Tolman, C.W. (1991d). For a more adequate concept of development with help from Aristotle and Marx. In P. van Geert & L.P. Mos (Eds.), Annals of Theoretical Psychology, 7, 349-356. New York: Plenum
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For a more adequate concept of development with help from Aristotle and Marx

Charles W. Tolman

Conceptual Criteria

I do not believe that the concept of development can usefully be characterized on a continuum of strength in exactly the manner proposed by Dixon, Lerner, and Hultsch [[this volume (1991a)]]. To explain, let me begin by drawing attention to the definition of 'concept' in Antony Flew's A Dictionary of Philosophy:

That which a person has when he understands or is able to use some portion of his language. Criteria for possessing a concept may be weak, requiring only an ability to pick out or distinguish that to which an expression applies. For example, to possess the concept sheep could require no more than the ability to say 'sheep' in the presence of sheep. Stronger criteria might involve the grasp of the logical or grammatical behaviour of the expression ('sheep' is a common noun, not a proper name), factual knowledge (sheep are a source of meat), or the ability to define or give the essence of a sheep. (Flew, 1984, p. 69)

Strictly speaking, by Flew's definition, the adjectives 'weak' and 'strong' apply not to the concept, but to the criteria for possessing one. Criteria that reveal more about the thing or penetrate more deeply into its essence are stronger than those that merely point. This understanding is consistent with the three 'indisputable' meanings of concept given by Heath: [p. 350]

To have a concept 'x' is ...(a) to know the meaning of the word 'x'; (b) to be able to pick out or recognize a presented x (distinguish non-x's, etc.), or again to be able to think of (have images or ideas of) x (or x's) when they are not present; (c) to know the nature of x, to have grasped or apprehended the properties (universals, essences, etc.) which characterize x's and make them what they are. (Heath, 1967, p. 177)

Although Heath does not explicitly mention strength, the third meaning is not just broader in that it embraces the first two, it implies stronger criteria as all [[sic. as well, -P.B.]].

It follows that scientific discourse requires stronger criteria than everyday discourse, this being one of the main differences between scientific and everyday concepts. Moreover, scientific criteria are more exacting regarding the correctness with which they represent real objects. This, however, does not guarantee an absence of error in the concept. Indeed the very diversity of criteria that must be included in a scientific concept increases the risk of error. Scientific concepts are therefore more or less correct (or true), with improvements and resolution of differences coming about by virtue of inclusion of additional true criteria and exclusion of false ones.

Now the notion of strength suggested by the authors differs significantly from the one described by Flew. (I won't quibble further over whether we are talking about the concept itself or the criterion used for saying that a person possesses it -the notion of a "strong concept" serves at least as a useful shorthand.) Their notion turns on the stringency of "requirements [criteria] for change processes to be counted as developmental." What this means is apparent from their Figure 2: a criterion is not viewed as stronger or weaker in comparison with other criteria as in the standard definition, but rather varies internally in strength. Unless the metric is carefully specified, possibilities might suggest themselves such that if a concept (or its criteria) were asserted with great vigor or passion it (they) could be taken as stronger than if asserted timidly. It is also implied that a weak concept may be as or more acceptable to science than a strong one, again at variance with the customary understanding.

Perhaps problematic inferences like these can be avoided or their problematic nature resolved through a more precise justification of internally varying criterion strength, even if some confusion with the more common notion results. But there are more problems here than just this. First, since the nub of the matter appears to be the 'strength' [p. 351] with which development is distinguished from mere change, then it is hard to see how concepts can vary in the manner described. They can only vary in the accuracy with which they capture the strength of the distinction. For instance, if development really is very distinct from mere change then a concept that says it isn't is not weak, it's wrong.

