Cognitive revolution

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The "cognitive revolution" is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research, which in turn sparked a rethinking of several foundational concepts in the philosophy of science. The relevant areas of interchange were the combination of psychology, anthropology and linguistics with approaches developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science and neuroscience.

The cognitive revolution in psychology was a response to behaviorism, which was the predominant school in experimental psychology at the time. This school was heavily influenced by Ivan Pavlov, B.F. Skinner, and other physiologists, who had defined psychology as the science of behavior. They proposed that psychology could only become an objective science were it based on observable behavior in test subjects. Because mental events are not publicly observable, Behaviorist psychologists avoided description of mental processes or the mind in their literature.

The field of cognitive psychology developed as a response to this approach to psychology. Its main idea was that by studying and developing successful functions in artificial intelligence and computer science, it becomes possible to make testable inferences about human mental processes. This has been called the reverse-engineering approach.

The cognitive approach was brought to prominence by Donald Broadbent's book Perception and Communication in 1958. The publication of the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric Neisser in 1967 is also considered an important milestone. Other influential researchers included Noam Chomsky, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell. The cognitive revolution reached its height in the 1980's with publications by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and artificial intelligence experts like Douglas Hofstadter.

Proponents of the movement often cite Chomskian linguistics as an impetus for behaviorism's falling from popular favor. It should be noted, though, that the term "behaviorism" is an umbrella term that encompasses multiple approaches towards behavior. At the time the revolution occurred, the popular "behaviorism" was Kenneth Spence and Clark Hull's Stimulus-Response psychology. Radical (also called "thoroughgoing") behaviorists continued to hold to Skinner's behaviorist model of language acquisition, which some have argued was not adequately refuted by Chomsky's anti-behaviorist arguments (MacCorquodale 1970).

The rejection of mental states by the behaviorists was based on a philosophical concept known as Occam's Razor. It states that a theory should make the fewest assumptions possible while still accounting for known data. Radical behaviorists argue that data can be accounted for by using observable phenomena and that there is no need to assume a "mental" world exists at a metaphysical level. See parsimony. Cognitive psychologists argued in response that experimental investigation of mental states do allow scientists to produce theories that more reliably predict outcomes.

The success of the cognitive scientists in predicting and describing human behavior prevailed over the strict behaviorist approach. By the early 1990's the cognitive approach had become the dominant research line in many of the (applied) psychology research fields.

[edit] References

• Skinner, B. F. (1989). Review of Hull's Principles of Behavior. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 51, 287- 290
• Chomsky (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language 35(1):pp. 26-58.
• Ken MacCorquodale's Response to Chomsky's Review of Verbal Behavior [1]