ABSTRACT
It is a particular pleasure to contribute to a volume devoted to mechanisms of developmental change. The article published in 1972 based on my doctoral dissertation was titled “Mechanisms of Change in the Development of Cognitive Structures,” and I have been concerned with the problem ever since. The growing interest in the problem has been attributed to the success of the microgenetic method, which I first used in the 1980s (Kuhn & Ho, 1980; Kuhn & Phelps, 1982), as a tool for studying change. The implication is that the study of change mechanisms has been difficult because of the methodological challenge it poses. Although I agree with this assumption and believe the microgenetic method offers the opportunity to make new inroads on the problem, I want to suggest today another source of difficulty in the effort to understand change mechanisms, and that is an impoverished conception of what is developing.
