I agree that one of the problems with constructive development theory, as you seem to hint at, is that it sets off certain alarm bells in your mind because it matches the same patterns as things which we have now concluded to be incorrect or just instruments for abuse of power.
Explicit levels are a common tactic taken to try to give rationalizations of why this person or that person of higher status “deserves” that status against human egalitarian norms, so naturally any theory that includes something like them feels a bit icky, and nothing in the material presented here does much to clear that up.
I’ve also not read a good explanation of constructive development theory that would make sense to someone who doesn’t understand the subject-objection notation (that is, I’ve seen nothing that does a great job of explaining subject-object notation to someone who doesn’t immediately grasp the concept and then just needs some details filled in) or who hasn’t started thinking at least some of the time at level 4.
However constructive development theory certainly hasn’t been as vigorously researched and written about as many other topics in psychology, and lacking any strong disconfirming evidence I’m inclined to suspect we might find good evidence and helpful explanations if we spend some more time digging into it.
I’m woefully under-skilled for the task of both rigorous scientific studies and clear explanations that will satisfy a wide audience, so my main hope is that my insights spur on a few folks who are appropriately skilled to dig deeper.
No, I wasn’t hinting that it sets off alarm bells because it pattern-matches against other things that we’ve found to be wrong or harmful.
I was saying that the author of the piece in question shows signs of intellectual dishonesty: presenting this taxonomy in a way that makes it clear that he sees people at higher levels as more capable, more fit for high responsibility, etc., while also claiming explicitly not to think any such thing. This of course has little bearing on whether the theory is correct (my feeling is that like most such theories it’s describing something real but putting more structure on it than the reality actually has; different people think at different levels of abstraction, have more or less detailed models of the world, care differently about others, etc., and all these things are continuously variable and dividing into “stages” is artificial) but—and at this point I am pattern-matching—it seems to me like it might be a sign that he, and so maybe others, may be embracing the theory for the feeling of superiority it gives as well as for its actual merits.
someone who doesn’t understand the subject-object notation
I’m not sure whether that’s me or not. I mean, the description in the article you linked to seems perfectly straightforward but it seems to me that the right way to think about it is that you have
a notation for indicating steps from A to B (A; A(B) meaning “basically A but with B beginning to creep in”; A/B meaning “a mixture of A and B, with A having the upper hand”, B/A meaning “a mixture of A and B, with B having the upper hand”, and B(A) meaning “basically B but with occasional bits of A”)
the ability to use this notation when A and B are successive steps along some path of cognitive development, with a little more specificity in the meanings of the steps (e.g., the boundary between A/B and B/A being which of two frameworks you mostly use for understanding things)
one specific application to CDT
and the only place where subjects and objects come into it is in the fact—which has basically nothing to do with the notation—that CDT has this idea that you can be acted upon by things that are at too high a level of abstraction, too large a scope, for you to be thinking about them explicitly, and that important progress happens when you gain the ability to think about them rather than merely being acted on by them. Which is all very well but really isn’t a reason to call it “subject-object notation”.
I agree that one of the problems with constructive development theory, as you seem to hint at, is that it sets off certain alarm bells in your mind because it matches the same patterns as things which we have now concluded to be incorrect or just instruments for abuse of power.
Explicit levels are a common tactic taken to try to give rationalizations of why this person or that person of higher status “deserves” that status against human egalitarian norms, so naturally any theory that includes something like them feels a bit icky, and nothing in the material presented here does much to clear that up.
I’ve also not read a good explanation of constructive development theory that would make sense to someone who doesn’t understand the subject-objection notation (that is, I’ve seen nothing that does a great job of explaining subject-object notation to someone who doesn’t immediately grasp the concept and then just needs some details filled in) or who hasn’t started thinking at least some of the time at level 4.
However constructive development theory certainly hasn’t been as vigorously researched and written about as many other topics in psychology, and lacking any strong disconfirming evidence I’m inclined to suspect we might find good evidence and helpful explanations if we spend some more time digging into it.
I’m woefully under-skilled for the task of both rigorous scientific studies and clear explanations that will satisfy a wide audience, so my main hope is that my insights spur on a few folks who are appropriately skilled to dig deeper.
No, I wasn’t hinting that it sets off alarm bells because it pattern-matches against other things that we’ve found to be wrong or harmful.
I was saying that the author of the piece in question shows signs of intellectual dishonesty: presenting this taxonomy in a way that makes it clear that he sees people at higher levels as more capable, more fit for high responsibility, etc., while also claiming explicitly not to think any such thing. This of course has little bearing on whether the theory is correct (my feeling is that like most such theories it’s describing something real but putting more structure on it than the reality actually has; different people think at different levels of abstraction, have more or less detailed models of the world, care differently about others, etc., and all these things are continuously variable and dividing into “stages” is artificial) but—and at this point I am pattern-matching—it seems to me like it might be a sign that he, and so maybe others, may be embracing the theory for the feeling of superiority it gives as well as for its actual merits.
I’m not sure whether that’s me or not. I mean, the description in the article you linked to seems perfectly straightforward but it seems to me that the right way to think about it is that you have
a notation for indicating steps from A to B (A; A(B) meaning “basically A but with B beginning to creep in”; A/B meaning “a mixture of A and B, with A having the upper hand”, B/A meaning “a mixture of A and B, with B having the upper hand”, and B(A) meaning “basically B but with occasional bits of A”)
the ability to use this notation when A and B are successive steps along some path of cognitive development, with a little more specificity in the meanings of the steps (e.g., the boundary between A/B and B/A being which of two frameworks you mostly use for understanding things)
one specific application to CDT
and the only place where subjects and objects come into it is in the fact—which has basically nothing to do with the notation—that CDT has this idea that you can be acted upon by things that are at too high a level of abstraction, too large a scope, for you to be thinking about them explicitly, and that important progress happens when you gain the ability to think about them rather than merely being acted on by them. Which is all very well but really isn’t a reason to call it “subject-object notation”.