James Mark Baldwin

1861-1934 · American · Developmental Psychology and Genetic Epistemology

The self is realized by taking in 'persons' from over against it; the ego and the alter are born together.

James Mark Baldwin was an American theorist of mental development — the founder, with a few others, of developmental psychology and of what he called genetic epistemology, the study of knowledge through the stages by which it grows in the child and the race. Where his contemporaries measured and experimented, Baldwin built theory: grand, dialectical, evolutionary systems of how mind, self, and knowledge come to be, out of which he coined a vocabulary — the circular reaction, imitation as the engine of learning, the "socius" or social self, organic selection — that shaped the field long after…

Topics James Mark Baldwin addresses

• genetic epistemology
• the circular reaction
• imitation as the engine of development
• assimilation and accommodation
• organic selection (the Baldwin effect)
• the social self
• the dialectic of personal growth
• the ego and the alter
• the socius
• the ejective self
• genetic logic
• the child and the race
• developmental stages
• mental development
• persistent imitation and invention
• the theory of reality
• habit and accommodation
• selective thinking
• the self as a social construction
• development and evolution
• the sense of the other
• the genetic method
• determinate stages of knowledge
• suggestion and the growth of will

Converse with James Mark Baldwin on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in James Mark Baldwin's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.