Concerning the Rumored Falling to Earth of "Time's Arrow"Author(s): Michael Chandler and Jeremy CarpendaleSource: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1994), pp. 245-248Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1448860 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 05:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PsychologicalInquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.187 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:43:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

COMMENTARIES

Concerning the Rumored Falling to Earth of "Time's Arrow"

Michael Chandler and Jeremy Carpendale University of British Columbia

This is an important article, and a better alternative to the course actually pursued here might well have been to simply express our usual envy of, and appreci- ation for, this latest in the list of Overton's regular seismic reports of whatever paradigmatic movements happen to be set off as Organismic Worldviews carry on, tectonically grinding past their perhaps dated Mechanistic counterparts. As it is, we proceed some- what less generously, both by providing certain reasons as to why the short-term prospects for organismic views may not be as clear or bright as Overton envisions them and by going on to list certain ways in which the target article still may not succeed in putting the best available face upon such still suspect views.

First, then, we should probably begin by acknowl- edging that what is to count as our major point of disagreement with this target essay tends to be rather more affective than cognitive in character and generally turns upon the fact that, where Overton somehow man- ages to find room for new optimism concerning the upcoming prospects of organicism, we go on suffering from an altogether darker vision-one that turns his "the glass is half full and filling" into something much more like our own barefooted warning about broken glass on the floor. Although you might choose to argue, all this suggests that little more than temperament or, worse still, some "burnt child" reaction separates his generally sunny views from our altogether more som- ber ones, these different outlooks do portend, we mean to suggest, such sharply different futures that it may well be worthwhile to try to work out the reasons for the difference. Before coming to these matters, however, it seems best to begin with some succinct statement of what Overton holds out as his own goals and purposes.

By his own, we think overly optimistic, lights, Over- ton tends to see mechanistic views as having gradually fallen into a state of growing disarray, whereas organ- icism is assumed, by contrast, to be in for much happier times. "My basic argument," he states, "is that the machine narrative is losing its hold on interpretive plausibility across a wide range of knowledge do- mains" and is presumably doing so at the same time that the "revolutionary program" of organicism has "emerged from its relative dormancy" to once again provide us with a new "unifying theme." He reports, for example, that "geology, paleontology, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology," to name only a few of the several disciplines said to be involved, "have all been moving away from a mechanical narrative, toward an organic narrative."

Although Overton may well be right about all this fin de siecle openness to new beginnings, at least insofar as it applies to disciplines other than our own, all such rumors regarding the supposed "demise of objectiv- ism" or the "death of mechanistic traditions" within psychology proper strike us as having been greatly exaggerated and ought to be taken with a large grain (or dose) of salt(s). Overton is, of course, as much aware as the next person that the "cognitive revolution" of the late 1950s was initially stalled and then later co-opted "by the same machine categories as those that defined both the earlier 'mindless' behaviorism and philosoph- ical objectivism" it was initially meant to replace. Still, for reasons that are never made sufficiently clear, he now senses, where we do not, enough new slippage on this otherwise stuck brake to warrant proclaiming that we have recently arrived at some new "turning point" in what, until now, has proved to be a relentlessly stalled paradigm shift.

In marked contrast to the hopeful signs of change to which Overton responds, our own sampling of the contemporary psychological literature and beyond urges an altogether more cautious reading. By such more pessimistic lights, these appear to be, if anything, unusually risky times for anyone still open to the accu- sation of being an unrepentant organismic sympathizer. Out on the philosophical fringe, there are, of course, as Overton properly notes, certain bright but otherwise scattered lights. For example, those given off by Put- man or Searle or Taylor-from whom, it would appear, Overton has taken his own more hopeful bearings-are certainly there to be found. Closer to home, however, in the low trench warfare of contemporary psycholog- ical research and theory, the good times anticipated in the target article before us all seem strangely remote and ethereal. Where, for example, within the first-rank- ing psychological journals is any real evidence of the demise of objectivism to be found? Where is the sorely tried organicist to find new reasons to take heart? What, in fact, actually seems much closer at hand is what Habermas (1989), among others (e.g., Callinicos, 1989), referred to as "the new conservatism," a back- ward-looking view currently being promoted by a lot of ground-leveling deconstructionist talk of connec- tionism, modularity, and post-just about everything in sight-post-Piagetianism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and so forth (Chandler, 1993). Much the same would also seem to go for the notion of Time' s Arrow, which, because it is necessarily about the direc- tionality supposedly inherent in certain human events,

245

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.187 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:43:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

COMMENTARIES

would appear to have run hopelessly afoul of all those increasingly popular postmodern convictions concern- ing the supposed death of all remaining "grand narra- tives" (Lyotard, 1984). By such contemporary lights, any and all such residual talk about "progress" or "attractors" or universal end-states is seen as no better than a bad cover story for yet another plan to rob the opposition of their individual right to choose. Phrases like Time 's Arrow, then, would seem to be just the sort now guaranteed to get one into trouble with whoever is now being charged with the job of expunging from common usage all such nonrelativized forms of speech.

