2004.01.22. The lecture at Nara Women's University

Presentation at the colloquium
at the Nara Women's University
Psychology Department
January, 22, 2004

What is Development?
Axiomatic bases for a Developmental Science

Jaan Valsiner
Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477, USA
jvalsiner@clarku.edu

ABSTRACT. Developmental theorizing in psychology has emerged slowly in the past 300 years, and has been inconsistent. The main obstacle for developmental science is the misfit between axioms needed for looking at developmental phenomena, and psychology's habits of using standardized and consensually-rather than theoretically-validated methods. For reconstructing developmental science in new ways, it needs to build on lessons from its own history, rather than follow external fashions of sciences that are not aimed at the study of development. History of psychology is a central resource for the development of the science of psychology. Developmental science in the future is oriented to (a) preservation of time within its analytic units, (b) gives up the notion of "variables" and moves to study dynamically transforming structures, and (c) treats the systemic analysis of single cases as definitive of basic data derivation (with the notion of "sample" retained as the background "location map" of where the selected individual cases are located. This new developmental science shares its general idea complex with developmental biology, where the centrality of flexible pre-adaptation of organisms becomes central for science.

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