Reductionism versus emergentism:A framework for understanding conceptions of giftedness

New Directions in Talent Development Research: A Developmental Systems Perspective

“…The relational developmental systems approach still honors the traditional orthogenetic principle of development “from a state of relative globality and lack of differentiation to a state of increasing differentiation, articulation, and hierarchical integration” (Werner, , p.126), yet with an emphasis on the developing person as a multi‐level, open, and adaptive system, with its interaction with the environment capable of producing true novelty and complexity (Lewis, ). To capture this multi‐level system at work in talent development, I (Dai, , ) developed a multi‐level analytic framework presented in Figure , which shows how the evolving complexity builds up through over time (Dai, ).…”

“…As Bronfenbrenner and Ceci () pointed out, developmental potentials for development “are not merely passive possibilities but active dispositions expressed in selective patterns of attention, action, and responses” (p. 572). By emphasizing the importance of the intensity and duration of the transactional experiences, which they called proximal processes , they in effect argued for functional autonomy (Allport, ) of person–environment transactions; that is, the effectiveness of such a functional system we call talent is not reducible to genetic differences in capacities or predispositions (see also Dai, , for a non‐reductionistic, emergentist argument).…”

The ‘high ability’ debate: introduction to the special issue

“…James Borland, one of the leaders of this movement, advocates 'the death of giftedness' and 'gifted education without gifted children', that is, appropriately differentiated provision for all learners, including those who learn more quickly than age peers (Borland, 2003(Borland, , 2005. David Yun Dai, one of the contributors to this issue, has noted the bifurcation of the field into 'reductionist' and 'emergentist' conceptions (Dai, 2005).…”

Book reviews

“…Although it is made clear from the start of the publication that all contributions relate to the US, some of the key questions raised are reflected in current government initiatives in other countries, including the UK. Many issues explored throughout the book, such as the ongoing nature-nurture debate about intelligence (Dai, 2005;White, 2006) and the promotion of a more inclusive approach to identification (Eyre, 1997;Freeman, 1998;Winstanley, 2006) have been discussed for decades, but the focus on talents across the life-span in different cultural contexts enables the reader to consider these from different perspectives.…”