Witherington 2007

Paper
Human Development 2007;50:127–153

DOI: 10.1159/000100943
The Dynamic Systems Approach as

Metatheory for Developmental Psychology
David C. Witherington
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N. Mex., USA
Key Words
Circular causality Contextualism Dynamic systems Metatheory Organicism
Abstract
The dynamic systems perspective has been touted as an integrative metatheoret-
ical framework for the study of stability and change in development. However, two dy-
namic systems camps exist with respect to the role higher-order form, once emergent,
plays in the process of development. This paper evaluates these two camps in terms of
the overarching world views they embody. Some dynamic systems proponents ground
their conceptualization of development in pure contextualist terms by privileging the
here-and-now in the explanation of development, whereas other proponents adopt an
integration of organismic and contextualist world views by considering both local con-
text and higher-order form in their explanatory accounts. These different ontological
premises affect how each camp views the process of self-organization, the principle of
circular causality and the very nature of explanation in developmental science.
Copyright © 2007 S. Karger AG, Basel
The Dynamic Systems Approach as Metatheory for Developmental

Psychology
A decade ago, developmental psychology could easily be characterized as a field

in search of ontological unity, marked by increasingly particularistic, domain- and
context-specific ‘minitheories,’ which offered a narrowed focus on specific behavior
in specific settings but at the price of an integrated developmental account [Fischer
& Bidell, 1998]. Since then the field has witnessed what Lerner [2006] recently de-
scribed as ‘the ascendancy of a developmental systems frame’ (p. 5) – a widespread
commitment to thoroughly relational, integrative conceptions of development that
promise to transcend false dichotomies and unify the field. Prominent among the
family of metatheoretical frameworks rooted in this developmental systems frame is
© 2007 S. Karger AG, Basel David C. Witherington, Department of Psychology

Logan Hall, University of New Mexico
Fax +41 61 306 12 34 Albuquerque, NM 87131-1161 (USA)
E-Mail karger@karger.ch Accessible online at: Tel. +1 505 277 4805, Fax +1 505 277 1394
www.karger.com www.karger.com/hde E-Mail dcwither@unm.edu
the dynamic systems perspective (DSP), which attempts to explain, through the sys-
tems’ concepts of self-organization and holism, how developmental patterns arise
and, in the process, offers a model for development which reconciles the ceaseless
flux and variability of real-time action with the orderly, organizational flow of de-
velopment [Lewis, 2000a; Thelen & Smith, 1994]. As a general, multidisciplinary ap-
proach – grounded in the mathematical modeling of complex and nonlinear change
over time – the DSP has enjoyed successful application to the study of movement
coordination and motor development [Kelso, 1995; Newell, Liu, & Mayer-Kress,
2003; Thelen & Ulrich, 1991] and of late has expanded its range to include cognitive,
language, social, emotional and psychopathological development [Camras & With-
erington, 2005; Fogel, Nwokah, Dedo, Messinger, Dickson, Matusov, & Holt, 1992;
Granic, 2005; Lewis & Granic, 2000; Lewis, 2000a; Martin, Fabes, Hanish, & Hol-
lenstein, 2005; Smith, 2005; van Geert,1998].
At the level of mathematical modeling, the DSP holds considerable promise for
the study of development [Hartelman, van der Maas, & Molenaar, 1998; Jansen &
van der Maas, 2001; van der Maas & Molenaar, 1992; van Geert, 1998]. Mathemati-
cally speaking, a dynamic system is simply an articulation of the processes by which
a system state at time t transforms into a later system state at time t + 1. Equations
for dynamic systems are recursive in nature, involving an iterative process whereby
the product (system state t + 1) of the equation’s initial run feeds back to the equation
as a new initial system state to produce in turn a later system state, t + 2, and so on
[van Geert, 1991; van Geert & Steenbeck, 2005]. These straightforward mathemati-
cal foundations for DSP juxtapose against uncertainty over what exactly the ap-
proach entails at the level of metatheory for developmental psychology, especially in
light of disagreements among some of the DSP’s leading proponents over seemingly
core conceptual issues [Fogel et al., 1992; Lewis & Granic, 1999; Thelen & Smith,
1998; van der Maas, 1995]. Is the DSP primarily a formal (in the mathematical sense)
realization of von Bertalanffy’s [1968] general systems theory tenets [Beek, Hopkins,
& Molenaar, 1993; Capra, 1996; van der Maas & Hopkins, 1998]? Or does the DSP
constitute a ‘radical’ contextualist world view [Fogel et al., 1992]? Is it a paradigm
shift, no longer compatible with the ‘grand narrative’ framework of Piaget [Smith,
Thelen, Titzer, & McLin, 1999; Thelen & Smith, 1998]? Or is it highly compatible
with Piaget [Chapman, 1991; van der Maas, 1995, 1998; van Geert & Steenbeck,
2005]? How conceptually unified are the multiple approaches that fall under the gen-
eral rubric of ‘dynamic systems’ [Keating & Miller, 2000]? Although the mathemat-
ics of dynamic systems certainly condition to a degree the metatheory of the perspec-
tive [van Geert & Steenbeck, 2005], the DSP, as a metatheoretical framework, cur-
rently embodies varied and potentially conflicting ontological premises depending
on the account provided. As it is primarily at the level of metatheory that the DSP
has pervaded much of current thought in developmental psychology [Newell & Mo-
lenaar, 1998], establishing the metatheoretical foundations for the DSP as a develop-
mental perspective is of paramount importance.
Lewis [2000a] has argued that disagreements among DSP proponents reflect
surface level, ‘superficial differences’ (p. 40), not fundamental conceptual division.
Recently, van Geert and Steenbeck [2005] have distinguished the ‘Bloomington ap-
proach’ – associated with the work of Esther Thelen, Linda Smith, John Spencer and
others – from their own ‘Groningen approach,’ with regard to what level of organiza-
tion constitutes an appropriate variable level for dynamic systems modeling. Propo-
128 Human Development Witherington

2007;50:127–153
nents of the Bloomington approach eschew psychological constructs such as ‘object
permanence’ or ‘theory of mind’ and regard only real-time actions in specific physi-
cal contexts as viable source material for dynamic systems analysis. For the Gronin-
gen approach, higher-order, formal variables such as psychological constructs are
perfectly and appropriately amenable to dynamic systems modeling, but proponents
of the approach make no ontological assumptions regarding the ‘mental’ status of
such variables. Psychological constructs simply correspond to a more macroscopic
level of action patterning, and in the end, Groningen approach advocates argue that
‘these variables and dimensions will have to be brought back to the working of a so-
far-unknown short-term dynamics that incorporates the embodied acting person
that Esther Thelen brought in to the study of human development’ [van Geert &
Steenbeck, 2005, pp. 436–437]. This suggests that macroscopic variables, though ap-
propriate for modeling, must eventually be characterized in more microscopic, real-
time, action-in-context terms to count as explanatory. Thus, van Geert and Steen-
beck frame the division between these two DSP approaches in terms of what phe-
nomena are appropriate for dynamic systems modeling but, like Lewis [2000a], avoid
characterizing this difference in terms of a more fundamental, ontological division.
In this paper, I argue that the issue of whether or not to admit psychological
variables into the DSP framework reflects considerably more division at the level of
basic metatheoretical orientation than van Geert and Steenbeck [2005] suggest. Two
camps do indeed characterize the current DSP landscape, but these camps adopt
fundamentally distinct world views regarding the nature of causality and explana-
tion. As Lewis [2000a; see also Kelso, 1995] suggests, the principle of self-organiza-
tion is foundational to the world view the DSP promotes, but the specific nature of
self-organization involves different ontological premises depending on the camp in-
volved. One DSP camp, purely contextualist in orientation and associated most
clearly with the writings of Thelen and Smith, weds its analysis to action in the con-
text of the here-and-now, rejects higher-order forms as explanatory in the sense of
formal and final cause, reduces developmental time to real time, regards as illusory
the orderly, directional flow of development viewed in macroscopic terms, treats
emergent patterns as epiphenomenal, and regards the process of self-organization in
exclusively bottom-up terms. The other DSP camp represents an integration of
metatheoretical approaches, specifically the contextualist and organismic world
views, and finds its most cogent instantiation in the writings of Marc D. Lewis and
Kurt Fischer and his colleagues [for a discussion of contextualist and organismic
world view integration, see Overton & Ennis, 2006]. This camp, by virtue of its world
view merger, fully admits higher-order forms into its explanatory framework, inte-
grates the emergent pattern into the nexus of causal relations, embraces all forms of
causality – efficient, material, formal and final – as distinct but legitimate types of
explanation, considers developmental time as emergent from but irreducible to real
time and regards the process of self-organization in both bottom-up and top-down
terms via circular or interlevel causality.
The distinct metatheoretical orientations these two camps implicitly – if not
explicitly – espouse is this paper’s topic for examination. The first section of this pa-
per provides a detailed and integrated overview of the organismic and contextualist
world views. Although distinctions among world views have been extensively out-
lined in many other publications [e.g., Overton, 1984, 1991, 1998; Overton & Ennis,
2006; Pepper, 1942; Reese & Overton, 1970], the detail of the present account is pro-
Dynamic Systems as Metatheory Human Development 129

