Developmental Dynamics: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

At the end of the 20th century, as new tools and techniques from the interdisciplinary field of nonlinear dynamics began enjoying increased application to the study of development, interest in dynamics flourished in the developmental sciences. In the eyes of many prominent dynamics thinkers of the time, these new dynamics approaches – by virtue of their grounding in time and variability – not only established a thoroughgoing process orientation to development but also stood in marked opposition to the structural, or organizational, focus that had marked classic organicist and systems treatments of development from earlier in the century. Treatments of developmental dynamics today, however, are embarking on exciting new ways to integrate the organizational focus of classic systems accounts with modern principles of nonlinear dynamics. As a consequence, today’s dynamics orientations are taking seriously the explanatory significance of phenomena like purposiveness, end-directedness, normativity, and subjectivity that characterize organisms as unique levels of process organization. Many challenges lie ahead for fully realizing such an integration, and we highlight two noteworthy conceptual issues that today’s treatments need to confront: (1) the notion of abilities or powers as potentials for action and what it means for “potential” to explain action; and (2) the notions of real time change, developmental time change, and what it means for these different timescales to interrelate.