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The Developmental Approach to Cognition: Its Relevance to the Psychological Interpretation of Anthropological and Ethnolinguistic Data
Author(s) -
WERNER HEINZ,
KAPLAN BERNARD
Publication year - 1956
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1956.58.5.02a00070
Subject(s) - relevance (law) , interpretation (philosophy) , citation , cognition , psychology , philosophy , library science , linguistics , computer science , psychiatry , law , political science
cern to anthropologists, ethnolinguists, and psychologists alike. To this end, we shall (A) discuss the nature of the developmental approach to cognition; (B) meet critically some of the objections to the application of the developmental concept of "primitivity" to anthropological-linguistic data; and (C) demonstrate the value of the developmental approach in relating ethnolinguistic data to psychological experimentation. (A) THE NATURE OF THE DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH TO COGNITION A general developmental approach has been of heuristic value in systematizing certain aspects of biological phenomena in various fields of life science such as comparative anatomy, embryology, neurology. It is the aim of developmental psychology to view the total behavior of all organisms in terms of similar developmental principles. It is our belief that such an approach is fruitful in coordinating, within a single descriptive framework, psychological phenomena observed in phylogenesis, ontogenesis, psychopathology, ethnopsychology, etc., and in linking these observations to the formulation and sys