Overton is not unaware, of course, of all these broadly conservative postmodern trends, but he is a lot quicker than we are to find some silver lining hidden in this otherwise ominous gathering of clouds. Unlike ourselves, he remains encouraged, for example, that the "renewed focus on the centrality of biology, body, and brain," which many see as little more than a regressive step toward the re-ghettoization of only recently liber- ated mentalistic notions such as intentionality or mean- ing making, is not the objective search for new "naturalized foundations" that it might seem but instead is only a special case of a much broader organic-cate- gory revolution. We should be so lucky. Similarly, he cites Rosenau (1992) in support of his wish to distin- guish "skeptical postmodernism," with its "radical rel- ativism" and "flat ontology," from some supposedly more developmentally friendly brand of "affirmative postmodernism"-a brand that, as far as we can tell, only Rosenau, and now Overton, has ever heard of.

It is, of course, neither automatically foolhardy nor necessarily an intellectual crime to remain optimistic while the bulk of one's constructivistic colleagues feel beleaguered and very much on the run. It is, neverthe- less, an open and vulnerable stance and so sufficiently different from the more guarded norm as to demand some special pleading. In our view, the case Overton makes in behalf of his optimistic reading of current intellectual events is not strong or reassuring enough to lure the rest of us, who have otherwise been planning to keep our heads down, into automatically sharing his own conviction that the coast has suddenly become clear.

All that has been said so far has been about the degree to which Overton is within his rights in announcing some new change in our local intellectual climate. All the value in his wide-ranging target article should not be seen to rest, however, on the question of whether constructivistic views of the knowing process are or are not winning some current popularity contest or whether greater or fewer numbers of our colleagues are now convinced that development, unlike simple change, is necessarily directional. Winning or losing, Overton, like ourselves, is broadly committed to such interpre- tive views, and what is most at issue here is the case

246

that he makes for his own particular version of this outlook. Available space allows us to take up only two of the several ways in which his views on these matters depart from our own. One of these concerns the import- ant question of how to avoid becoming impaled on the horns of whatever dichotomy one happens, for the moment, to be promoting. The other is about just how narrowly canalized a trajectory the flight of Time's Arrow should be expected to keep.

On Looking Out for the Other Horn of the Dilemma

What, to our way of thinking, likely counts as one of the most valuable contributions of this target article is the clear way in which Overton brings out certain of the dangers associated with imposing some dualistic framework upon events as part of some early move toward later promoting one of the horns of that dichot- omy at the expense of the other. Borrowing interest- ingly from Taylor (1985) and others (e.g., Searle, 1983) who make related points, Overton presents a strong case in favor of the claim that all such bipolar represen- tations risk backfiring, by inadvertently lending a new legitimacy to exactly those perspectives to which one is most opposed. As Overton puts it, when one's own such "project begins to fail, the weight of evidence [automatically] begins to shift to the suppressed term." "Objectivist projects" consequently prove to be the "secret sharers" (Sass & Woolfolk, 1985) of "subjec- tivist views," just as mechanistic perspectives end up as organicism's suppressed opposite numbers. As a repair of just these difficulties, Overton urges us to attempt any one of several available "interpretive turns," all of which are bent upon restoring such "rad- ical" or "Cartesian" or "either-or" split frames, by precluding "the relative privileging of one or the other pole of a bipolar concept" and by working instead to embody both within the same "relational matrix."

