ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with causes of change and variation in cognitive development. It focuses on biological, environmental and social processes and events which might be thought to produce cognitive development. It asks the ‘how’ questions: how is cognition assembled during childhood? What internal and external factors influence the way in which cognitive behaviour develops and how do the developmental processes work? How do an individual’s genes and experience interact during cognitive development? It is not a satisfactory answer to such questions, though it may provide a very early sketch map of what sort of terrain will have to be covered. It is not satisfactory for several reasons: in the first place there are my own inadequacies, but beyond that there is the two-strand problem of incomplete description and inadequate theory which characterised even the material on ‘what’ children’s cognition is, which I discussed earlier in this book. ‘How’ questions, questions of cause, are notoriously harder to answer than descriptive ‘what’ ones. ‘Cause’ itself is an elusive and difficult concept; the sort of thing we are concerned with here is those events or processes on which cognitive development is conditional, which are sufficient causes (all that is required for it to proceed), or necessary causes (essential but perhaps not the only thing required) or contributory causes (useful, but neither necessary nor sufficient). Distinctions may also have to be made between predisposing factors, precipitating factors, and factors which, once development is on its way, sustain, reverse, limit, amplify, diminish or otherwise modify it. There may be overdetermination, belt and braces and safety pins all, co-operatively or independently, holding up the developmental trousers. We must also recognise that for something as complex as cognition there will perhaps be multiple causation, many factors involved in ways which may vary from person to person and time to time, so that the ‘life histories’ of cognitive development in different people may be completely different in what event or
process was significant and when. There will be chains of causes: X causes Y, but is itself caused by W which is caused by V which is caused by etc. How far we trace these chains back to the First Cause will depend on many factors: time, persistence, how good the data are, what we consider to be ‘real’ causes, how many unknown processes we can tolerate between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’; and throughout we will achieve a much more satisfactory account, and have an infinitely better potential for therapeutic or educational intervention, if we consider how these causes work.
