ABSTRACT
After briefly characterizing historic roots of the concept of development in philosophy and biology, the authors discuss general models or families of theories about human development, namely, mechanistic, organismic, dialectic and contextual models of human development. They focus on concepts of human individual development (“ontogeny”). The authors suggest that developmental theories which were influential up to the 1960s can be traced back to two fundamental philosophical models (metatheories) that provide the basis for many extant assumptions about human development, that is, the mechanistic model and the organismic model. The history of the mechanistic model stems from the time of John Locke and David Hume, although Locke himself was less restrictive than the mechanistic (behavioristic) model of development in suggesting that, in addition to learning, humans have an inherent function of reflection, which is composed of the process of comparing, distinguishing, judging, and willing.
