Dynamics and indeterminism in Developmental and Social Processes

Alan Fogel, Maria C.D.P. Lyra, Jaan Valsiner, Alan Fogel, Maria C.D.P. Lyra, Jaan Valsiner

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317779865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

One of the most profound insights of the dynamic systems perspective is that new structures resulting from the developmental process do not need to be planned in advance, nor is it necessary to have these structures represented in genetic or neurological templates prior to their emergence. Rather, new structures can emerge as components of the individual and the environment self-organize; that is, as they mutually constrain each other's actions, new patterns and structures may arise. This theoretical possibility brings into developmental theory the important concept of indeterminism--the possibility that developmental outcomes may not be predictable in any simple linear causal way from their antecedents. This is the first book to take a critical and serious look at the role of indeterminism in psychological and behavioral development.
* What is the source of this indeterminism?
* What is its role in developmental change?
* Is it merely the result of incomplete observational data or error in measurement? It reviews the concepts of indeterminism and determinism in their historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives--particularly in relation to dynamic systems thinking--and applies these general ideas to systems of nonverbal communication. Stressing the indeterminacy inherent to symbols and meaning making in social systems, several chapters address the issue of indeterminism from metaphorical, modeling, and narrative perspectives. Others discuss those indeterministic processes within the individual related to emotional, social, and cognitive development.

PART

I

DETERMINACY AND INDETERMINACY: THEORETICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER

1

QUE SERÁ, SERÁ: DETERMINISM AND NONLINEAR DYNAMIC MODEL BUILDING IN DEVELOPMENT

Paul van Geert

University of Groningen

The most forceful fighters of developmental determinism are probably found among parents of kids in the sweet age of adolescence. Whatever determines the behavior of adolescents, it certainly is not the parents’ good advice and lessons that they teach. It’s true, there is a certain form of determinism, in that adolescents are in general very determined to do what is stupid and inadvisable, and the only form of determinism they themselves seem to support is that of self-determinism, if any such philosophical concept exists. Of course, the preceding comments are nothing but the lamentations of a developmental psychologist who has gone through the purifying experience of parenthood. The trouble with educating kids is that parents are almost forced to believe in some form of determinism, preferably environmental determinism, which teaches that what children do and the kind of people they become is, to a considerable extent, a consequence of what their parents and schoolmasters taught them, but very often kids grow up in a way that strays so markedly from the life course that parents had in mind. Que será, será.

In its original form, determinism is the philosophical doctrine that every event, act, and decision, is the inevitable consequence of antecedents that are independent of the human will (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1992). Nobody, with the exception of a few weirdos maybe, will seriously endorse philosophical determinism in this particular form. However, there exist forms of physical and statistical determinism that still color the scientific discussion about how human development comes about, and to what extent development is determined by either natural or nurtural factors.

The verb determine comes from the Latin determinare, which means to limit. In view of its etymology, determinism boils down to the doctrine that antecedents limit the range and properties of consequent events, or that events are constrained by their past. It is hard to imagine that anyone would seriously object to this particular form of determinism.

In summary, there is a form of determinism that no one would endorse, and there is a form of determinism that no one would seriously reject. The fight over developmental determinism must take place somewhere between these two poles. In this chapter, I begin by exploring some potential sources of the determinism debate in physics, and then proceed to (developmental) psychology and dynamic systems theory. My aim is to show that nonlinear dynamics provides a view of development that sheds a new and interesting light on the determinism issue.

SOURCES OF THE DETERMINISM DEBATE IN PHYSICS

Physical Determinism in Celestial Mechanics

Whereas determinism as applied to human acts and free will has never found widespread acceptance, it has been strongly endorsed in classical physics. The best known formulation of physical determinism is as follows: If an imaginary being would know the position and speed of all particles in the universe, this being would, in principle, be capable of computing the fate of the universe into an infinitely distant future (Smith, 1989; Stewart, 1989). The “invention” of physical determinism is often attributed to Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827). Employing Newton’s equations, Laplace computed the orbits of comets and planets and published his results in the five volumes of his Mécanique céleste (1799–1825). The fact that the orbits of heavenly bodies so distant from the world of man could be inferred from mathematic theories that the human mind could not only grasp but also discover, marked a turning point in scientific thinking. One could say that the normal relationship between reality and model was turned upside down. The model was no longer considered a representation of reality, but rather reality was seen as the instantiation of a (mathematical) model. This view expressed the triumph of Platonism, in a sense, because, with the discovery of Newton’s laws, mankind was supposed to have found the eternal Ideas that underlay the structure of the Universe.

