ABSTRACT
The basic problem of developmental psychology is how to explain the persistent construction of novelty in the context of the relative conservatism of the developmental process. Modern psychological discourse seems to have failed to bring the solution to this problem any closer than the efforts of the leading psychologists a century (e.g., Baldwin, 1895; Groos, 1908; Janet, 1929), or decades (Piaget, 1946; Vygotsky, 1935; Wallon, 1934, 1942) ago. The progress in developmental psychology seems to come via some nonlinear and nonmonotonic trajectory, where the research at any time is not necessarily more profound than that occurring at previous times and in differing contexts.
