Developmental Normativity and Normative Development

Development is guided by multiple norms, and further normativities emerge in development. This should be a commonplace observation — after all, it characterizes the core dialectic of developmental processes — but normativity is instead a perplexing and sometimes desperately ignored aspect of development. I will address some reasons why normativity is so perplexing, reasons that begin with Parmenides, and, therefore, that have a rather long history. Within the framework of that historical and conceptual diagnosis of the problem, I explore a model of the emergence of normativity. Finally, I will illustrate with a several examples of emergent normativity in learning and development. These emergent normativities include the normativity of truth and falsity that constitute representation and the — so I argue — related instrumental normativity of motivation, that of success and failure that guide learning, and the positivity and negativity of emotions. Within that outlined framework, I show how higher level motivations, such as curiosity, esthetic motivation, and competence motivation, emerge. Studies of the mind and person — including psychology, including especially developmental psychology — suffer from a problematic conceptual framework that stems from the pre-Socratics, has dominated Western thought since that time, and that makes fundamental theoretical understanding, especially regarding the mind and persons, impossible. I will outline this problematic framework, and show how it renders the normativity of mind and development naturalistically inscrutable. I begin with Parmenides. Parmenides argued that change cannot occur: For A to change into B, A would have to disappear into nothing, and B would have to emerge out of nothing, and those are impossible (Campbell, 1992). The difficulties with " nothing " were taken seriously, and, in fact, are still with us today: How can you point to nothing? How can you encode nothing? — or What is this thing 'nothing' that " nothing " refers to? 1 In fact, Empedocles proposed his metaphysics of earth, air, fire, and water as a response to the Parmenidean argument: earth, air, fire, and water do not change, and thus satisfy (sort of) Parmenides. Only their locations and mixtures change, and the world can be accounted for in terms of these more superficial kinds of change. Similarly, Democritus' atoms do not change, only their locations and relationships. This substance or atomic form of metaphysics has, in multifarious forms and guises, dominated Western thought since then. But it creates fundamental problems, problems that are most especially focused …