The Epistemological Character of Physical Determinism

It is important to note that physical determinism was basically an epistemological issue. It referred not to causality per se, but to a state of knowledge: If I know the present, I can foresee the future. This epistemological stance is based on an ontological one, which claims that if exactly the same antecedents hold, exactly the same consequents must follow. The general objection against physical determinism is that it is, in principle, impossible to have a complete knowledge of the properties of particles or objects, that is, a knowledge of infinite accuracy. An infinitesimally small error will soon diverge into a macroscopic error that is of the same magnitude as the events that one intends to predict. Imagine seven perfect billiard balls aligned on a perfect table, and a perfect player wants to make a seven ball carom. An initial error no bigger than the radius of a single atom suffices to make the sixth ball miss the seventh (Smith, 1989). If similar reasoning is applied to atoms in a gas, for instance, two gaseous states that are similar except for an infinitesimally small factor will have evolved into two massively different states after only 1⁻¹¹ seconds.

The impossibility of knowing the future is mirrored in the impossibility of knowing the past, given an almost perfectly accurate knowledge of the present. The reason for this fact lies not only in the previously mentioned exponential increase of error, but also in the fact that the arrow of time is not symmetrical. In addition to celestial mechanics, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, physicists were highly interested in heat and in machines that turned heat into mechanical energy (given that mechanical energy was so easily turned into money). Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) discovered that the transformation of heat into energy was asymmetrical. Because of this asymmetry, events flow in only one direction, namely, that of increasing entropy. Entropy, loosely defined, is a state of disorder, or loss of information. Put differently, the inevitable course of time corresponds with a decreasing possibility of reconstructing the past, given knowledge of the present.

Ontological Determinism and Uncertainty in Quantum Physics

The confutation of the epistemological version of physical determinism does not affect the potential truth of ontological determinism. However, it is still possible to think of two identical states of affairs, or more simply, to think of the same state of affairs twice, and then to ask oneself whether or not identical antecedents must lead to identical consequents.

Physics, however, is far from a monolithic discipline. It deals with a variety of subjects, each of which requires its own particular assumptions and models. Quantum physics, for instance, deals with an entirely different world than classic Newtonian physics does. At the beginning of the 20th century, quantum mechanical principles were discovered that shed an entirely different light on the issue of definite and determined properties in physical states. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, introduced in 1927, raises doubts about the possibility that events at the level of elementary particles have definite properties and are thus, in principle, replicable. Or, more precisely, the principle shows that it makes no sense to conceive of events as if all their relevant properties (momentum and position) can be accurately known or measured simultaneously. So, there is no meaning in the statement that events can, in principle, be replicated and should, therefore, have exactly the same consequences. Exit determinism?

All this talk about unknowable futures and pasts should not make us forget that physics is about the only scientific discipline where truly amazing predictions of past and present events are possible. Mathematical models that account for uncertainty and lack of accuracy are actually very well suited to overcome these problems as far as the limits of computation allow us to go. Actual quantum mechanical predictions are extremely accurate. We have seen that gases, for instance, lose track of their past, so to speak, after unimaginably small amounts of time. But as a whole, gases behave very neatly and predictably. The reason is that indeterminism at the level of small particles is definitely outweighed by their large numbers. The large numbers of particles allow for a statistical treatment that reintroduces determinism at the practical scale of macroscopic events. This brings us to a second view on determinism, namely, statistical determinism, which is not only reigning in certain branches of physics, but also in the life and social sciences. Although statistical determinism sounds like a contradictio in terminis, it makes perfect sense and there’s even a law that accounts for it: the law of large numbers.

Statistical Determinism

We are all familiar with the imaginary pinball machine from statistics class: a perfect upright surface, with perfectly aligned nails set in triangular form. Perfectly round marbles are put into the pinball machine, through a slot on the top exactly in the middle. Although it is impossible to predict the course of any individual marble, even given arbitrarily high accuracy of initial-state knowledge, a great number of marbles will produce a highly predictable pattern, namely, a bell-shaped distribution at the bottom of the machine. As the number of marbles approaches infinity, the bell shape will approach absolute geometric accuracy. This is an illustration of the so-called central limit theorem, an essential theorem of probability theory.

