Complexity and the Idea of Human Development

Abstract

Reflecting on ‘human development’ theorists face conceptual confusion, borne out experientially by contemporary ecological, social, and economic crises. Since concepts create realities (i.e. justify and motivate practices), and philosophers create concepts, it is important to consider how philosophers might respond to conceptual difficulties caused by the modern era’s still influential ‘binary’ paradigm, exemplified by the law of the excluded middle, which entails a discursive split between modernism’s ultimately predictable cosmos and postmodernism’s insistence on fundamental chaos. Supposedly obliged to choose between opposites, theorists are caught between the necessity and iniquity of both. This impasse sets up conditions for what Lyotard calls ‘differends,’ and constrains our power to create responsible concepts.