Evaluative claims about foundational development

Wouter van Haaften

pp. 75-91

in: Wouter van Haaften, Michiel Korthals, Thomas Wren (eds), Philosophy of development, Berlin, Springer, 1997

Abstract

In this chapter we concentrate on the question of how to defend claims that a certain stage is better than its predecessor(s). Our question is not, therefore, how developmental processes come about, which is what most developmental theories focus on. It concerns instead the evaluation of the development, a question that many developmental theories do not even mention. This may be so for two reasons. One is that they just do not want to make such an evaluative claim. The other, which is more often the case, is that they consider the correlation of development with improvement to be entirely obvious and not in need of separate argumentation.