Mechanisms of Cognitive and Social Development: One Psychology or Two?

Abstract

The mechanistic and organismic paradigms in developmental psychology have tended to be narrowly applied to the particular phenomena they handle best: the development of social behavior in the case of the mechanistic paradigm and cognitive development in the case of the organismic paradigm. The study of moral development offers a potential point of intersection between the two traditions, but a survey of the pertinent literature indicates that this promise has failed to be fulfilled. Furthermore, the critical limitations that presently characterize each paradigm suggest that each potentially can enhance its own explanatory power by attempting to incorporate the alternatives it has heretofore ignored -alternatives encompassed by the opposing paradigm. While social learning theory at present has no theoretical structure in terms of which to conceptualize the intervening cognitive processes it is now beginning to acknowledge are important, cognitive-developmental theory has not incorporated any account of the complex interplay between the developing individual and the specific cultural-historical environment in which this development takes place. While at the moment both paradigms have deficiencies in critical areas making it impossible for either to supply a satisfactory remedy for the shortcomings of the other, it is precisely this incorporation of antitheses that will be necessary if each paradigm is to enhance its own explanatory power, as well as further our progress toward the synthesis of alternatives that ultimately is needed for the construction of a new, more satisfactory paradigm.

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