Embodiment and agency: toward a holistic synthesis for developmental science

Relational, systems-oriented approaches are strongly positioned to advance theory and research in developmental science and to cement a process orientation to development at all levels of organization--from the biological to the psychological and sociocultural--despite continued prominence in the field of biologically reductionist explanatory accounts. However, the inclusive, explanatorily pluralistic ontological framework involved in adopting a relational perspective on developing systems is not always fully appreciated, explicitly articulated or even followed by devotees of the perspective. In this chapter, we highlight the importance of holistically couching interlevel relations--those that obtain vertically between levels of organization, such as between the biological and psychological levels--in terms of wholes and parts and of recognizing the different modes of causal explanation that obtain depending on whether the relations move from parts-to-whole or whole-to-parts. This, in turn, yields an explanatory pluralism under which all living systems, at any level of organization, exist as both subjects and objects. We ground this discussion by examining the ontological compatibility with a relational developmental systems perspective of two systems-oriented approaches to embodiment: the dynamic systems approach of Thelen and Smith (1994, 2006) and the enactive approach of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).