition.

In his attempt to work out the implications of a disembodied mind, Descartes created five key features of mind which have regularly been returned to or reinvented by subsequent nativist and empiricist thinkers as they have struggled with the same problems as Descartes. To begin to understand how later thinkers so often returned to Descartes’ positions, it will be helpful to consider in more detail what Descartes proposed. His five essential elements include three kinds of ideas—innate, “adventitious” (contingent), and “factitious” (complex) as well as notions of reified mental structures and a set of “rules” to guide the use of the other parts of mind.

Innate Ideas

As we have seen, a fundamental problem with a model of mind as disembodied is that it cuts off mind from acting upon the world. The self-organizing we do to control our actions in transforming the world is the basis for systematicity in mental life. The organization of our actions on the world provides us the means to understand the way the world itself is organized. Cutting the mind off from action removes this source of systematicity completely from the account. As a result, systematicity seems to come from nowhere and the only explanation for our ability to understand organization in the world appears to be that it simply exists innately. In this way, systematicity becomes reified in various notions of innate forms. This reification plays two roles in Descartes’ theory of mind. The first has to do with “ideas” of systematicity occurring as content in the mind, treated here; the second involves reified notions mental abilities such as mental dispositions or “faculties,” treated below.

Despite Descartes’ ridicule of Aristotle’s essential forms, he had no qualms about the notion of such forms pre-existing in the mind. As he wrote to the Dutch philosopher Regius, “essential forms explained in our fashion … give manifest and mathematical reasons for natural actions …” (Descartes as quoted in Alanen, 2003, p. 52, emphasis added). By “our fashion” Descartes was referring to his re-conception of the source of knowledge about the organization of the world. Instead of the intellect participating in the forms of objects, the forms, now separate “ideas” pre-exist in the mind and are applied to the world of objects. Such ideas occurred in the mind as “evident intuitions,” that is direct, unmediated knowledge such as “triangles have three sides” that are true simply because they appear self-evident (Alanen, 2003, pp. 1516; Kenny, 1968). Such ideas provide a means of understanding the organizational aspects of the world—the “reasons for natural actions”—such as the regularities being discovered by the rising mechanical science.

Adventitious Ideas

Despite the textbook image of De...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• What is an Integrative Theory of Development – And Why Do We Need One?
• PART I: Foundations
• PART II: Methods for an Integrative Psychology of Development
• PART III: Change Processes: How Development Happens
• PART IV: Pathways and Processes Within and Between Psychological Domains
• PART V: Moving Forward
• Index