ABSTRACT
For over 40 years, Willis F. Overton has been at the forefront of efforts in developmental science to both elucidate and ultimately transcend the pernicious conceptual divisions that have long plagued the field (e.g., Overton, 1973, 1984, 1991, 1998, 2006, 2013, 2015; Reese & Overton, 1970). Unparalleled in its cogency and conceptual rigor, Overton’s work has systematically delineated the “background concepts,” or metatheoretical frameworks, that necessarily “ground, constrain, and sustain” every facet of research on development and developmental process (Overton, 2015, pp. 13, 15). His longstanding critique of the Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic paradigm—a world view that dominated the field’s overarching conceptualization and study of development for much, if not most, of the last 100 years—has been instrumental in revealing that metatheoretical framework’s core conceptual inadequacies. In its stead, Overton has advanced and fully articulated a Process-Relational paradigm, one that heals traditional dualisms of the field and substitutes an explanatory pluralism for the reductionism and foundationalism of the mechanistic split tradition. In short, Overton’s work has spearheaded a revolutionary metatheoretical shift in developmental science: from the mechanistic ontology of substance and being to the relational ontology of process and becoming. And more so than any other proponent of this paradigm shift, Overton (2015) has unfailingly emphasized the “necessary indissociable relation” (p. 37) between process and organization (or, more generally, function and structure) in our explanations of developmental stability and change, marrying a focus on the bottom-up dynamics of developmental process with a holistic structuralist emphasis on system organization as explanatory in its own right (Witherington & Heying, 2015).