Ludwig Boltzmann’s kinetic-molecular theory of gases infers macroscopic determinacies, such as the gases’ pressure and temperature, from the indeterminate interactions among the masses of gas particles. It seems that, in order to understand the behavior of phenomena such as gases, the microscopic level is the wrong level of aggregation; laws and determinacies reign at the macroscopic level. In the physical universe, determinism comes about. Just as Venus, the goddess of beauty, was born out of the ephemeral foam of the ocean, determinism comes about as the result of indeterminacies at a lower level of aggregation, namely, the level of particles. But the law of large numbers does set a few restrictions. First, the events or objects at the lower level should be treated as a homogeneous class; that is, they should lose their proper identity and become exactly similar to one another. In addition to homogeneity at the object level, time should become a mere rank ordering dimension. Different occurrences of similar events are completely independent of one another.¹

Summary

What can we learn from this small and probably also extremely selective excursion into the field of physical determinism? One conclusion that I find interesting is that determinism in its traditional, absolute sense, turned out to be an epistemological issue. It is not about the fact that causality per se is deterministic, but rather about whether or not causal chains can be predicted to an infinite degree of accuracy. First, it is, in principle, impossible to achieve an infinite degree of accuracy in the measurement of physical conditions. Second, even infinitesimally small inaccuracies turn into major errors after surprisingly small amounts of time (small in comparison to the error). It follows, then, that there is no support for the determinist claim.

A second interesting conclusion is that determinism (or rather, the impossibility of determinism) is a two-sided phenomenon. Not only can the future not be predicted, but the past can be known only to a limited extent. Events lose information about their past, and eventually all information about the past will be lost in a state of maximal entropy.

Third, if the problems are lifted to the macroscopic level, determinism, in the sense of predictability and knowableness, has demonstrated its viability very persuasively in the form of highly accurate physical predictions.

Finally, microscopic indeterminacy turns into macroscopic order, simplicity, and predictability, basically because of one iron law: the law of big numbers. It is interesting to see that time, taken separately and acting on the microscopic particle level, acts to increase the physical degrees of freedom, whereas space greatly reduces the degrees of freedom and creates a regular, greatly deterministic macroscopic world, provided the homogeneity and independence principles hold.

SOURCES OF THE DETERMINISM DEBATE IN NONLINEAR DYNAMICS

From Mechanics to Dynamics

The motions of planets and heavenly bodies were the showpiece of classical physical determinism. The wonderfully accurate application of Newton’s laws to the motions of these huge and distant objects can be attributed to the fact that the problem of their motions reduced reasonably well to an analytically solvable problem, basically to the problem of how two large masses affect one another. But at the end of the 19th century, mathematicians, Poincaré in particular, discovered that this reduction turned out to be a fortuitous hit, an exception rather than the rule: Three bodies attracting each other yielded a problem that could no longer be solved by straightforward analytical means, and three bodies are only one more than two, but also a lot fewer than the numbers statistical mechanics worked with (Stewart, 1989). A new mathematical discipline—dynamics—had to be invented in order to account for processes of change and motion that occurred in relatively small sets of interacting objects. In those sets, the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem could not be invoked to bypass the problems of indeterminacy.

Dynamics, Order, and Indeterminacy

Dynamics is the study of how variables affect each other over time. It studies transactions of the form: “If variable A affects B, and B affects A, how will A and B evolve, given a particular way in which that transaction occurs?” Transactions of this kind have a wealth of interesting properties, but two are worth mentioning. The first is that they usually cause a massive reduction in the degrees of freedom. Because A and B are variables, the transaction could, in principle, result in any possible combination of a value of A and a value of B. In that case, there would be an infinite number of possible states. Classical determinism claimed that any of those possible states could be predicted given perfectly accurate knowledge of the initial conditions of A and B, but in many dynamic systems, the result of the transaction is that A and B evolve toward one out of only very few potential states. Those are the so-called attractor states of the dynamic system. All states that fall within a relatively wide range of initial values home in on one particular attractor state. That is, one needs only very crude information about the initial state in order to correctly predict a final state. However, the fact that initial-state regions border on each other means that the more an initial state approaches a border, the more accurate must be the information to make a correct prediction. And for initial states that lie exactly on the border of regions, it is impossible to predict which end state will result.

Dynamic systems theory combines several elements from determinism and indeterminism: prediction, information, and uncertainty. It shows that the universe is not uniformly structured, as far as determinacy and accuracy are concerned. For some regions of the “universe” consisting of variables A and B, only very little information suffices to make very accurate predictions, whereas for other regions an extremely high level of accuracy of measurement is just about as good as throwing dice.

Another interesting property of nonline...