Development and Change



Table of Content

Introduction3

Development and Change: Discussion with Historical Reflection3

Conclusion12

References/Bibliography14

Development and Change

Introduction

Although it generally is acknowledged that change characterizes many aspects of human life and the larger world and is associated especially closely with science and technology and their influence on society, this phenomenon is not easy to define. One puzzling issue concerns how an object can be one thing, then change, and still remain the same object (that has undergone change). How should such a relationship, which implies both noncontinuity and continuity, be distinguished from replacement? A common response to is to argue that in change there is some development or growth: A thing has immanent within it a feature that over time (through change) is made manifest. The application of this biological notion to scientific, technological, economic, political, or ethical change remains fundamentally problematic and may best be approached through comparisons and in historical terms.

Development and Change: Discussion with Historical Reflection

Early forms of the interrelated ideas of change and development were expressed in various instances of premodern (European and non-European) thought. Aristotle's On Coming to Be and Passing Away is the first systematic discussion of change. However, it was only in association with the scientific revolution of the 1600s and the Enlightenment of the 1700s that change became a theme for systematic articulation and gave rise to a concept of change as progress that has implications for science, technology, and ethics. The scientific revolution was understood by its proponents as a decisive progress in knowledge. Modern science claims as well as strives to represent a truer picture of nature than all previous sciences. In part, this knowledge depends on a more accurate understanding of development and change in the natural world.

The idea that human agency can be understood as social in origin and that all humans have the capacity to change their individual and collective destinies through the deployment of reason to combat tyranny, ignorance, superstition, and material deprivation was an important hallmark of European Enlightenment thinking. The notion that science can explain everything in nature, with the resulting knowledge being available to promote human progress, became the hallmark of modern rationalism and the social sciences. The first systematic compilation of scientific and technological knowledge to this end is contained in Denis Diderot's (1712-1784) Encyclopédie (1751-1772).

Armed with their ardent faith in the rationality of scientific methods and their ability to dissect and attack prevailing religious, social, political, and economic practices, many of the followers of the Enlightenment believed in and acted on the possibility of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness for all humanity. Studies of the evolution of human societies gave rise to the notion of modernization as a way to change cultural patterns and social hierarchies and divisions.

The idea of progress through change became ingrained in intellectual thought and social and political action. Imaginative thinkers of modernization such as Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825), and Robert Owen (1771-1858) claimed that the creative application of science and technology in industrial processes could unleash an ...