Self-Organization and Explanatory Pluralism: Avoiding the Snares of Reductionism in Developmental Science

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, the concept of self-organization has played a central role in efforts to establish a relational metatheoretical approach to the study of development. Yet the notion of self-organization that predominates in scientific discussions today has undergone a conceptual narrowing relative to the broader use and interpretation of self-organization that characterized the biologically-oriented systems thinking of Weiss and von Bertalanffy and was grounded in Kant's teleological account of organisms as natural ends or purposes. In this article, the author discusses how our conceptual use of self-organization in developmental science has changed under the influence of nonlinear dynamical systems theory and how these changes could actually foster rather than discourage new forms of reductionism in our thinking about development.