2007;50:127–153
vided to thoroughly articulate the metatheoretical foundations for what I argue is
the DSP’s current ontological split. The second section of this paper provides a
metatheoretical treatment of the DSP in general, its core principle, self-organization,
in particular, and the key role the principle of circular causality plays in distinguish-
ing DSP camps. Finally, the third section of the paper details the two DSP camps,
termed here the ‘contextualist DSP’ and the ‘organismic-contextualist DSP,’ in terms
of the world views they embody.
World Views and Development: Organicism and Contextualism
It is widely acknowledged as a tenet of the modern scientific approach that the

‘fact-finding’ efforts of any scientific enterprise necessarily derive from a particular
‘world hypothesis’ or world view, from general models or sets of beliefs about what
constitutes reality and truth [Kuhn, 1962; Pepper, 1942]. In developmental psychol-
ogy, numerous accounts have documented the world view foundations for the field’s
most enduring conceptualizations of the organism and its development [Lerner,
1978; Lerner & Kauffman, 1985; Reese, 1991; Reese & Overton, 1970; Sameroff,
1983]. Thirty years ago, mechanistic and organismic world views predominated as
metatheoretical frameworks for the study of development [Langer, 1969; Reese, 1991;
Reese & Overton, 1970]. Under a mechanistic world view, the organism is likened to
a machine, a reactive collection of parts upon which forces act [Langer, 1969; Pepper,
1942; Reese & Overton, 1970]. Development involves the additive, quantitative ac-
cretion of behavioral patterns, efficiently caused by contingent relations with and
reinforcement from external events. Mechanism’s atomistic stance and relatively
passive characterization of the organism contrasts sharply with the organismic world
view, which takes as its hallmark the organism as an active constructor of reality
through interaction with the world [Reese & Overton, 1970]. Under an organismic
world view, the organism is thought of as an irreducible, integrated whole, and its
development is marked by irreversible, progressive and qualitative changes in the
formal properties of the whole [Meacham, 1997; Overton, 1984; Pepper, 1942; Schol-
nick, 1991]. Throughout much of the last half century, organicism’s influence as a
guiding metatheory held sway over developmental theory and research. However,
organicism’s relative neglect of the particular in development, from the level of so-
ciohistorical differences in developmental pattern and trajectory to the level of con-
text specificity in real-time behavior, has led to growing concern over its adequacy
[Lerner, Hultsch, & Dixon, 1983; Scholnick, 1991].
Enter contextualism1. Under a contextualist world view, the particularities of
time and context assume paramount importance for understanding action and its
1
The world view of contextualism offered in this paper is not the only reading available. Due to
contextualism’s tendency to ‘lose its identity and to become a part of mechanism or of organicism’
[Overton, 1984, p. 219], some accounts identified with contextualism bear greater similarity to the
merger accounts of organicism and contextualism than to the account originally set forth by Pepper
[1942]. Overton [1998] specifically writes that contextualism ‘need not be read as a split tradition that
suppresses order and change of form’ (p. 153). However, for the purposes of this paper, contextualism
is identified with Pepper’s original account and with the pragmatism Overton [1991] discusses; those
variants of contextualism that admit the integration of organicism into their metatheoretical frame-
work are here identified with the merger of organicism and contextualism.

2007;50:127–153
development. Rather than appeal to the abstract, generalizable forms action as-
sumes, contextualism grounds itself in the now, in the moment, in the real-time ac-
tivities of organisms in specific settings and contexts [Overton, 1991; Pepper, 1942;
Reese, 1991]. ‘The event alive in its present’ aptly captures the fundamental mindset
for this framework [Pepper, 1942, p. 232]. Contextualism is certainly not alone in its
emphasis on context [Capaldi & Proctor, 1994]. The holism criterial to the organis-
mic world view mandates a contextualization of parts in terms of the whole: the
meaning of a part of a system is primarily a function of its embeddedness within the
system as a whole [Overton, 1984; Sameroff, 1983]. Both organicism and contextual-
ism are relational in outlook in that they emphasize the relations that exist among
components of a system, not the components themselves, as under the mechanistic
world view [Overton, 1984; Overton & Ennis, 2006; Pepper, 1942]. However, the or-
ganismic world view backgrounds the particularities of action in context, the spe-
cific content of behavior, in favor of abstracting from the ever-changing present for-
mal properties of action within and between general levels of developmental organi-
zation [Lerner & Kauffman, 1985]. For contextualism, this abstract structuring of
specific action in context divorces behavior from real settings and from real time;
thus, the contextualist world view is inclined to deconstruct structure to reveal what
is ‘actually’ happening in the here-and-now [Chandler, 1997]. Both organicism and
contextualism are synthetic world views [Pepper, 1942]. But in the case of organi-
cism, with its integrative focus, synthesis exists at the level of higher-order, organis-
mic form. Contextualism’s synthesis, with its dispersive focus, remains wed to the
particularities of the here-and-now, to the level of specific action-in-context.
For organicism, the pattern abstracted from real-time actions in real settings
constitutes a formal explanation because it ‘introduces order and organization into
the domain under investigation’ [Overton, 1991, p. 220]. Development itself consti-
tutes a patterned whole within which both general (synchronic) levels or stages of
organization and specific real-time actions must be contextualized. In other words,
fully understanding an organism’s current level of organization requires an embed-
ding of that organization within a sequence of both past and future organizations
[Murray, 1991; Overton, 1991]. An integral feature of the organismic world view,
therefore, is its focus both on the dialectical progression of organization involved in
developmental process and on the ideal ‘timeless’ end points which represent final
integration and synthesis [Kendler, 1986; Pepper, 1942]. However, modern organis-
mic frameworks invoke an equifinal approach to developmental progress: as Pepper
[1942] states, ‘to the later organicists … there is no single cosmic path to the truth or
to the ultimate integration of fragmentary data. … There are many paths from error
to truth’ (p. 294). Furthermore, the ideal or absolute level of truth and final integra-
tion represents to the modern organicist, ‘an end toward which events progress …
not an end achieved’ [Overton, 1984, p. 219]. End points in the organicist’s concep-
tualization of development do not cause development in the sense of efficient causal-
ity or as an initiating force, but as final causes they do render coherent the direc-
tional flow of development [Overton, 1991; Tolman, 1991]. In effect, postulation of
an end point, whether a normative adult form or an idealized one, serves to embed
the current pattern within development as a whole [Murray, 1991; Overton, 1991;
Valsiner, 1997].
For contextualism, the notion of development as a whole, marked by irreversible
direction and order, falsely masks the change and novelty we constantly encounter

2007;50:127–153
in the here-and-now. Change is ever-present and of the moment, fluid, directionless
and reversible; Pepper [1942] writes that ‘nothing is more empirically obvious to a
contextualist than the emergence of a new quality in every event’ (p. 256). Contex-
tualism starts with the present event of specific action in a specific context and pro-
ceeds to other events immediately past and in the immediate future. However, it is
to the immediacy of the present that contextualism steadfastly clings:
… we should use only verbs. It is doing, and enduring, and enjoying: making a boat, run-
ning a race, laughing at a joke. … These acts or events are all intrinsically complex, com-
posed of interconnected activities with continuously changing patterns. [Pepper, 1942,
p. 232–233]
Development, therefore, does not resolve to the generalized trajectories organi-

cism espouses; rather, the real core of development rests in the context of the here-
and-now, because both organisms and the contexts within which they function un-
dergo constant change in relation to one another. The orderly flow of development,
viewed as a formal whole, is an epiphenomenal abstraction which loses sight of the
real process unfolding in the particularities of local context [Chandler, 1997]. It is
mere ‘appearance’ masking a ‘reality’ of real-time, context-specific action. Under-
standing development simply requires a grounding of analysis in the variability ac-
tion demonstrates during real-time, adaptive encounters with everyday contexts, for
development is continuous with such real-time change, moving from particular to
particular [Overton, 1991]. As analysis for organicism is largely top-down, so analy-
sis for contextualism is largely bottom-up.
With organicism arrives the risk of neglecting time and the particularities of
context, of neglecting the variability that so characterizes organisms as unique spec-
imens [Pepper, 1942]. As its focus becomes more abstract and further removed from
the particularities of context, organicism can glide dangerously close to a kind of
reified structuralism, in which higher-order forms are rendered concrete and as-
signed efficient causal status in the control of specific behavior in specific contexts
[Fischer & Bidell, 1998]. In developmental psychology, organismically derived com-
petence/performance models often conflate formal and efficient causal levels of ex-
planation, treating higher-order structures literally as functional antecedents of be-
havior and marginalizing performance variability by chalking it up to errors in the
way structural dictates are carried out. So pervasive is this way of approaching struc-
tural explanation that Piaget’s formal accounts of cognitive development are rou-
tinely and mistakenly criticized for positing the existence of logicomathematical
structures that dictate and determine performance [Chapman, 1988; Lourenco &
Machado, 1996].
With contextualism arrives the risk of complete dispersion and total abandon-
ment of integration [Lerner & Kauffman, 1985; Pepper, 1942]. As its focus repeat-
edly narrows to specific action in specific contexts, contextualism avoids establish-
ing an integrative framework for its specific events and consequently views the world
in terms of ‘multitudes of facts rather loosely scattered about and not necessarily de-
termining one another to any considerable degree’ [Pepper, 1942, pp. 142–143]. Es-
pousing a ‘horizontal cosmology,’ the contextualist world view dispenses entirely
with hierarchy, valuing instead the leveling or flattening of all systems of thought
that rely on multiple, vertically structured levels of analysis or organization [Kendler,
1986; Pepper, 1942]. Thus, notions of cognition as a ‘higher-order’ form of percep-