Although all this seems to us exactly the right ap- proach, the danger left over is that of allowing such heady talk of "relational matrices" to inadvertently work as a cover story for yet another attempt to discredit opposing views by transforming them into a special or marginal case of one's own, supposedly more encom- passing, vision. Something very much like this threat- ens to happen as Overton describes how, for certain pragmatic purposes, Time's Cycle accounts sometimes can be taken as reasonable descriptions, at least when otherwise inherently active and directional systems happen to be operating at some "near equilibrium point." Under such atypical conditions, he suggests, systems that are by their very nature directional can be mistakenly viewed as if they were actually cycling in response to various external prompts without, at the

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.187 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:43:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

COMMENTARIES

same time, exceeding tolerable levels of error. In the end, however, all such optimistic talk of finding a conceptual place large enough for both Arrow of Time and Cycle of Time appears to end up reducing the Cycle of Time metaphor to little more than a poor relation to, or a special case of, the apparently more inclusive notion of the Arrow of Time. In a critique of one of Overton's previous but related dichotomies, his col- league Ellin Scholnick (1991) ended by accusing him of perpetrating a sort of "Organismic imperialism." That same shoe threatens to once again fit. All talk of a "relational matrix" aside, we are concerned that Over- ton still has not demonstrated that he has found a way to avoid suppressing, rather than actually integrating, the other half of his own primary dichotomy between the supposed Arrow of Time and Cycle of Time.

Does Showing Directionality Require Demonstrating That the Course of

Normal Growth Lies in Some Particular Direction?

The final bone we wish to pick with Overton is the one that supports what is, to our way of thinking, his unnecessarily restrictive ideas about what ought to be allowed to stand as evidence of the directionality inher- ent in developing systems. The point we hope to make here turns primarily on a distinction especially well represented in Ernst von Glasersfeld's (1982, 1984) useful contrast between the notions of "fit" and "match." By this way of speaking, it is possible to talk, on the one hand, about how any one or a lifetime's worth of mental representations could be seen to ex- actly "match" reality, in much the same sense you might talk of identifying the particular paint required to match what was already on the wall. On the other hand, just as many different keys could be fashioned so as to fit the same lock, so too can one speak of the numerous representations or alternative developmental outcomes that might all be seen to "fit" within the space allotted for a given lifetime. The story about development, according to von Glasersfeld, is all about "fit" and not at all about "match." What saves such talk from col- lapsing back into some vulgar, survival-of-the-"fittest" form of functionalism is that, at least in the case of child development, some broadband version of human nature is seen to set limits on the variety of developmental outcomes that can be made to actually work. As von Glasersfeld (1981) put it, "though children need only adapt to a world that is, strictly speaking, a world of their own experience, it is not a world in which they are free to experience whatever they might want" (p. 122).

Although none of the foregoing is meant as a surprise for Overton, who cites with approval exactly the same writings by von Glasersfeld, what is newly afforded by

such polymorphic approaches but seemingly missing from Overton' s more canalized vision of development is any evident readiness on his part to exploit the useful differences between the ideas of "fit" and "match" as a means for threading some path between the unbounded vision of contingent change required by the objectivist or Cycle of Time perspective and the awkwardly re- strictive notion of unwavering directionality suggested by the metaphor of the Arrow of Time. That is, the real choices at our disposal are not, as these two metaphors might suggest, restricted to those of narrowly canalized development as opposed to wildly contingent change. Just as elsewhere in his article-where he argues so effectively against any attempt to "de-emphasize ... or treat as dis- pensable [the] relational or bipolar character" of "comple- mentary concepts [such as] organization/adaptation, structure/function, assimilation/accommodation, scheme/procedure, necessity/possibility"-one would have liked to see Overton make a better place than he does for the idea that a directional account of development need not be the natural enemy of those views that allow contin- gent circumstances to define some "arc" (Chapman, 1988) of equally acceptable alternative developmental outcomes. Such a conception of "fit," we argue, seems especially well suited to those who, like ourselves, ordinarily understand activity to constitute the subject- object matrix out of which developmental structures are thought to emerge. Activities necessarily require mate- rials upon which to operate, and developing persons, supplied as they regularly are with different (sometimes radically different) materials, could all pursue different developmental outcomes while still all exercising the same broad commitment to a directed form of growth. In this way, the perhaps contingent variety of cultures within which children are obliged to grow can still be seen to exercise their influence without jeopardizing other of one's theoretical commitments to views that take some kind of real directionality to be an essential part of any developmental story.

Note

Michael Chandler and Jeremy Carpendale, Depart- ment of Psychology, 2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z4, Canada.

References

Callinicos, A. (1989). Againstpostmodernism. London: Blackwell. Chandler, M. J. (1993). Contextualism and the postmodern condition:

Learning from Las Vegas. In S. C. Hayes, L. J. Hayes, H. W. Reese, & T. R. Sarbin (Eds.), Varieties of scientific contextual- ism (pp. 227-247). Reno, NV: Context.

