Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA.
Adv Child Dev Behav. 2013;44:161-92. doi: 10.1016/b978-0-12-397947-6.00006-4.
Relational, systems-oriented approaches are strongly positioned to advance theory and research in developmental science and to cement a process orientation to development at all levels of organization--from the biological to the psychological and sociocultural--despite continued prominence in the field of biologically reductionist explanatory accounts. However, the inclusive, explanatorily pluralistic ontological framework involved in adopting a relational perspective on developing systems is not always fully appreciated, explicitly articulated or even followed by devotees of the perspective. In this chapter, we highlight the importance of holistically couching interlevel relations--those that obtain vertically between levels of organization, such as between the biological and psychological levels--in terms of wholes and parts and of recognizing the different modes of causal explanation that obtain depending on whether the relations move from parts-to-whole or whole-to-parts. This, in turn, yields an explanatory pluralism under which all living systems, at any level of organization, exist as both subjects and objects. We ground this discussion by examining the ontological compatibility with a relational developmental systems perspective of two systems-oriented approaches to embodiment: the dynamic systems approach of Thelen and Smith (1994, 2006) and the enactive approach of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).
关系论、系统论的方法在推进发展科学的理论和研究方面具有很强的优势，并巩固了在所有组织层次上（从生物学到心理和社会文化）的发展过程论的地位，尽管在生物学还原论解释性解释领域中仍占有突出地位。然而，尽管对发展系统采用关系论观点涉及包容性的、具有多种解释的本体论框架，但它并不总是被该观点的信徒完全理解、明确表达，甚至遵循。在本章中，我们强调了从整体上构建层次间关系的重要性——这些关系在垂直方向上存在于组织层次之间，例如在生物和心理层次之间——以及认识到根据关系是从部分到整体还是整体到部分，所获得的不同因果解释模式的重要性。这反过来又产生了一种解释上的多元主义，根据这种主义，任何组织层次上的所有生命系统都既是主体又是客体。我们通过考察与关系发展系统观点在本体论上的兼容性，来为这一讨论提供依据，这两种系统论的体现方法是：Thelen 和 Smith（1994，2006）的动态系统方法和 Varela、Thompson 和 Rosch（1991）的能动性方法。
