| DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz
(Cognitive Development) = (Biology + Social Context):
Is the Whole the Sum of Parts?
The Social Context of Cognitive Development
By Mary Gauvain. The Guilford Series on Social and Emotional Development.
New York: Guilford Press, 2001. 249 pp. Paper, $23.00.
Recently we have seen more studies focusing on the dynamic aspects of cognitive
development. This seems to arise from the unsatisfactory accounts that
claim that developmental changes are derived from either the internal activity
of a system regardless of the external context or from the external inductive
and conditioning environment regardless of the individual's phylogenesis and
ontogenesis. Both extremist accounts fall short in depicting the dynamic between
organism and environment. As a result, we piled up a plethora of data
that ratify the same old dichotomy between nature and nurture, individual and
social, organism and environment. Mary Gauvain's book The Social Context of
Cognitive Development is part of this recent endeavor to understand development
beyond these dualist perspectives.
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