Development as interaction

Seeing development as interaction involves trying to reconcile the influence of both nature
and nurture, by showing how maturational processes link into social processes of learning.
Psychologists who take this position acknowledge a debt to the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant (17241804). Kant rejected the
rationalist notion of innate knowledge. He also rejected the empiricist notion
that knowledge is derived solely from the environment. Although Kant agreed
with Locke that experience is crucial for learning, he argued that knowledge
could not arise from what people took in through their senses alone. Kant
suggested a synthesis (a merging) of the two opposed viewpoints of rationalism
and empiricism. Basically, he proposed that we are born with certain mental
structures that help us to interpret input from our senses in particular ways. He
called these mental structures categories of understanding. By themselves, they
cannot give us knowledge and it is only through interaction with the environment
that these structures order and organize experience. Furthermore, there is an active role for
individuals as organizers of experience: no longer are they seen either as passively receiving
sensory stimuli (as in empiricism), or passively following some biological programme (as in
rationalism or nativism). The major mechanism for development is the continuous, two-way
interaction between the child and the environment. In this view, both nature and nurture
play an important role in development. Most contemporary theories of development
recognize the active roles of children in their own development. Children affect how their
caregivers behave towards them; they make choices about their own lives, and, as they get
older, increasingly select their own environments. This is much more than a simple
interaction of nature and nurture, and developmental researchers are now attempting to
capture this two-way complexity of cause and effect in what are sometimes called
transactional models of development.