Online research in philosophy

Abstract The concept ?development stage? seems to be going through a revival (cf. Commons and Richards, 1984; Levin, 1986). Three positions regarding the conceptualization of development stages can be distinguished. Piaget's original formulations are presented as a starting point (Piaget, 1960). Trends in the sub?discipline of developmental psychology concerned with the study of cognitive development are then shortly reviewed and contrasted with trends in the sub?discipline concerned with the study of moral development. In the field of moral development research, Kohlberg has proposed a hard structural stage model which subscribes to Piaget's criteria while in the field of cognitive development most of the stage criteria specified by Piaget are regarded as untenable and the weaker notion of ?sequence? has become popular. By relating this divergence in interpretation and appreciation to trends in the methodology and theory of research concerning moral development, reasons for maintaining a hard?structural stage model are made intelligible. Characteristic of the Kohlbergian stage concept is an interest in meaning structures, structured wholeness and hierarchical integration.

Developmental systems theory (DST) is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology (EDB). The contributions to this literature by evolutionary developmental biologists contain three important misunderstandings of DST.

Developmental systems theory is an attempt to sum up the ideas of a research tradition in developmental psychobiology that goes back at least to Daniel Lehrman’s work in the 1950s. It yields a representation of evolution that is quite capable of accommodating the traditional themes of natural selection and also the new results that are emerging from evolutionary developmental biology. But it adds something else - a framework for thinking about development and evolution without the distorting dichotomization of biological processes into gene and non-gene and the vestiges of the ‘black-boxing’ of developmental processes in the modern synthesis, such as the asymmetric use of the concept of information. Phenomena that are marginalized in current gene-centric conceptions, such as extra-genetic inheritance, niche construction and phenotypic plasticity are placed center stage.

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) offers both an account of developmental processes and also new integrative frameworks for analyzing interactions between development and evolution. Biologists and philosophers are keen on evo-devo in part because it appears to offer a comfort zone between, on the one hand, what some take to be the relative inability of mainstream evolutionary biology to integrate a developmental perspective; and, on the other hand, what some take to be more intractable syntheses of development and evolution. In this article, I outline core concerns of evo-devo, distinguish theoretical and practical variants, and counter Sterelny's recent argument that evo-devo's attention to development, while important, offers no significant challenge to evolutionary theory as we know it.

Developmental systems theory (DST) expands the unit of replication from genes to whole systems of developmental resources, which DST interprets in terms of cycling developmental processes. Expansion seems required by DST's argument against privileging genes in evolutionary and developmental explanations of organic traits. DST and the expanded replicator brook no distinction between biological and cultural evolution. However, by endorsing a single expanded unit of inheritance and leaving the classical molecular notion of gene intact, DST achieves only a nominal reunification of heredity and development. I argue that an alternative conceptualization of inheritance denies the classical opposition of genetics and development while avoiding the singularity inherent in the replicator concept. It also yields a new unit--the reproducer--which genuinely integrates genetic and developmental perspectives. The reproducer concept articulates the non-separability of "genetic" and "developmental" roles in units of heredity, development, and evolution. DST reformulated in terms of reproducers rather than replicators preserves an empirically interesting distinction between cultural and biological evolution.

What makes a leader ethical? This paper critically examines the answer given by developmental theory, which argues that individuals can develop through cumulative stages of ethical orientation and behavior (e.g. Hobbesian, Kantian, Rawlsian), such that leaders at later developmental stages (of whom there are empirically very few today) are more ethical. By contrast to a simple progressive model of ethical development, this paper shows that each developmental stage has both positive (light) and negative (shadow) aspects, which affect the ethical behaviors of leaders at that stage. It also explores an unexpected result: later stage leaders can have more significantly negative effects than earlier stage leadership.

In this paper, I address the question of what the Developmental Systems Theory (DST) aims at explaining. I distinguish two lines of thought in DST, one which deals specifically with development, and tries to explain the development of the individual organism, and the other which presents itself as a reconceptualization of evolution, and tries to explain the evolution of populations of developmental systems (organism-environment units). I emphasize that, despite the claiming of the contrary by DST proponents, there are two very different definitions of the ‘developmental system’, and therefore DST is not a unified theory of evolution and development. I show that the DST loses the most interesting aspects of its reconceptualization of development when it tries to reconceptualize evolutionary theory. I suggest that DST is about development per se, and that it fails at offering a new view on evolution.

Abstract In The Moral Development of the Child Piaget proposes a sketch of a developmental account of moral judgments, and the sequence of stages which he there proposes have been widely taken to provide a basis for any adequate developmental account. However, if Piaget's work on cognitive development is taken as providing a standard by which to judge such theories it is doubtful that moral development can be accounted for through the use of the equilibrium concept. The very notion of ?a moral judgment? with which Piaget works imposes severe restrictions on the adequacy of the theory, leading him necessarily to ignore important issues. Furthermore, there seems to be no underpinning available to secure the necessary order of the stages, and as a matter of fact some children seem to show evidence of a capacity to make advanced moral judgments at an early age. It is argued, therefore, that the search for developmental structures of this kind should be abandoned.