Taking Emergence Seriously: The Centrality of Circular Causality for Dynamic Systems Approaches to Development

摘要

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, The-len and her colleagues [Spencer, Dineva, & Schoner, 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 constraint. Copyright©2011 S.KargerAG, Basel