2007;50:127–153
tion/action systems or as a set of processes that constrain ‘lower-order’ processes are
anathema to the contextualist. So, too, contextualism undermines the distinction
between development and change by regarding the directional, progressive flow of
development as mere illusion [Chandler, 1997; Lerner & Kauffman, 1985].
Integrating World Views
As world views, organicism and contextualism each act as complete and auton-
omous metaphorical systems in their own right, with their own distinctive sets of
truth criteria [Pepper, 1942]. Thus, many consider a metatheoretical eclecticism,
borne of the integration of multiple world views, logically incompatible and at best
misguided [Hayes, Hayes, & Reese, 1988; Kuhn, 1962; Pepper, 1942; Reese & Over-
ton, 1970]. Despite such misgivings, proposals for synthesis between and among
world views have frequently arisen in developmental psychology, marked by calls for
uniting organicism and mechanism [Horowitz, 1987; Kuhn, 1978] and more recent-
ly by attempts to integrate organicism and contextualism [Lerner, 1991; Overton &
Ennis, 2006].
From Lerner’s [1991, 2006] developmental contextualism to Gottlieb’s [1992;
Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 2006] developmental psychobiological systems view
and to Overton’s [2006; Overton & Ennis, 2006] relational metatheoretical frame-
work, these attempts at integration typically involve the extension of an integrative,
organismic world view to more thoroughly accommodate contextualist concerns
with intra- and interindividual variability. As Overton [1984] has suggested, ‘when
contextualism combines with organicism, the integrative plan takes precedence and
the category ‘‘context,’’ as well as other contextualist categories, serve to specify and
articulate the nature of the organic whole’ (p. 219). Fischer and his colleagues [Fisch-
er & Bidell, 1998; Fischer, Bullock, Rolenberg, & Raya, 1993], for example, have ad-
vocated a more dynamic approach to formal explanation by replacing ‘fixed level’
structural accounts – those which, at any given point of development, rely on a single
abstracted form to organize our understanding of behavior across a wide variety of
contexts – with ‘developmental range’ structural accounts – those which, at any
given point of development, invoke multiple levels of abstracted organization to cap-
ture the range of performance that occurs under varying conditions of contextual
support. Increased appreciation for the contextual embeddedness of organisms in
environments, from the cultural to the sociohistorical, has prompted sustained com-
mitments to charting multidirectionality in the developmental process, both in its
pathways and in its ‘end points’ [Chapman, 1988; Lerner, 2006; Lerner & Kauffman,
1985]. Without abandoning the integrative focus and formalism of organicism, these
examples of world view integration widen the scope of development to admit into
their conceptual framework greater plasticity and novelty in process and product
[Capaldi & Proctor, 1999; Lerner, 2006].
To synthesize the ontological splits that typically characterize the pitting of one
world view against another, Overton [2006] proposes a ‘relational developmental
metatheory.’ Such a metatheory couches ontological splits (e.g., universals and par-
ticulars, structures and functions, progressive, irreversible, orderly trajectories of
development and cyclic, reversible, variational trajectories of development) in dia-
lectical terms, as ‘differentiated polarities (i.e., co-equals) of a unified (i.e., indisso-

2007;50:127–153
ciable) inclusive matrix’ (p. 33) that constitute distinct yet relationally unified lines
of sight. Thus, formal and final, efficient and material levels of causality reflect al-
ternative perspectives, different features of the same whole. Action-in-context yields
pattern, and pattern constrains action-in-context. Development is both directional
and cyclic, transformative and variational. These polarities share an underlying
identity – a unity – as alternative vantage points taken toward the same whole and
as interdependent frames whose meanings are necessarily contextualized one with-
in the other and within the whole of which they are differentiated, relational parts
[Overton, 2006].
In the midst of attempts to deliver overarching synthesis to a field increasingly
dominated by more narrowed, domain- and context-specific ‘mini-theories’ [Fisch-
er & Bidell, 1998], integrated world view accounts as well as contextualist accounts
have emerged as interrelated but distinct metatheoretical alternatives.2 What niche
does the DSP carve out of this metatheoretical arena? Is the DSP fully consistent with
integrated world view accounts? Does it embody a more radical break with the or-
ganismic tradition in the form of adherence to a contextualist world view? With this
discussion of organicism, contextualism and their possible integration as a back-
drop, I now turn to the DSP and its core idea, self-organization.
The DSP: Core Metatheoretical Foundations
The problem of reconciling phenomena that at the macroscopic level appear or-
dered, irreversible and determined with phenomena that at the microscopic level
appear variable, reversible and stochastic lies at the heart of the DSP and self-orga-
nization [Beek et al., 1993; Hopkins & Butterworth, 1997; Lewis, 2000a; Thelen &
Smith, 1994]. In fact, the study of dynamics has as its mathematical foundation the
prediction of qualitative system states from the quantitative mapping of system
change over time [Abraham & Shaw, 1992; van Geert, 1991]. Through differential
and difference equations, the complexity of change in nonlinear systems – stable at
one moment, undergoing transition at the next – can be successfully modeled, with
simple equations often capturing both quantitative and qualitative patterning in the
system’s rate of change. Geometrically, equations modeling system change can be
mapped by use of a state space composed of two or more axes each corresponding to
a system variable deemed integral to the change in question [Abraham & Shaw, 1992;
Hopkins & Butterworth, 1997; van Geert, 1991]. Each point in the state space – itself
a function of those variables that comprise the axes for the space – corresponds to
the behavior or state of the system at a given point in time. Temporal change in the
system corresponds to the trajectories that connect successive points in the state
space, forming a velocity vector field that charts both the dynamic history and the
tendency for change of the system [Abraham & Shaw, 1992]. Remarkable geometric
patterning emerges from basic equations quantitatively modeling rates of change
in the system. Stable solutions to these equations result in various ‘attractors,’ por-
2
At least in the sphere of developmental psychology, functionalist approaches, such as Gibsonian
ecological theory [Gibson, 1997], are perhaps the best known representatives of a contextualist world
view [Overton, 1998].

2007;50:127–153
tions of the space toward which trajectories converge. Graduated scaling of certain
parameters in these equations can give rise to dramatic reconfigurations – ‘bifurca-
tions’ – of the state space’s patterning. In short, from the simple equations of nonlin-
ear dynamics derive complex patterns.
The mathematics of nonlinear dynamics provides a unifying structure for un-
derstanding change in all its complexity and confers empirical legitimacy on classic
systems principles such as holism and emergence [van Geert, 1991; von Bertalanffy,
1968]. It highlights the necessary role that multiple components of a system play in
interaction with one another to produce an emergent pattern. As no one axis of a
state space contains the velocity vector field that constitutes a dynamic system, so no
one component of a system contains the plan for a system’s emergent behavior and
organization. As each axis of a state space is an equal partner in the pattern that un-
folds, so each system component is an integral part of the whole that comprises sys-
tem organization. Simple, quantitative change in a set of variables can coalesce in a
state space to form a stable pattern irreducible to any variable of the set; thus, com-
plex forms emerge from simpler ones. That these transitions can be successfully
modeled, without invoking a plan or instructions or appealing to some external
agent of change, speaks to the critical potential of these nonlinear dynamics
principles for charting developmental change in all domains of psychological func-
tioning.
Self-Organization
Emergence in a system, the coming-into-being of new patterns or forms as a re-

sult of interactions among the very components that comprise the system – such is
the nature of self-organization, both as a phenomenon and as the metatheoretical
underpinning for the DSP. As a phenomenon, self-organization is widely evidenced
in both physicochemical and biological phenomena. The often cited Belousov-
Zhabotinskii reaction, in which dramatic, varied patterning results from the mixing
of some basic chemicals, vividly demonstrates how an increasingly complex pattern
can emerge from interactions among components in a system where clearly no in-
structions or plan for the patterns exist beforehand [Thelen & Smith, 1994]. Such
patterning spontaneously emerges at the physiochemical level. This increasing order
in the face of entropic breakdown is possible when a system is open, when it exchang-
es energy with its environment [von Bertalanffy, 1968]. Thermodynamically, open
systems both preserve their overall organization and increase their complexity by
incorporating free energy, low in entropy, from the environment and expelling high-
entropy energy, thus counteracting for a time irreversible increases in entropy with-
in the system [Brent, 1978; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984]. Paradigmatically, the organ-
ism, qua organism, is an open system.
As the core idea for the DSP’s metatheoretical framework, self-organization
provides a model for understanding developmental change rooted in both universals
and particulars, in change that is both orderly and irreversible, and variable and re-
versible [Chapman, 1991; Overton, 1998]. Two general foci mark the conceptual ori-
entation that self-organization provides: (1) a focus on emergence rather than design
as the basis for system development, and (2) a focus on the relations among compo-
nents of a system, rather than the components themselves, as the source of develop-

