Criteria for Competence

Chapter  6

A Constructivist Framework for Understanding Early and Late-Developing Psychological Competencies

Jacques MontangeroUniversity of Geneva

Consistent with psychologists’ historical understanding of their discipline as a scientific enterprise, the question of when and at what ages different psychological competencies develop has generally been considered an empirical problem to be decided through an appeal to the results of systematic observation. In this view, the recurring controversies that have accompanied this problem from its inception can be resolved only through methodological refinements leading to more precise and interprétable observational data. However, the fact that several decades of such methodological refinements have ...