Second, the criteria 'selected' by the authors do not appear to distinguish anything from mere change. There are many changes not ordinarily regarded as developmental that are qualitative in nature. The change from ice to water to steam is an example. And there are similar changes that are irreversible, as when the egg hardens with boiling. It would also appear that changes are universal: there is no flower that does not finally wilt and decompose; there is no planet that does not constantly change its position in space. As for 'goal-directed' as opposed to 'random and chance' there is no ball on earth, once beginning its descent on an unobstructed inclined plan, that does not reach the bottom. Now if the 'strong' forms of these criteria are found in instances of mere change, they can hardly be of much use in isolating the distinguishing features of development that is not mere change.

Third, the criteria are not really mutually exclusive as endpoints of bipolar continua ought to be. The most obvious in this regard is quality/quantity. One would be hard put, as Engels demonstrated in his Dialectics of Nature (1954 Chap. XII), to find any change of quality that does not involve a change in quantity, nor any change of quantity that does not ultimately lead to a change of quality. In any case, it seems hardly reasonable to suggest that the everyday qualitative concept of ice is stronger than the scientific quantitative one. With regard to universality, the very claim that every child develops differently depending upon context implies by itself that every child develops. With regard to goal-directedness, the dialectical nature of necessity and chance is well known: toss enough coins and a predictable bell-shaped curve results. And children don't just develop, no matter how much chance is involved; they inevitably develop into adults. The dialectic of reversibility and irreversibility is harder to demonstrate. Suffice it to say here that both developmental and nondevelopmental changes probably involve both (compare eggs, ice, and Freudian regression).

The real difficulty with these criteria and the approach being taken to them, however, is that they appear to be aimed at telling us more about the three or four 'models' targeted by the authors than about development itself. The problem is not to debate the number of teeth [p. 352] in the horse's mouth, but to count them. A contrasting emphasis on actuality or truth would suggest that we need to discover the reversible and irreversible factors in development, its qualitative and quantitative characteristics its progressive and nonprogressive aspects, and the extent of the generality of its various features. It may well be that it is the particular configuration of the concrete unities of these opposites that distinguishes development from mere change.

This implies of course that a 'pre-concept' (Holzkamp, 1983, pp. 50ff) of development must be held by psychologists prior to these discoveries. Such a concept exists and it is something like pointing to those fuzzy gray creatures in the field. We know, for instance that a child's competencies do not and cannot, remain in their childish state. They become, in the course of growing up, the competencies of an adult. How does this happen? There has been a general agreement on observations and questions like this at least from the time of G. Stanley Hall. This agreement makes up a weakly determined concept (a fuzzy one, as the present authors have called it). The point is to fill it with new criteria to make it strong in Flew's sense, that is, to make it ever more comprehensive and true.

Aristotle and Teleology

The authors present us with what seems to me a confusing picture of teleology. The impression that they are uncomfortable with it is inescapable. I believe, however, that a consideration of teleology or final cause, is absolutely essential to developmental theorizing. I shall explain here why I think that is so.

First we need to clear the decks of some seriously distorted notions of final cause. These tend to take the form of an end causing the process that leads up to it, or the end existing somehow preformed in the process. One searches in vain for these and similar notions in Aristotle. That great thinker made a very clear distinction between final cause and efficient cause; these distortions all turn on a conflation of the two. As Randall (1962, p. 229) observed, "... final causes or ends are for Aristotle never to be identified with efficient causes: never for him does what a process brings about itself bring about the process."

Another distortion is to equate final cause with purpose. I refer once again to Randall:

For Aristotle, there are no purposes in the world outside human actions and makings. Final causes, tele, are for him a much broader [p. 353] class than the subclass of 'purposes'. That broad class includes not only human purposes, but also all natural ends and outcomes in the processes that take place by nature. (Randall, 1962, p. 125)

Final cause was one of four causes listed by Aristotle [[(Metaphysics, BOOK 1, Part 3; BOOK V, Part 2)]] and one of the three out of the four that have been eliminated or neglected by many thinkers since the rise of modern science in the 17th century. In retrospect, the reason for this is clear. Formal, material, and final cause [[as they have come to be known]] had no place in the prevailing mechanistic [[(Efficient cause)]] thinking of the 17th and 18th centuries. They only began to emerge again from our scientific subconscious with the rise of biology and functionalism in the 19th century. This is not accidental; it was precisely the biological and functional emphases of Aristotle's thinking that led him to distinguish the four kinds of causes. Aristotle advanced the other three causes, particularly the final, as part of an opposition to the mechanistic thinking of Empedocles and Democritus.