2007;50:127–153
ing form in a system. As a model, self-organization couches developmental transfor-
mation in terms of emergent, novel form [Lewis, 2000a]. Despite widespread rejec-
tion of traditional nature-nurture dichotomies, developmental theorizing, even in
its modern guises, too often appeals to some form of preexistent design when ex-
plaining developmental change [Oyama, 1985; Thelen, 1989; Thelen & Smith, 1994].
Talk of genetic blueprints, plans and predispositions, or of information in the envi-
ronment awaiting discovery does little to move developmentalists beyond classic
nativism and empiricism, in which formative status for development is assigned to
either nature or nurture. Arguments that the potential for any given developmental
form resides in one component of an interaction (e.g., in an individual’s genetic
makeup, with environmental conditions merely serving as ‘trigger’ for the actualiza-
tion of said potential), rather than in the interaction itself, invoke notions of prede-
sign, notions that ‘some influences are more equal than others, that form, or its mod-
ern agent, information, exists before the interactions in which it appears’ [Oyama,
1985, p. 27].
Explaining a novel, emergent pattern and form in development by appeal to a
single source that houses the potential, the instructions or the plan for the pattern
harks back to preformationist thinking but within the context of an epigenetic
framework, the kind of perspective Gottlieb [1983; Gottlieb et al., 2006] has labeled
‘predetermined epigenesis.’ As Oyama [1985], Thelen [1989; Thelen & Smith, 1994]
and others have cogently argued, such predesign approaches fail to really explain
anything, for such approaches basically rely on a redescription of the phenomenon
to be explained. The emergent pattern is explained in terms of a set of instructions,
a plan, some information, all of which are in the final analysis either structurally or
functionally isomorphic to that which is being explained [Smith & Thelen, 1993]. In
such explanations, ‘the old homunculus rears its head, although in a more sophisti-
cated guise’ [Thelen, 1989, p. 78]. The question then becomes how to explain the de-
sign used to explain the pattern; clearly, predesign approaches do little more than
deflect the task of explanation to another level of analysis.
At the level of the specific behavioral content, the inadequacy of predesign ap-
proaches is robustly manifest. Accounts of action generation that rely on a central
executive in the head fail to adequately address the many biomechanical and gravi-
tational forces that contribute to the actual patterning of action in real time. Con-
trary to traditional accounts of motor behavior, an individual action does not bear
one-to-one correspondence to a particular pattern of central nervous system effer-
ence [Bernstein, 1967]. The same innervation pattern for a muscle can generate var-
ious movement patterns for a limb, just as the same movement pattern for a limb can
be generated by various innervational muscle patterns [Turvey, Shaw, & Mace, 1978].
Every action thus emerges from a confluence of anatomical, physiological and me-
chanical contexts. Consider the following example from Turvey et al. [1978]:
With the arm in an approximately horizontal position, in which the axis of the humerus
is just below the horizontal axis of the shoulder joint, contraction of the pectoralis will ad-
duct the arm in a horizontal plane. But from an approximately horizontal position, in
which the axis of the humerus is slightly above the horizontal axis of the shoulder joint,
contraction will adduct the arm in the vertical plane. (p. 560)
Explaining this ‘context-conditioned variability’ requires much more than the

invocation of some designer or program in the head [Bernstein, 1967]. Clearly, mul-

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tiple factors – both intra- and extra-organismic – centrally contribute to the actual
pattern action will assume. As such, appealing to an underlying design to account
for specific action-in-context hopelessly fails to explain the wide variability in pat-
terning observed. The ‘design’ of the action emerges from the interactions of multiple
factors rather than preexisting the very processes that engender it [Oyama, 1985].
With its focus on emergence rather than design, the metaphorical framework of
self-organization likewise eschews single-cause accounts in favor of a focus on rela-
tions, embodying a shift from an atomistic, isolated element stance toward a rela-
tional stance in the explication of form [Capra, 1996; Thelen & Smith, 1994]. The
relations that exist among components of a system, not the components themselves,
comprise the fundamental unit of analysis for studying development [Lerner, 1991].
Such a focus on relations in understanding the emergence of form necessitates a re-
jection of single-entity notions of efficient causality. A system’s form is multiply de-
termined, with each component of the system a necessary interactant in the joint
production of change in the system as a whole. Because new system forms are not
contained in any of the components that comprise the system, form as a whole is ir-
reducible to the parts, studied in isolation of one another, that give rise to it [Capra,
1996; von Bertalanffy, 1968]. The efficient cause, thus, becomes distributed across
multiple components of the system such that each component influences the emer-
gence of form without determining it [Turvey et al., 1978].
Self-organizing systems are furthermore characterized by nonlinear relations
among component parts. The appeal to nonlinearity stands in opposition to the view
of systems as reducible to an additive combinations of their parts, with each part
maintaining its elemental identity irrespective of the relations that combine it with
other parts [Gottlieb, 2003; Overton, 2003]. Rather, self-organizing systems, given
their nonlinear nature, are irreducible wholes; each part of the system cannot be de-
fined independently of the system, for the relations that comprise the system are
characterized by an ‘interpenetration among parts’ [Overton, 2003, p. 359]. Parts are
‘internally’ related, with their identity dependent on context, both the horizontal
context of relations that exist among parts and the vertical context of relations be-
tween part and whole [Kitchener, 1982; Overton, 2003]. Nonlinearity is at the heart
of the holism that marks self-organization.
Self-Organization Revisited: The Issue of Circular Causality
The DSP metatheoretical framework, embodied in the principle of self-organi-

zation, adopts a relational, multidetermined stance toward the process of develop-
ment and renders viable via mathematical instantiation classic systems’ notions of
emergence and holism. New, irreducible structures do indeed emerge nonlinearly
from previous structures in true epigenetic as opposed to predetermined fashion.
The model of self-organization presented thus far does not, however, fully capture
the developmental process. The emergence of novel form constitutes but one half of
a dialectical process serving to both maintain and transform organization. A full
explication of the nature of development involves the synthesis of both processes of
‘transformation’ and ‘conservation’ [Langer, 1969, 1970; Piaget, 1971]: How, in other
words, does the organism both conserve its organization, preserving its continuity
and undergo discontinuous transformation?

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With regard to the transformational process in development, proponents of the
DSP are uniform in their endorsement of multicomponent, nonlinear interaction as
the source of emergent form. Questions arise, however, when the focus of inquiry
shifts from emergence to maintenance. Once a novel pattern/structure/form has
arisen, what is its ontological status in the continuing nexus of interactions that com-
prise the organism qua organism? Is the novel, higher-order form an epiphenomenal
product of interaction, denuded of any causal impact in its own right? Is the form
illusory and evanescent, residing exclusively at the intersection of action in context?
What level of organization in structure are we willing to admit as ontologically ‘real’
for the purpose of explanation? Proponents of the DSP soundly reject structural
reification, the reducing of formal to efficient cause. But an indictment of structural
reification is not an indictment of structuralization per se, of the abstracted formal
and final levels of explanation that are the hallmark of organicism. ‘Homunculus’
arguments fail to explain emergent structure precisely because they reduce formal
cause to efficient cause. In other words, homunculus arguments offer the higher-or-
der abstraction of formal and final cause as a functional, antecedent explanation for
emergent pattern and concretize those forms, rendering them little more than rede-
scriptions of the phenomenon to be explained. However, rejecting the homunculus
fallacy in no way precludes structural explanation. Formal and final causes involve
processes of constraint, regulation and modulation, unlike the ‘push-from-behind,’
initiating processes captured by an efficient cause [Bates, 1979; Juarrero, 1999]. The
problem arises when one kind of cause is reduced to another [Overton, 1991].
So, the question of the novel form’s status, once it emerges (at what level of or-
ganization does it emerge, what level of organization is maintained, what explana-
tory role does it play in the subsequent developmental process), remains for the
metatheoretical framework of the DSP. It is a question usefully framed in terms of
the concept of circular causality, a common property of self-organizing systems
[Lewis, 2000a, 2000b]. Circular causality specifically targets the issue of interlevel
causality, the ‘vertical’ causal relations that exist between lower-order parts and
higher-order emergent wholes, as distinct from ‘horizontal,’ intralevel causality
[Juarrero, 1999; Lewis, 2000b]. Haken [1996], whose dynamic systems approach,
synergetics, has been highly influential in DSP approaches to motor control and de-
velopment, characterizes circular causality by way of a puppeteer-puppet analogy:
In a way, the order parameters act as puppeteers that make the puppets dance. There is,
however, an important difference between the naïve picture of puppeteers and what is hap-
pening in reality. As it turns out, by their collective action the individual parts, or puppets,
themselves act on the order parameters, i.e. on the puppeteers. While on the one hand the
puppeteers (order parameters) determine the motion of the individual parts, the individ-
ual parts in turn determine the action of the order parameters. … Because the individual
parts of the system determine or even generate the order parameters which in turn enslave
the individual parts, the latter determine their behavior cooperatively. (p. 43)
Circular causality assigns causal status to both bottom-up and top-down pro-
cesses and in particular highlights the distinct mechanisms of cause involved in
each. Bottom-up processes involve part-part interactions, in which components in-
teract with one another to generate a higher-order system or whole. This is the hall-
mark of emergence. Top-down processes, in which the emergent form organization-
ally frames the very parts that give rise to it, exist at the level of whole-part relations

