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Neural development, behavioural/cognitive development and innateness within developmental scenarios| old_uid | 14636 |
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| title | Neural development, behavioural/cognitive development and innateness within developmental scenarios |
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| start_date | 2014/11/15 |
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| schedule | 16h-16h45 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Within behavioural and cognitive science, the use of development is ambiguous. Some researchers think that cognitive/behavioural development does not exist since development refers only to biological development (Lorenz, 1965; Chomsky, 1980; Fodor 1998). Others identify cognitive development to learning (Catchpole et al, 2008). In both cases, their positions reflect several questionable oppositions (biology/psychology; maturation/learning; constrained/flexible processes).
I will argue that the widespread claim for ‘taking development seriously’ within biology, (Robert, 2004) ethology (Lehrman, 1953) and cognitive science (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) has several consequences for the account of behavioural/cognitive development. First, in offering a broad account of development, it shows that development is mainly a descriptive term. Second, the unitary of development implied by the claim does not mean that there is a general theory of development. The way to study development seems rather to construct specific developmental scenarios or trajectories of given phenotypes in which neural development and behavioural/cognitive development are to be linked. I will argue that dynamic mechanistic explanations (Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 2010) can fulfil this requirement in using both cross-levels explanatory-relevant factors and primitive functional units (Morton and Frith, 2001), which can be conceived as innate capacities. |
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| responsibles | Pradeu, Reynaud |
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