We now find ourselves once again in a post-mechanicist stage of intellectual historical development and one of the most urgent tasks we face in current developmental theory is to find ways of transcending the limits of mechanicism, of formulating genuine and effective theories of development that reflect its processual nature. Aristotle as it turns out, had quite a bit to say about this problem. Surely we cannot afford to neglect or, worse, distort his conclusions about it.

What did Aristotle intend? His introduction to the 'causes' in the Posterior analytics [[(BOOK II, Part 11)]] says it clearly: "We think we have scientific knowledge when we know the cause, and there are four causes..." (Aristotle, 1941, p. 170). The four causes represent, in short, the kinds of information we must posses about something in order to lay claim to genuinely scientific knowledge about it.

What was important to Aristotle about the object of investigation was its motion: "We ... must take for granted that things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion -which is made plain by induction" (Aristotle, 1941, p. 219 [[Physics, BOOK I, Part 2]]). The form of motion that most interested him was "becoming in its widest sense" (1941 p. 230), the "coming to be and passing away" (p. 240 [[Physics, BOOK I, Part 8]]). "We say that one thing comes to be from another thing, and one sort of thing from another sort of thing" (p. 230 [[Physics, BOOK I, Part 7]]). It is clear enough from these passages that Aristotle was interested in the kind of changes that includes what we ordinarily understand as development. [p. 354]

Why is final cause important for understanding these kinds of change? Randall (1962) sums it up neatly with the question "What is an egg?"

Democritus can tell us it is a chemical process, but it is clearly not a 'mere' chemical process: it is a chemical process that grows into a chicken. We can go back, find the elements out of which the egg is made up, either Aristotle's elements or our own, we can find the material of the egg, its From What. We can find the hen and her reproductive system, the cock and his, we can find the agents that generated the egg, the efficient cause of the egg, the By What. Both material and agent are necessary and important. But we clearly do not understand what an egg really is unless we recognize the egg as a possible chicken [[, its For What]] (Randall 1962 p. 26).

And we surely cannot claim to understand the psychological processes of the child if we have no idea of what they may become, or worse, if we pretend that they do not become.

What about the claim that the dialectical thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, and Engels were teleologists? There can be no doubt that they were -in the original Aristotelian sense. This is understandable in terms of their opposition to mechanicism and their recognition of the world as becoming. But there can be equally little doubt that they rejected the distortions of final cause that made it ridiculous. That is clear from the discussion of method in the introduction to Marx's Grundrisse (1973; cf. Sayer, 1979, p. 92) and from Engels' Anti-Dühring (1947, e.g. p. 86). Hegel's Phenomenology of mind (1967, pp. 294-296) condemned the mechanical notion of teleology, although the author was admittedly prone to overgeneralize purpose.

The point is that anyone who has seen through the errors of mechanicism must necessarily gravitate to some version of final cause. And this comes not out of some kind of metaphysical prejudice, but, as exemplified by Aristotle, from respectful regard for the nature of reality.

