The Development of World Views: Towards future synthesis?

Abstract

Developmental psychologists have a definitional problem. Although they study the course of change, they have competitors who also study change, labeling it as learning, personality reorganization, history, or even measurement unreliability. Since psychology often divides itself into content areas like personality or perception, those subdivisions may subsume or ignore another framework that examines changes from a unified temporal perspective. So developmental psychologists often find themselves members of a threatened species in danger of being identified solely as students of other processes of change like learning, or as members of other disciplines studying perception, cognition, or social processes in exotic organisms such as the infant. The self-reflective developmentalist, therefore, confronts the problems of defining what is unique and valuable about the discipline and of understanding why that discipline is always on the verge of extinction.