Cognitive revolution
The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science.[1] The preexisting relevant fields were psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy.[2] The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies[3] and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science.[4] By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm.[5][6][7] Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.
For the emergence of cognitively modern behavior in humans, see Behavioral modernity.A key goal of early cognitive psychology was to apply the scientific method to the study of human cognition.[1] Some of the main ideas and developments from the cognitive revolution were the use of the scientific method in cognitive science research, the necessity of mental systems to process sensory input, the innateness of these systems, and the modularity of the mind.[8][1][9] Important publications in triggering the cognitive revolution include psychologist George Miller's 1956 article "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two"[10] (one of the most frequently cited papers in psychology),[11] linguist Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957)[12] and "Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" (1959),[13][14] and foundational works in the field of artificial intelligence by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon, such as the 1958 article "Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving".[10] Ulric Neisser's 1967 book Cognitive Psychology was also a landmark contribution.[15]
Historical background[edit]
Prior to the cognitive revolution, behaviorism was the dominant trend in psychology in the United States. Behaviorists were interested in "learning", which was seen as "the novel association of stimuli with responses."[16] Animal experiments played a significant role in behaviorist research, and prominent behaviorist J. B. Watson, interested in describing the responses of humans and animals as one group, stated that there was no need to distinguish between the two. Watson hoped to learn to predict and control behavior through his research. The popular Hull-Spence stimulus-response approach was, according to George Mandler, impossible to use to research topics that held the interest of cognitive scientists, like memory and thought, because both the stimulus and the response were thought of as completely physical events. Behaviorists typically did not research these subjects.[16] B. F. Skinner, a functionalist behaviorist, criticized certain mental concepts like instinct as "explanatory fiction(s)", ideas that assume more than humans actually know about a mental concept.[17] Various types of behaviorists had different views on the exact role (if any) that consciousness and cognition played in behavior.[18] Although behaviorism was popular in the United States, Europe was not particularly influenced by it, and research on cognition could easily be found in Europe during this time.[16]
Noam Chomsky has framed the cognitive and behaviorist positions as rationalist and empiricist, respectively,[19] which are philosophical positions that arose long before behaviorism became popular and the cognitive revolution occurred. Empiricists believe that humans acquire knowledge only through sensory input, while rationalists believe that there is something beyond sensory experience that contributes to human knowledge. However, whether Chomsky's position on language fits into the traditional rationalist approach has been questioned by philosopher John Cottingham.[20]
George Miller, one of the scientists involved in the cognitive revolution, sets the date of its beginning as September 11, 1956, when several researchers from fields like experimental psychology, computer science, and theoretical linguistics presented their work on cognitive science-related topics at a meeting of the 'Special Interest Group in Information Theory' at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This interdisciplinary cooperation went by several names like cognitive studies and information-processing psychology but eventually came to be known as cognitive science. Grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in the 1970s advanced interdisciplinary understanding in the relevant fields and supported the research that led to the field of cognitive neuroscience.[2]
Criticism[edit]
There have been criticisms of the typical characterization of the shift from behaviorism to cognitivism.
Henry L. Roediger III argues that the common narrative most people believe about the cognitive revolution is inaccurate. The narrative he describes states that psychology started out well but lost its way and fell into behaviorism, but this was corrected by the Cognitive Revolution, which essentially put an end to behaviorism. He claims that behavior analysis is actually still an active area of research that produces successful results in psychology and points to the Association for Behavior Analysis International as evidence. He claims that behaviorist research is responsible for successful treatments of autism, stuttering, and aphasia, and that most psychologists actually study observable behavior, even if they interpret their results cognitively. He believes that the change from behaviorism to cognitivism was gradual, slowly evolving by building on behaviorism.[22]
Lachman and Butterfield were among the first to imply that cognitive psychology has a revolutionary origin.[23] Thomas H. Leahey has criticized the idea that the introduction of behaviorism and the cognitive revolution were actually revolutions and proposed an alternative history of American psychology as "a narrative of research traditions."[18]
Other authors criticize behaviorism, but they also criticize the cognitive revolution for having adopted new forms of anti-mentalism.
Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner criticized the adoption of the computational theory of mind and the exclusion of meaning from cognitive science, and he characterized one of the primary objects of the cognitive revolution as changing the study of psychology so that meaning was its core.[24]
His understanding of the cognitive revolution revolves entirely around "meaning-making" and the hermeneutic description of how people go about this. He believes that the cognitive revolution steered psychology away from behaviorism and this was good, but then another form of anti-mentalism took its place: computationalism. Bruner states that the cognitive revolution should replace behaviorism rather than only modify it.[24]
Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman argues in his book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1991) that a positive result of the emergence of "cognitive science" was the departure from "simplistic behaviorism". However, he adds, a negative result was the growing popularity of a total misconception of the nature of thought: the computational theory of mind or cognitivism, which asserts that the brain is a computer that processes symbols whose meanings are entities of the objective world. In this view, the symbols of the mind correspond exactly to entities or categories in the world defined by criteria of necessary and sufficient conditions, that is, classical categories. The representations would be manipulated according to certain rules that constitute a syntax.
Edelman rejects the idea that objects of the world come in classical categories, and also rejects the idea that the brain/mind is a computer. The author rejects behaviorism (a points he also makes in his 2006 book Second Nature. Brain science and human knowledge),[25] but also cognitivism (the computational-representational theory of the mind), since the latter conceptualizes the mind as a computer and meaning as objective correspondence. Furthermore, Edelman criticizes "functionalism", the idea that formal and abstract functional properties of the mind can be analyzed without making direct reference to the brain and its processes.[26]
Edelman asserts that most of those who work in the field of cognitive psychology and cognitive science seem to adhere to this computational view, but he mentions some important exceptions. Exceptions include John Searle, Jerome Bruner, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Alan Gauld, Benny Shanon, Claes von Hofsten, and others. Edelman argues that he agrees with the critical and dissenting approaches of these authors that are exceptions to the majority view of cognitivism.[27]
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