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and operate in terms of constraint: emergent wholes constrain and regulate their
component parts. Once a novel whole emerges, the very natures of the components
that comprise the whole must always be defined, at least in part, in terms of the high-
er-order whole in which the components are embedded.
Circular causality rescues higher-order forms and wholes from the dustbin of
epiphenomena. The relations among a system’s components that establish the iden-
tity of the system as a whole are regulated and preserved by the very nature of the
whole to which they gave rise. Emergent forms, in effect, organize the component
processes that give rise to them by ‘changing the prior probability of the component’s
behavior,’ by, in nonlinear dynamics terms, ‘constrain(ing) movements within self-
organized space such that they preserve the invariant relations that characterize the
higher level of organization’ [Juarrero, 1999, p. 146 and pp. 175–176]. Process gives
rise to product that in turn regulates process. This paves the way for introduction of
higher-order forms such as intentions, mental structures and developmental levels
of organization into the causal matrix of self-organization [Juarrero, 1999]. By em-
phasizing the need to consider whole-to-part relations in addition to part-to-part
and part-to-whole relations, circular causality establishes formal and final causes as
legitimate and critical forms of explanation alongside efficient and material causes,
giving rise to true reciprocity of structure-function, process-product relations [Juar-
rero, 1999].
Circular causality, in principle, covers any given level of organization, from the
emergence of concrete behavioral content to the emergence of higher-order form.
Self-organization involving circular causality at the level of behavioral content is
popularly exemplified by the realm of motor control. Groups of muscles may act to-
gether in a task-specific context, giving rise to a functional synergy like ‘reaching’ or
‘walking.’ Once established, these synergies in turn constrain and regulate the very
lower-order coordinations that give rise to them. The synergy is the singular orga-
nization that marks the stable relations now obtaining among the individual muscles
in context, despite continual variability in the individual components themselves,
e.g. continual magnitude changes in muscle firings [Kelso, 1995; Turvey et al., 1978;
Woollacott & Jensen, 1996]. Circular causality at this level, the level of real-time ac-
tion-in-context, is consistent with contextualism’s emphasis on holism and synthesis
in the here-and-now.
By admitting higher-order forms into its network of explanation, however, self-
organization marked by circular causality can also draw on the integrated merger of
organismic and contextualist metatheories. Higher levels of organization abstracted
from behavioral content enter into the realm of explanation by means of circular
causality in the same manner as those levels of organization that remain more close-
ly tied to the level of real-time action-in-context. Higher-order forms, reflecting the
abstracted organization of an organism that characterizes functioning across a va-
riety of contexts, necessarily frame the lower-order, material processes on which
they depend. In this regard, form abstracted from the here-and-now is as integral to
explanation as real-time contextual factors. An understanding, for example, of the
constraints imposed by an abstracted developmental level of organization on a par-
ticular action-in-context provides an essential interpretive framework – the organ-
ism as an integrated whole at a particular point in developmental sequence – for the
action. Such is the contribution of an organismic focus on formal wholes, reflected
in circular causality’s constraint function imposed by higher-order structure on low-

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er-order components. In complementary fashion, as already noted, embedding real-
time action in various real-time, concrete contexts, both organismic and environ-
mental, provides an equally essential explanatory framework, for this taps into the
material processes involved in the real-time emergence and consolidation of behav-
ioral content as well as the developmental emergence of organismic form. Such is the
contribution of a contextualist focus on real-time particularities, reflected in circu-
lar casuality’s emergence function, in which lower-order components coalesce to
produce higher-order wholes.
Circular causality and self-organization in general are in principle indifferent
to the level of organization to which they are applied. Yet it is just this issue of ‘level
of organization’ that forms the ontological divide evident in DSP circles. Specifi-
cally, some DSP proponents adopt a purely contextualist stance toward self-organi-
zation and circular causality, meaning that the only emergent wholes granted causal
status in their framework are those which exist at the level of behavioral content, like
muscle synergies. Other proponents of DSP adopt an integrated world view stance
toward self-organization and circular causality, admitting higher-order form into
the explanation of real-time action-in-context without abandoning a contextualist
focus on particularities. The divide in DSP is succinctly captured in the following
two quotes from central figures in the developmental literature. First, from van der
Maas in his 1995 review of the landmark volume on DSP by Thelen and Smith [1994;
also Smith & Thelen, 1993]:
Thelen and Smith introduce an alternative for the concept of structures. They state: ‘We
differ, however, in our fundamental view of mental activity as a dynamic assembly rather
than a hierarchy of structures …’ [1994, p. 130]. On first sight, Thelen and Smith simply
replace the concept of structure by the concept of assembly. … However, Smith and The-
len go further. These assemblies do not exist outside the task context (p. 310). … they say
about their structures: ‘The structures are products of local processes, not the causes of
them’ (p. 162). In spite of their rejection of reductionism, to me this is a reductionist view.
The rejection of reductionism is only correct if structures influence the local processes
that created them and initiate other local processes. … This is what self-organization is
about. The local processes are not more real than the emergent structures (pp. 631–632).
Then, in response to the Piagetian framework within which van der Maas and
Molenaar [Molenaar & Raijmakers, 2000; van der Maas & Molenaar, 1992] apply
their DSP, Thelen and Smith [1998] write:
Van der Maas and Molenaar accept piagetian structuralism as a starting point and view
the changes in mental structures as the data to be modeled by catastrophe theory … But,
in a fundamental way, the Dutch authors’ structuralism is incompatible with a thorough-
ly dynamic approach [Thelen & Smith, 1994; van Geert, 1993]. This is because the con-
struct of mental structures implies that behind the orderly transition from one stage to a
more advanced one is a hidden order, that is, instructions that live and exist outside of the
performance of the act itself and therefore direct it. Children fail to conserve volume, ac-
cording to this view, because they lack the conservation structure or stage … The use of
dynamic language does not obviate the old developmental issue of the homunculus: Who
or what is orchestrating behavior and its changes? … What is the reality of a stage when
behavior is in flux? (p. 577)
Recent theorizing by Thelen and Bates [2003; see also Thelen & Smith, 2006]
offers an ostensibly different view of mental structures, one in which ‘there is no in-
compatibility between dynamic systems theory and the exploration of mental struc-

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tures. … The difference has really been a matter of emphasis: should the dynamics
reflect behavior or the workings of the mind?’ [Thelen & Bates, 2003, p. 388]. How-
ever, extending the DSP’s level of analysis to the realm of mental structures does not
in itself admit such structures into dynamic models of change; such forms could still
be defined in exclusively product terms. Earlier in the same article, Thelen writes:
‘Dynamic systems theory says it is not useful to ask what a child ‘‘really knows’’ be-
cause there is only behavior assembled to do tasks: behavior that may be stable over
many tasks but can also be fragile under other circumstances’ (p. 382). This ‘task-
specific’ stance can be read as simply an anti-reification argument, an argument
against using formal abstractions to explain in efficient causal terms actual behavior
in context. But the writings of Thelen and Smith [1994, 1998, 2006; Thelen, Schoen-
er, Scheier, & Smith, 2001] belie this simple reading; to the extent that representations
and mental structures are rendered as activity in the here-and-now, alive in the pres-
ent moment, Thelen and Smith consider them appropriate components for analysis.
This argues for a form of DSP derived from a pure contextualist world view, in which
the formal and final causal status of higher-order forms (e.g., mental structures) are
at best highly suspect and most frequently rejected outright, in which pattern expla-
nations are not considered ontologically real unless reduced to efficient and mate-
rial causal processes, to real-time activity in a task-specific context. In contrast, Van
der Maas espouses a form of DSP derived from the integration of organismic and
contextualist world views, in which formal and final causes enter into explanation
as readily as efficient and material ones, in which true vertical, reciprocal causality,
hierarchical as well as heterarchical, exists, with lower-order parts both giving rise
to but also constrained by higher-order wholes. Thus, two distinct metatheoretical
versions of DSP currently guide the application of dynamic systems principles to de-
velopmental psychology, a contextualist DSP and an organismic-contextualist DSP.
The following sections outline in more detail the distinctions present in these two
frameworks.
The Contextualist DSP
The contextualist framework for the DSP, as already noted, is prototypically ar-
ticulated in the writings of Thelen and Smith [Smith & Thelen, 1993; Thelen &
Smith, 1994, 1998, 2006]. In their 1993 edited volume, Smith and Thelen encapsulate
their perspective in the following quote:
This is the grand idea of dynamic systems: that what happens on the local level in real-time
experience determines the developmental trajectory. Real time and developmental time
are theoretically connected. The global order of behavior, the directionality of develop-
ment, and the variability of real-time behavior are all explained by a single process ac-
count. (pp. 165–166)
Prima facie, this sounds like nothing more than an endorsement of self-organi-
zation as a unifying principle for understanding development and change. Yet in this
quote lie all of the earmarks endemic to a contextualist world view specifically: priv-
ileged grounding in the particularities of time and context, in the real-time here-
and-now of action in context, and dismissal of higher-order form as epiphenomenal.
Thelen and Smith [1994] write of the view from above – the macrolevel view of be-

