ABSTRACT
Given the integrated character of change specified within the orthogenetic principle, developmental processes can change quantitatively or qualitatively. The orthogenetic principle highlights the fact that a developmental scientist must consider both the continuous and the discontinuous aspects of development. From the orthogenetic perspective, developmental change is not only lawful and a synthesis of constancy and change, but developmental change is also thereby consistent with the features of ontogeny that are highlighted by a probabilistic-epigenetic conception of development. The conceptual factors that influence the continuity–discontinuity issue were usefully specified by Heinz Werner. Werner saw that considerable confusion existed among developmental scientists over the continuity–discontinuity issue. Indeed, understanding the bases of continuity and change in human development is a task fundamentally linked to the nature–nurture issue. In the search for the individual and contextual conditions of continuity and discontinuity, relational developmental systems -oriented developmental scientists would tend to agree with one implication of the orthogenetic principle of Heinz Werner.