Marx, Society and the Individual

Is it true for Marx that "although individuals are influenced by the structures of their society, individual thought and actions may be explicable primarily in terms of social institutions," that "... the interaction between the individual and society exists descriptively, but is of little explanatory value," and that "when it comes to the explanation of social phenomena, the interaction is rendered in a way reminiscent of one-way causation from the social system to the individual?" These are [p. 355] the conclusions the authors draw from the following quotation from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past" (1969, p. 398). Granted, the authors offer their interpretation cautiously -they admit that it is extreme- but they offer no alternative. The question is, however, why this obviously faulty interpretation is offered at all. As a deduction from the quotation, it is a blatant nonsequitur. Indeed, Marx here states very plainly that "men make their own history" and then goes on to remind the reader that this is not done in a vacuum, but under conditions which they do not choose willy-nilly. (Who could possibly object to this?) The whole point of the passage is to deny that history is something that simply happens to people. It represents anything but "one-way causation" or "methodological collectivism."

The following passages are offered as evidence of Marx's more dialectical understanding of the matter:

M. Proudon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the stem-mill, society with the industrial capitalist. ... The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations. (Marx, 1963, p. 109)

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way (Marx & Engels, 1970, p. 42)

Passages of this sort are innumerable, and they all affirm a genuinely dialectical and reciprocal interaction between the individual, social relations, and the physical environment.

If we misunderstand Marxism, then we make it all the harder for ourselves to appreciate the real contributions to the understanding of human development made by Vygotsky, Luria, Leontyev, Davydov and [p. 356] other developmental psychologists who have adopted a Marxist perspective of their work. And they have adopted this perspective because they believed it served well the interests of all who are concerned with understanding the human developmental process, not mechanically or metaphysically, but on its own terms. Those who share that concern can no more afford to misunderstand Marx than they can afford to misunderstand Aristotle.

References

Aristotle (1941) The basic works of Aristotle (R. McKeon, Ed.). New York: Random House.

[[Dixon, R.A., Lerner, R.M., & Hultsch, D.F. (1991a). On the concept of development in individual and social change. In P. van Geert & L.P. Mos (Eds.), Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol. 7, 279-324. New York: Plenum.: )

[[Dixon, R.A., Lerner, R.M., & Hultsch, D.F. (1991b). Maneuvering Among Models of Developmental Psychology. In P. van Geert & L.P. Mos (Eds.), Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol. 7, 357-368. New York: Plenum.]]
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Engels, F. (1947). Anti-Dühring. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Engels, F. (1954). Dialectics of nature. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Flew, A. (1984). A dictionary of philosophy. London: Pan Books.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1967). The phenomenology of mind. New York: Harper & Row.

Holzkamp, K. (1983). Grundlegung der Psycholgie. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Marx, K. (1963). The poverty of philosophy. New York: International Publishers.

Marx, K. (1969). The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In Karl Marx & Frederick Engels: Selected Works (Vol. 1). Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. New York: Vintage Books.

Marx, K., & Engels, R. (1970). The German ideology. New York: International Publishers.

Randall, J.H., Jr. (1962). Aristotle. Sussex: Harvester Press.

Sayer, D. (1979). Marx's Method. Sussex: Harvester Press.

Related Links

Tolman, C.W. (1987a). Theories of Mental Evolution in Comparative Psychology: Darwin to Watson. (15-23). In E. Tobach (Ed.). Historical Perspectives and the International Status of Comparative Psychology. Hillsdale: LEA.

Tolman, C.W. (1987b). The comparative psychology of A.N. Leontyev -U.S.S.R. (203-209). In E. Tobach (Ed.). Historical Perspectives and the International Status of Comparative Psychology. Hillsdale: LEA.

Tolman, C.W. (1989a). Pluralistic Monism: William James as Closet Heraclitean. Psychological Record, 39, 177-194.

Tolman, C.W.; & Piekkola, B. (1989). John Dewey and Dialectical Materialism: Anticipations of Activity Theory in the Critique of the Reflex Arc Concept. Activity Theory, 1, Nr. 3/4, pp. 43-46. [see My Repost of this article (P.B)].

Tolman, C.W. (1990). Continuity/discontinuity in the evolutionary thinking of the Chicago functionalists. Storia Della Psicologia, 2, 64-72.