The explanatory significance of wholes: How exclusive reliance on antecedent-consequent models of explanation undermines the study of persons

Psychology has long labored under a mechanistic view of persons as reducible to parts (i.e., traits) that dictate human functioning. Efforts to study persons holistically—as embodied wholes embedded in the world—have resuscitated the study of personhood and its development, overhauling linear cause-effect models of psychological functioning in favor of emergence-focused, dynamic process alternatives rooted in the concept of persons as necessarily constituted within interactive context. Focused on agency and self-determination, the study of personhood also calls for an appreciation of the explanatory significance of persons as persons, as unified wholes who preserve their own organization in the face of ceaseless exchange with the world. Fully adopting this important vantage point for understanding persons, however, is only possible by expanding notions of scientific explanation beyond the temporal framework of antecedent-consequent, parts-to-whole relations in order to embrace a person's wholeness itself as a legitimate mode of explanation for understanding functioning.