ABSTRACT
Early philosophical thought regarding the mind-body problem set the scene for understanding the development of mechanism. There is little doubt that mechanism has elicited, and continues to elicit, strong and polarized opinion regarding its contribution to theoretical development and more particularly, regarding its contribution to understanding and explaining human development. There is certainly little doubt that the significant corpus of knowledge has created continues to be applied in areas such as clinical psychology, health and education. However, DeGrandpre has argued that behaviourism is being marginalized within the broad field of psychological science although principles of operant psychology certainly are constrained in their ability to provide anything resembling a complete picture of psychological experience and action, psychological science has yet to exploit the full implications of basic operant principles, especially for science of meaning. While information processing theories and Bandura's work both have their origins in mechanistic school of thought, we have seen how these represent a move towards greater organicism.
