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The dynamic systems (DS) approach has emerged as an influential and potentially unifying metatheory for developmental science. Its central platform – the argument against design – suggests that structure spontaneously and without prescription emerges through self-organization. In one of the most prominent accounts of DS, Thelen and her colleagues Spencer, Dineva, Schöner, 2009a; Thelen Smith, 1994, 2006 have extended the argument against design to a complete ontological rejection of structural explanation. I argue that this antistructuralist stance conceptually undermines the very principle of emergence through self-organization upon which the approach is built, jeopardizing its process focus. Taking emergence seriously entails a strong commitment to circular causality and the reciprocal nature of structure-function relations through the adoption of a pluralistic model of causality, one that recognizes both local-to-global processes of construction and global-to-local processes of constraint.
David C. Witherington (Sat,) studied this question.