2007;50:127–153
havior and its development that highlights orderliness, progression and generalized
structure – in terms of generating the impression of a global order in behavior. This
global order, for Thelen and Smith, is something to be explained, a product, not a
kind of explanation in its own right. The global order that characterizes behavior at
a macrolevel is itself an abstraction from the specifics of real-time action in context,
an identification, in other words, of an invariant pattern that characterizes the or-
ganism’s action across contexts and that constitutes a formal or pattern explanation
[Overton, 1991]. As a formal explanation, this ‘appearance’ of global order, however,
holds little explanatory value for Thelen and Smith – and for a contextualist DSP –
until it is really explained by means of efficient and material causes [Overton, 1991].
Thelen and Smith reject the use of an underlying order to explain the global order,
but their reasoning moves beyond issues of the structural reification that often marks
the use of ‘underlying order’ explanations. They specifically write that ‘this form of
explanation leaves unexplained the local details of individual acts – ‘‘their fit’’ to the
specific context. … By not explaining how the global order is realized amid the local
details, there is failure to explain the global order itself’ [Thelen & Smith, 1994,
p. 216]. However, formal levels of explanation, as abstractions from the particulars
of action-in-context, necessarily ignore the messy variability of local details. They
merely ‘attempt to formulate the pattern, organization, or form of the phenomenon
under study’ [Overton, 1991, p. 217], and, to the extent that they do not merely rede-
scribe the phenomenon, such explanations, at least for those more organismically
minded, constitute an ontologically ‘real’ category of cause. For the contextualist
DSP, embodied in the writings of Thelen and Smith, these explanations, by virtue of
their formal abstraction from behavioral content, move enough beyond the imme-
diacy of the here-and-now to become explanatorily vacuous. By this perspective,
formal explanation always amounts to structural reification and calls forth the spec-
ter of the instruction-filled homunculus. Whether the abstraction of invariant form
across variable content exists at the behavioral level of global order, the cognitive
level or any other context-independent level of organization is itself immaterial,
though certain levels of organization, e.g., the cognitive structural level, necessarily
admit of greater abstraction from the here-and-now than others. It is simply the
explanatory nature of form itself that for a contextualist DSP is no true explanation
at all.
For Thelen and Smith, the here-and-now of specific action in specific context
generates the global order – of behavior, of structure, of developmental trajectory –
in a unidirectional fashion [van der Maas, 1995]. Reciprocal relations in the form of
circular causality, from higher-order, global forms to local variability, are conspicu-
ously absent from their writings, consistent with a contextualist framework for the
DSP. In fact, global order and local variability are ‘the same thing ; they are inexora-
bly tied together in a way that confers a special status on context – on the role of the
immediate here-and-now’ [Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 216]. To the extent that global
order remains wed to the concrete, to the here-and-now level of behavioral content,
circular causality is fully endorsed. For Thelen and Smith, emergent forms such as
walking, reaching, remembering, the coupling of perceiving and acting, all con-
strain in circular causality fashion the relations of the components which gave rise
to them. But when formal constructs involve higher levels of organization, such in-
terlevel causality is abandoned, and such constructs become mere products or are
regarded as illusory by dint of their ‘timeless’ divorce from real-time activity. This

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privileging of real-time, task-specific contexts is foundational to a contextualist
DSP. Verbs (and gerunds) replace nouns in the contexualist language of Thelen and
Smith: perception and action become perceiving and acting, knowledge becomes
knowing, etc. Just as they define form, pattern, global order in purely product terms,
so they emphasize the grounding of psychological constructs in real-time activity.
The act – be it physiological, behavioral or mental – in real-time context is the level
at which synthesis occurs, for it is the only level of analysis grounded in the here-
and-now.
In fact, ‘knowing’ for Thelen and Smith ‘is perceiving, moving, and remember-
ing as they evolve over time’ [Thelen et al., 2001, p. 4]. Knowing is necessarily
embedded in current activity and thus is never a property of the organism indepen-
dent of the immediacy of the here-and-now. It is ‘the momentary product of a dy-
namic system, not a dissociable cause of action’ and is always ‘in the service of a task’
[Thelen & Smith, 2006, p. 303]. Knowledge, global order, the generalized properties
of functioning are only ‘seemingly removed from the here and now’ [Thelen & Smith,
1994, p. 217, italics added]. But since ‘real time, context-specific behavior, general-
ized knowledge, and competence are all one’ (p. 179) and since the here-and-now,
embodied in the task-specific context, is privileged relative to other levels of analy-
sis, the unification of global order and local variability in the account of Thelen and
Smith stems not from synthesis but from reduction, as the ‘appearance’ of global
order is reduced to the ‘reality’ of local variability [Overton, 1998; van der Maas,
1995]. As Overton [1998] has noted, for Thelen and Smith, ‘variability and only
variability constitutes ‘‘real’’ change’ (p. 128). Global order is, in fact, ‘a history
of perceiving and acting in specific contexts’ [Thelen & Smith, 1994, p. 216]. Note
how in these definitions, from the standpoint of relations along a vertical axis of
organization, ‘higher-order’ forms like knowing are effectively reduced to ‘lower-
order’ forms like perceiving, moving and remembering. Nothing in these defini-
tions suggests that a parameter like knowing – which is typically taken to character-
ize more abstract, context-independent properties of organismic functioning – in-
volves emergent properties irreducible to the real-time components that comprise
it. Thus, knowing becomes another real-time activity, defined at the same level of
organization as other real-time properties like perceiving and acting. The relation-
ship forged among these variables, then, is one of parts in relation to other parts, not
one of parts (perceiving, moving, remembering, which of course are themselves
wholes in relation to lower-order constituent components) giving rise to wholes
(knowing), which by virtue of being wholes are necessarily higher-order abstrac-
tions of their parts.
By grounding higher-order organizations in real-time activity and in task-spe-
cific context, Thelen and Smith achieve the kind of ‘horizontal cosmology’ espoused
by a contextualist world view. Relationships that from an organismic perspective in-
volve vertical, interlevel movement from part to whole and vice versa are flattened
to establish intralevel interactions. The extensive work of Thelen, Smith and their
colleagues explaining behavioral variability in the context of Piaget’s A-not-B task
aptly illustrates this leveling of higher-order form [Smith et al., 1999; Spencer, Smith,
& Thelen, 2001; Thelen et al., 2001]. Rejecting Piaget’s formal explanation of the
stage 4 object concept, Thelen, Smith and their colleagues reconceptualize infants’
performance in terms of ‘the coupled dynamics of looking, planning, reaching, and
remembering within the particular context of the task’ [Thelen et al., 2001, p. 5].

2007;50:127–153
Note that the variables of looking, planning, reaching and remembering, from an
organismic perspective, would most likely be defined in terms of at least two levels
of organization, thus rendering the relations among these variables both part-part
and part-whole [McCollum, 2001]. For Thelen, Smith and their colleagues, each
variable is a component, which in confluence with all other components in a spe-
cific real-time context will give rise to patterned activity. No attempt is made to de-
fine some interactions in terms of part-to-part dynamic construction, others in
terms of whole-to-part constraint, as a hierarchical ordering of the variables would
require.
This flattening of levels extends to the characterization of development itself by
Thelen and Smith. Thelen and Smith [1994] suggest that ‘dynamic principles erase
the gap between real-time assembly of behavior and its assembly over ontogenetic
time’ (p. 129). Development is a ‘history of past here and nows’ (p. 216), an ‘accrual
of real-time events’ (p. 244). The word ‘accrual’ suggests that development is forged
through accumulation or addition. In other words, developmental time is simply a
collection of real-time, here-and-now actions in context rather than being an emer-
gent, holistic property of real-time action in context. Developmental psychology has
traditionally employed developmental-time organizations, such as stages, to explain
why the organism does what it does at any particular point in time, but such a formal
approach necessarily ignores the multiplicity of factors and the enormous variabil-
ity inherent in the particulars of real-time action in context. Thelen and Smith, with
their contextualist DSP, remedy this deficiency by grounding developmental time in
real time, thus establishing continuity between real-time particulars and develop-
mental-time generalities. But just as global order in its abstract form is an epiphe-
nomenal product by their perspective, so the orderly, abstracted flow of developmen-
tal time is denuded of explanatory significance. Developmental history is critical for
the contextualist DSP, but as a variable of influence it is simply another part, weight-
ed equally with all other parts, not a higher-order whole, an interpretive, organiza-
tional framework into which current real-time activity must be embedded to fully
understand such activity. Developmental changes for Thelen and Smith [2006]
amount to ‘patterns assembled for task-specific purposes whose form and stability
depend on both the immediate and more distant history of the system’ (p. 284). De-
velopmental time is wed to the task-specific context in the same way that real-time
activity is, meaning that it no longer involves abstraction across time as it does in
organismically minded perspectives. Form across time, generalized from real-time
content, is rejected for its abstraction, its structural reification and its divorce from
the particulars of the here-and-now; developmental change becomes a quantitative
accumulation of real-time change, a succession of task-specific adaptations. In Over-
ton’s [2006] terminology, this contextualist DSP employs a ‘split metatheory’ in its
conceptualization of development, couching development in terms of a process of
selection rather than construction and regarding development exclusively as a series
of adaptations to local contexts [Overton, 1998]. The context-independent levels of
organization in development that constitute its macrolevel flow offer no explanatory
framework in their own right. Development becomes a collection of particulars, con-
sistent with the dispersive quality of contextualism. Once again, a unidirectional
path emerges from real-time particulars to higher-order developmental-time levels
of organization; the developmental history causally involved in real-time emergence
is itself a collection of real-time particulars.