Chapman, M. (1988). Contextuality and directionality of cognitive development. Human Development, 31, 92-106.

247

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.187 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:43:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

COMMENTARIES

Habermas, J. (1989). The new conservatism: Cultural criticism and the historians' debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowl- edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rosenau, P. M. (1992). Postmodernism and the social sciences: Insights, inroads, and intrusions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press.

Sass, L., & Woolfolk, R. (1985). Psychoanalysis and the hermeneutic turn. Unpublished manuscript.

Scholnick, E. K. (1991). The development of world views: Towards future synthesis? In P. Van Geert & L. P. Mos (Eds.), Annals of theoretical psychology (Vol. 7, pp. 249-259). New York: Plenum.

Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, C. (1985). Human agency and language: Philosophical pa- pers (Vol. 1). New York: Cambridge University Press.

von Glasersfeld, E. (1981). An epistemology for cognitive systems. In G. Roth & H. Schwegler (Eds.), Self-organizing systems: An interdisciplinary approach (pp. 121-131). Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag.

von Glasersfeld, E. (1982). An interpretation of Piaget's constructiv- ism. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 142-143, 612-635.

von Glasersfeld, E. ( 1984). An introduction to radical constructivism. In P. Watzlawick (Ed.), The invented reality (pp. 17-40). New York: Norton.

The Arrow of Time and Developmental Psychopathology

Sebastiano Santostefano Wellesley, Massachusetts

Overton comprehensively reviews how the machine and organic paradigms have been engaged for centuries in revolutions and counterrevolutions and proposes that a shift is occurring in favor of organic concepts. With this commentary, I attempt to illustrate that this shift can be seen in the domain of developmental psychopa- thology and to highlight what investigators and clini- cians see when they peer through the lens of the organic paradigm to understand cognition, personality develop- ment, and change.

The reader who is not as familiar as Overton is with historical developments in philosophy and physical sciences may experience, upon reading his account, that he or she is flying the Concorde over a blurred terrain, rapidly shifting altitudes from theory to a single concept and back again, while also (and paradoxically) creeping along in a covered wagon through tangled thickets of "objectivism," "skeptical postmodernism," and "interpretationism." The terrain might become clearer if we remind ourselves that Western thinking has typically divided points of view with boundaries. Wilber (1979) convincingly argued that, although na- ture is an organized whole, when we attempt to under- stand and give meaning to human experience, knowingly or unknowingly, we immediately draw mental boundaries that cast the experience as a pair of opposites signifying either pleasure or pain-for exam- ple, good versus evil, freedom versus restriction, ap- pearance versus reality. To quote Wilber, "To desire something means to draw a boundary line between pleasurable and painful things and then to move toward the former. To maintain an idea means to draw a bound- ary line between concepts felt to be true and concepts felt not to be true" (p. 17). Segregating points of view, as Overton discusses, has typified Western philosophy

248

when asking the question: What is the basis of knowl- edge? Objectivism responds by drawing a boundary between events that occur independent of the mind (the objective or real) from those that are dependent on the mind (the subjective or appearance), proposing that knowledge exists independent of the knower and seg- regating the subjective as unpleasurable. The individ- ual is viewed in terms of "machine" categories-as inherently passive and aroused to action by stimuli. Phenomena are separated into isolated elements that operate in an additive fashion.

Although a boundary serves some conceptual conve- nience, it limits our understanding of the whole individ- ual. But, there is an even more damaging outcome. Quoting Wilber (1977), "A boundary line, as any mil- itary expert will tell us, marks off the territories of two opposing and potentially warring camps" (p. 10), and, "when the opposites engage in conflict, a typical way of solving the problem is to attempt to dismiss one or reduce it to the other" (p. 20). This strategy, as Overton points out, has characterized skirmishes between objec- tivism and skeptical postmodernism. The later view- point suppresses the real in favor of appearance, divides appearance in terms of constraint versus freedom, and rejects concepts suggesting constraint (e.g., "holism," "coherence").

Boundaries dissolve when the proposition is ac- cepted that what appear to be opposites in fact share a fundamental unity, because nature knows nothing of opposites. To illustrate this point, Overton uses the familiar figure that simultaneously forms a vase and faces. Although the lines divide space so that we per- ceive one or the other, the lines simultaneously unite the figures, as neither exists without the other. The viewpoint of interpretationism does not divide the in-

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.187 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:43:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions