An overview of the concepts of change and development: From the premodern to modern era

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the concepts of change and progress from the perspective of the history of science and modern developmental psychology. The section on the history of science focuses on the period extending from the premodern Hellenistic era to the Age of Enlightenment. This period is long and inevitably includes several different worldviews and cultural trends. The discussion is limited to the most important and the culturally most significant trends of thought - especially that of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelic tradition. The section on the approach taken by modern developmental psychology analyses the following questions: Which characteristic changes, namely, cognitive ones, must occur for these to be considered developmental? How do developmental and learning theories, based on different philosophical models, view concepts of change and development? How are change and development studied by developmental scholars nowadays? Weak and strong conceptions of development are underlined in particular. In conclusion, conceptions of progress, change and development are discussed by using a classification of world hypotheses and ‘unit ideas’ (familiar resemblances) from the whole of history.