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The Organismic-Contextualist DSP
The writings of Thelen and Smith detail a DSP couched squarely in a contextu-
alist world view. As such, the perspective they offer has a set of distinct truth criteria,
is internally consistent and stands on its own as a unique, viable metaphorical per-
spective. Some DSP proponents in developmental psychology, however, offer theo-
retical positions that I would argue reflect more of an integration between organis-
mic and contextualist world views than a pure contextualism. As such, these alter-
nate positions ontologically split in at least one fundamental sense from the
contextualist DSP which Thelen and Smith endorse and consequently represent a
distinct metaphorical framework for the application of dynamic systems principles
to developmental psychology. As an integration of two world views, the organismic-
contextualist DSP attempts to join the formal abstractions of organicism with the
real-time particularities of contextualism by acknowledging the explanatory sig-
nificance of both. For van der Maas and others, higher-order form must be admitted
into the causal fabric of explanation, not in efficient terms but as a means of con-
straint; new structures are not mere products, they argue, no less real than the lower-
order forms and relations that give rise to them.
An organismic-contextualist DSP arises in the writings of a number of leading
DSP proponents but has not been systematically outlined in the fashion of Thelen’s
and Smith’s contextualist DSP. The purpose of this paper is to articulate two distinct
metatheoretical approaches to the study of dynamic systems and to instantiate these
approaches in specific DSP writings, not to provide an exhaustive review of all dy-
namic systems approaches to development. As a result, I will focus on two particular
developmental applications of DSP, from Marc D. Lewis and his colleagues [Lewis
2000a, b] and from Kurt Fischer and his colleagues [Fischer & Bidell, 1998, 2006;
Mascolo & Fischer, 1999]. Like Thelen and Smith [1994, 2006], both Lewis [2000a,
b] and Fischer and Bidell [1998, 2006] ground their perspectives in self-organization,
eschew arguments of predesign and highlight the centrality of relations among sys-
tem components in the emergence of novel form. However, unlike Thelen and Smith,
their accounts embrace higher levels of organization in the explication of form. For
example, Lewis [2000a] has explicitly identified the principle of circular causality as
foundational to self-organization. Circular causality for Lewis [2000b] introduces
both hierarchy and higher-order form into causal explanation. In discussing higher-
order forms such as appraisal (Lewis uses the term ‘emotional interpretation’) and
intentions, Lewis writes
As in all self-organizing processes, a circular causality can be imputed between a global,
higher-order form and the coupling of its lower-order constituents. … the idea that an in-
tentional state is superordinate to emotion fits surprisingly well with the centrality of goals
in most models of emotional elicitation….emotions are generally assumed to serve goals
through appraisals that lead to action. Thus if intentions or goal states are viewed as emer-
gent (in real time), they could be said to cause the lower-order coordination of cognitive
and affective elements that (circularly) cause those intentions. (p. 44)
With regard to higher levels of organization such as personality, Lewis and Fer-
rari [2001] again explicitly endorse interlevel causality as a means of considering
explanation at multiple levels of organization. They write that ‘connections laid
down in personality (macro)development constrain the possibilities for moods. …

2007;50:127–153
which constrain microdevelopment more immediately. Thus, it is the nesting of
mood in personality that constrains emotional interpretations in real time, and their
joint effects curtail the variance available for making sense of and feeling about the
world’ (p. 189). Throughout Lewis’ writings on emotional development, his articula-
tion of the DSP relies on ‘hierarchically nested self-organizing processes’ [Lewis &
Ferrari, 2001, p. 189] and on the vertical interactions that exist among levels of orga-
nization, from the concreteness of activity in the here-and-now to the abstraction of
structures stably maintained in developmental time. These higher-order forms –
epiphenomenal byproducts according to a contextualist DSP – cause, by means of
constraint from above, the coupling of lower-order components which themselves
first gave rise to the higher-order pattern in real time. Lewis’ DSP is both firmly
grounded in the importance of real-time particularities in the emergence of new
form and committed to the ontological reality and explanatory significance of high-
er-order form, once emergent. Lewis consequently endorses a DSP with both contex-
tualist and organismic properties.
Unlike the contextualist DSP of Thelen and Smith [1994, 2006], in which glob-
al order and local variability are ‘the same thing’ and in which higher levels of orga-
nization are leveled to the ‘reality’ of the here-and-now, Lewis’s organismic-contex-
tualist DSP endorses the utility of carving out in both horizontal and vertical fashion
distinct levels of organization. In a telling critique of the social process theory of Fo-
gel et al. [1992], Lewis and Granic [1999] argue that ‘part of the problem may be
Fogel’s reluctance to acknowledge the distinctness of subsystems or components,
such as cognition and emotion or self and other. A complex systems account should
be able to accommodate parts and wholes without ignoring process’ (p. 693). Lewis’
point echoes Koestler’s Janus principle [as cited in Sameroff, 1983], that each com-
ponent of a system is simultaneously (1) a part of that system and (2) a whole in rela-
tion to the lower-order components that comprise it as a system in its own right.
Recognition of such duality is obscured in the horizontal cosmology of the contex-
tualist DSP, which flattens part-whole relations or treats them in unidirectional fash-
ion (parts only give rise to wholes). Fischer and Bidell [2006] underscore Lewis in
their own developmental articulation of a DSP. They explicitly reject arguments that
rely on structural reification and that apply static notions of form to the explanatory
framework of developmental psychology. However, Fischer and Bidell do not conse-
quently reject wholesale the utility of form in explaining development. Rather, psy-
chological structure by their account constitutes the ‘organizational property of dy-
namic systems of activity’ (p. 317) and involves ‘a dynamic patterning and relating of
components that sustain the organized activities that define life and living things’
(p. 318, italics added). In this definition, Fischer and Bidell are essentially endorsing
the incorporation of pattern explanation, of formal cause, into a DSP. They explic-
itly acknowledge in their 1998 Handbook of Child Psychology chapter that a system
is structured when ‘specific relations exist among its parts, subsystems or pro-
cesses. … These relations include part and whole’ [Fischer & Bidell, 1998, p. 472, ital-
ics added].
Thus, part-whole and whole-part relations – a staple of traditional systems the-
ory [von Bertalanffy, 1968] – factor as centrally in Fischer’s and Bidell’s [1998, 2006]
account as part-part relations; this is further demonstrated in their discussion of the
concept of skill, of which psychological structure is a type. Skills, though grounded
in contextualist fashion in the here-and-now of everyday context, ‘are not composed

2007;50:127–153
atomistically but are necessarily integrated with other skills’ [Fischer & Bidell, 2006,
p. 321]. Skills, furthermore, are organized hierarchically ‘by integrating earlier skills
into a more inclusive whole’ (p. 333), and as skills undergo increasing integration
with one another, they ‘subordinate themselves to new forms of organization and
mutual regulation. The very process of creating new skills through self-organizing
coordination leads to a multileveled hierarchical structuring of living skills’ (p. 325).
The focus of Fischer and Bidell on organismic integration as well as real-time context
embeddedness clearly instantiates the dual character of their approach. An integra-
tive focus replaces the dispersive focus of a pure contextualism, and like Lewis,
Fischer and Bidell highlight the importance of interlevel causality; higher levels of
organization are not mere epiphenomena but fundamental constituents of system
explanation in the circular causality sense.
Such an integration of the organismic and contextualist world views finds its
clearest embodiment in Fischer’s and Bidell’s [2006] discussion of micro- and mac-
rodevelopment. Microdevelopment, Fischer and Bidell suggest, involves the process-
es by which specific skills emerge in real-time contexts, whereas macrodevelopment
involves the consolidation and generalization of skills across contexts. Macrodevel-
opment, in other words, is itself a patterned whole, irreducible to and no less ‘real’
than the microdevelopmental processes that give rise to it. They write that macrode-
velopment
is not simply an atomistic heap of many microdevelopmental processes but the cumulative
process in which all the microprocesses participate. In this sense, micro- and macropro-
cesses are intrinsically related and interdependent in a way that is analogous to the mo-
lecular and subatomic worlds. Neither can exist without the other, but neither can be re-
duced to the other. At the microdevelopmental level of analysis, we find phenomena that
do not appear at the macrolevel, and vice versa. (p. 363)
Fischer and Bidell repeatedly stress the reciprocal quality of interlevel relations;
macrodevelopment is characterized by unique, ontologically real phenomena that
emerge from microdevelopment and frame by means of constraint those very micro-
developmental phenomena. The holistic pattern of macrodevelopment must neces-
sarily enter into any explanatory framework, for ‘an accurate picture of transitions
requires placing such findings in a broader framework of developmental analysis’
[Fischer & Bidell, 1998, p. 517]. Fischer and Bidell steadfastly avoid the reification of
structure but simultaneously endorse the explanatory utility of formal cause, viewed
not in efficient casual terms but as an interpretive framework within which to un-
derstand the particulars of real-time action-in-context. In their account, organismic
higher-order forms sit in interdependent fashion alongside the contextualist here-
and-now, neither reducible to the other.
Conclusion
The DSP offers a ‘grand narrative’ framework for developmental psychology

that promises to unite the field through its focus on both stable pattern and local
variability, on developmental global order and on the particulars of real-time task-
specific contexts. At the DSP’s metatheoretical core lies the principle of self-organi-
zation. Although all proponents of the DSP agree on the characterization of emer-

