Top-Down Causation, Adaptive Selection, and Their Consequences

摘要

In his article, David Witherington [this issue] examined the dynamic systems (DS) approach to the study of development, proposing it as a metatheory for developmental psychology. Its basic mantra is 'emergence through self-organization.' But underlying this there is a battle between pattern and design. Witherington represented this as a contest between the contextualist DS perspective, where pattern is an epiphenomenon, and exclusive power lies in a bottom-up process of emergence, and an organismic-contextualist DS perspective, where pattern offers explanation by means of constraint, and circular causality prevails. The first approach is a reductionist antistructural stance, where causal pattern ultimately reduces to the local processes that engender it, maintain it, and remain independent of it. The second sees global patterning as no less real and explanatorily viable than the lower-level elements. This is Witherington's position: 'Taking emergence through self-organization seriously entails taking both the structure of the emergence and the self and organization of self-organization seriously ... [this] requires a full appreciation of the structure-function cycle that is circular causality'. According to this view, both formal and final causes, each invoking abstraction, are legitimate means of explanation.