Developmental Psychology and the Teleological Concept of Development
Developmental Psychology and the Teleological Concept of Development
The essay introduces a seemingly self-contradictory thesis: the concept of development is gradually fading away from a significant part of the contemporary developmental psychology. Although child psychology is usually equated with developmental psychology, the paper argues, this two endeavors should be differentiated. While the former can be taken as a realm of studies the subject of which are children, the latter is characterized by a particular developmental stance toward its subject matter, either children or adults. Specifically, the concept of development and therefore those developmental studies which aim to analyze and explain psychological ontogenesis involve a set of interconnected ideas: they should investigate psychological changes in time; they should involve teleological concerns, i. e. the relevant changes are directed toward some putative end state(s); regarding the pattern of development, they should be open to reconstruct both unidirectional and multidirectional developmental paths; they should evoke certain “mechanisms” responsible for developmental changes. However, these and related conceptual requirements and the appropriate methodological concerns are rarely satisfied in contemporary studies considering themselves as developmental psychology. In this way, the paper identifies a particular type of research: developmental psychology without development, a valuable branch of general psychology which misunderstands itself as developmental psychology. Finally, a possible motive of this self-misunderstanding is speculated about. Methodological and conceptual troubles of putting self-determining, language using and rule-following human adults into the Procrustean bed of causal-experimental paradigm of mainstream general psychology might lead to selecting infants and children as subjects, whose self-determining power and linguistic capacities seems to be less disturbing in this regard.