Cognitivism (psychology)

For other uses, see Cognitivism (disambiguation).

Psychology
History · Subfields
Basic science
Abnormal · Biological Cognitive · Comparative Cultural · Differential Developmental · Evolutionary Experimental · Mathematical Personality · Positive Social
Applied science
Applied behavior analysis Clinical · Community Consumer · Educational · Health Industrial and organizational Legal · Military Occupational health · Political Religion · School · Sport
Lists
Disciplines · Organizations Outline · Psychologists Psychotherapies · Publications Research methods · Theories Timeline · Topics
Portal
v · d · e

In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that came into usage in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition. Cognitive psychology dervived its name from the Latin cognoscere, referring to knowing and information, thus cognitive psychology is an information processing psychology derived in part from earlier traditions of the investigation of thought and problem solving.^{[1] [2]} Behaviorists acknowledged the existence of thinking, but identified it as a behavior. Cognitivists argued that the way people think impacts their behavior and therefore cannot be a behavior in and of itself. Cognitivists later argued that thinking is so essential to psychology that the study of thinking should become its own field.^[2]

Theoretical approach

Cognitivism has two major components, one methodological, the other theoretical. Methodologically, cognitivism adopts a positivist approach and the belief that psychology can be (in principle) fully explained by the use of experiment, measurement and the scientific method.^{[citation needed]} This is also largely a reductionist goal, with the belief that individual components of mental function (the 'cognitive architecture') can be identified and meaningfully understood.^{[citation needed]} The second is the belief that cognition consists of discrete, internal mental states (representations or symbols) whose manipulation can be described in terms of rules or algorithms.^{[citation needed]}. All of these assumptions come from a school of metaphysics known as naturalism and have been severely criticized as they have not been able to provide any adequate support for their claims and assumptions. Cognitivism becomes ever more specious once the collapse of positivism as a theory of meaning is acknowledged.

Cognitivism became the dominant force in psychology in the late-20th century, replacing behaviorism as the most popular paradigm for understanding mental function. Cognitive psychology is not a wholesale refutation of behaviorism, but rather an expansion that accepts that mental states exist. This was due to the increasing criticism towards the end of the 1950s of simplistic learning models. One of the most notable criticisms was Chomsky's argument that language could not be acquired purely through conditioning, and must be at least partly explained by the existence of internal mental states.

The main issues that interest cognitive psychologists are the inner mechanisms of human thought and the processes of knowing. Cognitive psychologists have attempted to shed some light on the alleged mental structures that stand in a causal relationship to our physical actions.

Criticisms of psychological cognitivism

In the 1990s, various new theories emerged and challenged cognitivism and the idea that thought was best described as computation. Some of these new approaches, often influenced by phenomenological and post-modernist philosophy, include situated cognition, distributed cognition, dynamicism, embodied cognition. Some thinkers working in the field of artificial life (for example Rodney Brooks) have also produced non-cognitivist models of cognition. On the other hand, much of early cognitive psychology, and the work of many currently active cognitive psychologists does not treat cognitive processes as computational. The idea that mental functions can be described as information processing models has been criticised by philosopher John Searle and mathematician Roger Penrose who both argue that computation has some inherent shortcomings which cannot capture the fundamentals of mental processes.

• Penrose uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem (which states that there are mathematical truths which can never be proven in a sufficiently strong mathematical system; any sufficiently strong system of axioms will also be incomplete) and Turing's halting problem (which states that there are some things which are inherently non-computable) as evidence for his position.
• Searle has developed two arguments, the first (well known through his Chinese Room thought experiment) is the 'syntax is not semantics' argument—that a program is just syntax, understanding requires semantics, therefore programs (hence cognitivism) cannot explain understanding. Such an argument presupposes the controversial notion of a private language. The second, which Searle now prefers but is less well known, is his 'syntax is not physics' argument—nothing in the world is intrinsically a computer program except as applied, described or interpreted by an observer, so either everything can be described as a computer and trivially a brain can but then this does not explain any specific mental processes, or there is nothing intrinsic in a brain that makes it a computer (program). Detractors of this argument might point out that the same thing could be said about any concept-object relation, and that the brain-computer analogy can be a perfectly useful model if there is a strong isomorphism between the two. Both points, Searle claims, refute cognitivism.

Another argument against cognitivism is the problems of Ryle's Regress or the homunculus fallacy. Cognitivists have offered a number of arguments to refute these attacks.

See also

• Cognition
• Cognitive psychology
• Cognitive science
• Computationalism
• Consciousness
• Critical psychology
• Educational psychology
• Enactivism
• Phenomenology
• Postcognitivism
• Symbol grounding
• Important publications in cognitivism

Further reading

• Costall, A. and Still, A. (eds) (1987) Cognitive Psychology in Question. Brighton: Harvester Press Ltd. ISBN 0-7108-1057-1
• Searle, J. R. Is the brain a digital computer APA Presidential Address
• Wallace, B ., Ross, A., Davies, J.B., and Anderson T., (eds) (2007) The Mind, the Body and the World: Psychology after Cognitivism. London: Imprint Academic. ISBN 978-1845400736

References

1. ^ Mandler, G. (2002). Origins of the cognitive (r)evolution. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 38, 339-353
2. ^ ^{a b} [|Lilienfeld, Scott O.]; [|Lynn, Steven Jay]; [|Namy, Laura L.]; [|Woolf, Nancy J.] (2010), "1", Psychology: A Framework For Everyday Thinking, Pearson Education Incorporated, pp. 24–28, ISBN 0-205-65408-1