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Beyond Principles and Programs: An Action Framework for Modeling Development

We are in strong agreement with many of the conclusions of Fields’s discussion [this issue], and would like to expand the theoretical context for his arguments in order to offer some further interpretations. Accordingly, in our commentary, we will introduce some historical and developmental considerations in an effort to situate Fields’s position within developmental theory more broadly. Such contextualization will help clarify how Fields’s arguments relate to extant frameworks for modeling development – including our own action-based framework. There are many things to commend this paper and it is a welcome contribution to developmental theory. Fields highlights some of the issues and complexities involved with object representation and object re-identification in an effort to demonstrate the inadequacy of a core aspect of nativist theory; specifically, that the appeal from nativists to a principle of object persistence is theoretically empty and fails to provide researchers with an explanation of how children are able to actually segregate and re-identify objects. Fields applies the modeling power of programs and their data structures to account for object persistence from within a computational framework – a framework that is generally shared by nativist researchers. If Fields’s conclusions are correct, this means that nativist arguments for the necessity of innate object representations (and thus the persistence principle) are unsound. We agree that internal inconsistencies in nativist theory are particularly damaging [Allen & Bickhard, 2011a], but we disagree with Fields about the implications of such criticism. In particular, programs are a marked improvement over principles, but we suggest the need to go beyond both principles and programs in order to adequately model cognitive and developmental phenomena. Epistemic agents are open systems that must interact with their environment to exist, and modeling their ontology and development from