Advancing the stage theory debate

With Daniel Gortz and Nora Bateson. The below excerpts from Mascolo's paper sound to me more like how they ended the discussion of a different way to frame developmental theory. It might address some of Nora's criticisms and concerns. Mascolo, M. (2020). "Dynamic Skill Theory." Handbook of Integrative Developmental Science, New York: Routledge.  

"Skill theory is not so much a theory of the development of children or adults, but instead a theory of the development of psychological structures. It is not a child or individual who operates at any particular level of development; it is the particular skill as it operates within a particular context (Bidell & Fischer, 1992). It follows that at any given moment in time, individual persons create particular skilled actions in order to meet particular adaptive challenges and environmental demands. As a result, although, at any given point in development, there are limits to the highest level of skill that an individual can construct, it makes no sense say that skills operate at any single level – even within individual persons and domains of action. The level of skill produced by an individual can change from moment to moment. [...] Both across and within particular domains of functioning, the level of skill that an individual creates changes as a function of the demands of the environment, and individual’s physical or emotional state, the level of support available, the novelty of the skill or context in question, and so forth. 

"Against this backdrop, it makes little sense to think of development as a kind of unidirectional ladder or fixed staircase. It is preferable to conceptualize development as a kind of web, with multiple connecting and diverging strands (Ayoub & Fischer, 2006; Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Fischer & Rose, 2001). A representation of the developmental web is provided in Figure 5. Each strand in the web represents a different developmental pathway. The pathways in the web can represent developmental changes in different skills or skill domains within the same individuals or in groups of individuals. Within the web, development can move in multiple directions, converging or diverging from its current trajectory at any given point in time. Questions about the pathways that development actually takes in particular individuals, groups, skill domains and contexts are empirical one, and cannot be presumed beforehand through logical analysis alone or on the basis of the assumed structure of any particular skill developing at any particular time" (10). 

"Drawing on ideas from dynamic and epigenetic systems thinking, Fischer adopted the idea that structures of acting emerge in medias res – in the middle of things (Fischer & Steward, 1999). A person is not a disembodied or rational agent set off apart from the world; the person is an embodied and emotive actor whose actions are embedded in the world. [...] Fischer (1993) argued against the idea that cognition could be understood as kind of fixed inner competence. No fixed competences exist within the individual; structures of action and though emerge dynamically through the mutual interplay between person and context, cognition and emotion, biology and culture, and so forth.  

"In this regard, it is helpful to think of developmental change processes in terms of vertical and horizontal coactions that occur within multiply-embedded epigenetic systems (Bidell & Fischer, 1997; Gottlieb, 2004). We can think of epigenetic systems as organized both horizontally and vertically. Vertical coactions occur between embedded 'levels' of the epigenetic system. Horizontal coactions occur within individual 'levels' of system functioning. From an epigenetic or systems perspective, the processes that organize development are not separate and distinct forces, but instead mutually influencing systems that produce both stability and order as well as flux and variation (Molenaar, 2015; Rose & Fischer, 2011). Ultimately, within such a view, the distinction between process and structure begins to erode (Giordano, 2017). There are not processes that operate on structures; there are only dynamically emergent systems -- structured processes that mutually regulate each other over time (Sawyer, 2002)" (14).