2007;50:127–153
gence in self-organization, the same proponents are not always unified in their char-
acterization of how new forms, once emergent, contribute to the developmental
process. I have argued that two camps of thought exist with regard to the principle
of self-organization, split as to the admission of higher-order form into the explana-
tory framework of behavior. This split, in turn, seems to reflect a broader split in the
world views adopted by leading proponents of the DSP. From one vantage point, the
DSP assumes a contextualist world view reading [Thelen & Smith, 1994, 2006]; from
another vantage point, the DSP follows from an integration of organismic and con-
textualist world views [Lewis, 2000b; Fischer & Bidell, 2006]. Thus, the DSP, as cur-
rently instantiated in developmental psychology, tracks the same metatheoretical
divides that have marked the field for much of the last 25 years: is contextualism the
most viable model for the study of development, or should a relational integration of
organicism and contextualism be pursued?
The question of how to judge the merits and shortcomings of each DSP ap-
proach cannot be readily answered by means of empirical data. As distinct metathe-
oretical positions, contextualist and organismic-contextualist dynamic systems ap-
proaches rely on similar but distinct categories for guiding the collection and inter-
pretation of data, and for guiding an assessment of what constitutes ‘the truth’ or the
ontologically ‘real.’ Advocates of a contextualist DSP can always marshal evidence
against including higher-order levels of organization in a causal network by simply
attending to the particularities of specific actions-in-context. Similarly, advocates of
an organismic-contextualist DSP can always marshal evidence for the inclusion of
higher-order levels of organization by simply analyzing the organism at the level of
invariant patterning across time and context. Whether or not a given level of analy-
sis or mode of explanation is privileged, endorsed or actively decried depends on the
metatheory guiding scientific exploration, and acts as a truth criterion by which em-
pirical evidence is judged [Pepper, 1942]. At the level of common truth criteria, both
approaches are guided by the desire to embrace and regard as foundational to devel-
opment the tremendous variability organisms show in their action within and across
contexts, rather than discard such intra- and inter-individual variability as ‘error’
variance. Though both DSP approaches share this endorsement of contextualism,
the organismic-contextualist DSP unites its contextualism with an organismic sense
of integration and consequently rejects the absolute feature of dispersion that marks
a pure contextualism. Both the integrative frame of organicism and the dispersive
frame of contextualism represent legitimate perspectives in this regard [Overton &
Ennis, 2006]. It is at this level – the level of integrative/dispersive versus purely dis-
persive world view – that the merits and shortcomings of both approaches can be, at
present, most fruitfully discussed.
Prima facie, the contextualist DSP has a decided advantage over an organismic-
contextualist DSP to the extent that the former is an internally consistent world view
in the scheme first systematically demarcated by Pepper [1942] and widely endorsed
since. An organismic-contextualist DSP, as an integration of world views, must strike
a potentially tenuous balance between distinct world views that operate according to
distinct truth criteria. In addressing the issue of world view merger, Pepper [1942]
argues for an ‘autonomy and insulation’ of world views to maintain clarity in the face
of evaluating evidence for or against any specific hypothesis (p. 341). For the contex-
tualist DSP, clarity of evaluation is preserved because its ontological base is rooted
firmly and decisively in ‘the act in context.’ However, the organismic-contextualist

2007;50:127–153
DSP seems to embody what Pepper has termed a ‘postrational eclecticism’ (p. 341).
This postrational eclecticism, like Overton’s [2006] ‘relational developmental
metatheory,’ involves a consideration of each world view in its own right, on its own
terms, and an acceptance of both organicism and contextualism as distinct, alterna-
tive and legitimate perspectives on the same whole. In Pepper’s words, ‘our postra-
tional eclecticism consists simply in holding these … theories in suspended judg-
ment as constituting the sum of our knowledge on the subject’ (p. 342). In this re-
gard, the organismic-contextualist DSP – though espousing an overarching
integrative approach by admitting both contextualist and organismic categories into
its truth criteria – maintains the unique truth criteria for each world view to which
it subscribes, rather than muddying these truth criteria through amalgamation into
a single perspective [for a discussion of the utility of integrating organismic and con-
textualist world views, see Overton & Ennis, 2006]. It remains for those who espouse
an organismic-contextualist DSP to more fully articulate their ontological frame-
work along these lines: is the merger in fact a brand of postrational eclecticism or is
it an effort at amalgamation, which would bring with it the potential for conceptual
obfuscation?
Unlike an organismic-contextualist DSP, a pure contextualist DSP, owing to its
exclusively dispersive framework, loses sight of the organism as an integrated whole.
The contextualist DSP searches for meaning not by abstracting higher-order orga-
nizational properties or by embedding organismic action in a developmental se-
quence but by embedding action in a task-specific context. Analysis of the task con-
text becomes an end in itself. As such, the contextualist DSP tends to characterize
the organism as a collection of task-specific actions. The extensive and primary focus
of Thelen, Smith and colleagues on the A-not-B error [Smith et al., 1999; Spencer et
al., 2001; Thelen et al., 2001] reveals the all-consuming power of the task context in
this work. For Piaget’s [1954] organismically minded approach, in contrast, the A-
not-B error took on meaning only in the context of a developmental sequence ex-
tending from infants’ early tracking efforts under conditions of object occlusion,
to early manual search efforts for uncovered, partly covered, and completely occlud-
ed objects, to manual search under conditions of visible displacement and later un-
der conditions of invisible displacement. With its privileging of the task-specific
particularities of action, the contextualist DSP ultimately undermines its own sys-
tems theory origins. A fundamental principle of general systems theory is that any
given form is both a whole in itself – a system in its own right – and a part of anoth-
er whole – a component comprising another system. Hence, no level of analysis is
privileged; one investigator’s form or structure is another investigator’s content, de-
pending on the level of analysis adopted. Lacking the integrative focus of organicism,
the contextualist DSP grounds itself in particulars but never satisfactorily establish-
es an organized sense of the organism across time and context, as a system totality
itself. The lure of the organismic-contextualist DSP rests in its charge to capture both
the domain-general and the domain-specific, the global order and the local variabil-
ity, without reducing one to the other.
Over 10 years ago, Butterworth [1993] suggested that the DSP unites all four
causes – efficient, material, formal and final – in Aristotle’s explanatory scheme.
From the standpoint of the organismic-contextualist DSP, this is true; from the
standpoint of the contextualist DSP, efficient and material causes are the final arbi-
ters of explanation. That the same perspective can inspire such different explanatory

2007;50:127–153
models for the study of development is a testament perhaps to its potential for unify-
ing the field. But at least two fundamentally distinct attractors characterize the
metatheoretical landscape for DSP, and an acknowledgement of their distinctness is
necessary to fully articulate the application of dynamic systems’ principles to the
study of development.
Acknowledgments
This paper was supported in part by a National Institute of Child Health and Human De-
velopment postdoctoral training grant (HD 07323).
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Human Development 2007;50:127–153

The Dynamic Systems Approach as

The Dynamic Systems Approach as Metatheory for Developmental

A decade ago, developmental psychology could easily be characterized as a field

© 2007 S. Karger AG, Basel David C. Witherington, Department of Psychology

128 Human Development Witherington

Dynamic Systems as Metatheory Human Development 129

World Views and Development: Organicism and Contextualism

It is widely acknowledged as a tenet of the modern scientific approach that the

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Dynamic Systems as Metatheory Human Development 131

Development, therefore, does not resolve to the generalized trajectories organi-

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Integrating World Views

Dynamic Systems as Metatheory Human Development 133

The DSP: Core Metatheoretical Foundations

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Emergence in a system, the coming-into-being of new patterns or forms as a re-

Dynamic Systems as Metatheory Human Development 135

Explaining this ‘context-conditioned variability’ requires much more than the

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Self-Organization Revisited: The Issue of Circular Causality

The DSP metatheoretical framework, embodied in the principle of self-organi-

Dynamic Systems as Metatheory Human Development 137

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Dynamic Systems as Metatheory Human Development 139

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The Contextualist DSP

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The DSP offers a ‘grand narrative’ framework for developmental psychology

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