tions to environmental demands and opportunities, facilitated or constrained
by transactional experiences and activities, and maturation.
Developmental Variability Versus Invariance
Traditionally, intellectual development is considerednormativeandinvariant,
a more-or-less, sooner-or-later matter. Piaget’s structuralist view of intellec-
tual development clearly has perpetuated this conception. In all fairness,
Piaget (1967, 1981) also considered affect and motivation as indispensable for
intellectual functioning and development. Piaget (1967) asserted that “there
is a constant parallel between the affective and intellectual life throughout
childhood and adolescence. This statement will seem surprising only if one
attempts to dichotomize the life of the mind into emotions and thoughts. But
nothing could be more false or superficial” (p. 15). According to this
parallellist view, affect provides energy and the valuation of an activity (what
he called energetics), and cognition provides structure. Thus affect may accel-
erate cognitive development, but it never changes the cognitive structures,
which are considered invariant in their developmental trajectories. However,
Piaget also seemed to espouse another competing view of the interplay of af-
fect and cognition in his explication of cognitive disequilibrium. According to
this view, affect or emotion is epiphenomenal to cognition (Piaget, 1952; see
Cicchetti & Hesse, 1983 for a discussion). This is simply the recurrent issue of
the primacy of cognition versus emotion at the developmental level. Either
way, developmental variability in intellectual functioning in terms of diver-
gent paths is not within the purview of Piaget’s theory.
The Emergent Intellectual Agency
The central issue of intellectual development is how to describe and explain
the emergent intellectual agency, broadly defined, of the developing person.
Piaget (1950, 1952), arguing from an epistemological point of view, provided
a plausible account of the development of scientific thinking during child-
hood and adolescence. In a neo-Piagetian tradition, Pascual-Leone and
Johnson (chap. 8) attempt to provide a rich account of the emergent agency
in terms of cognitive and affective schemes (i.e., action patterns), self-
motivation, reflective consciousness, and the self. What they delineate is an
emergent architecture of human agency booted by both biological matura-
tion and social-contextual experiences. It is worth noting that neurobio-
logical perspectives and evidence are heavily enlisted for this purpose. What
emerge from this architecture are various mental operations and functions
(i.e., the integration of second order discussed earlier), as well as primary and
extended consciousness, intentionality, and the self (i.e., the integration of
third order). The construct that holds three levels of analysis together as the
- BEYOND COGNITIVISM 19