ABSTRACT
Cognitive revolution, beginning in the 1950s, has made cognition the central topic in psychology. It succeeded with relative ease and as Gardner (1985: 174) remarked with somewhat militant metaphors, by the 1980s ‘cognitive psychologists have won the battle on their chosen field within psychology. … Nearly all researchers accept the need and the advisability of positing a level of mental representation.’ In the year when Gardner’s book was published, another revolution was already in progress. This more silent and more prolonged revolution has been initiated mainly by social psychologists, but some cognitive psychologists, for example Jerome Bruner, who had been active around the cradle of cognitive psychology itself, also participate in it. More radical representatives call this movement discursive revolution (Harré 1994), the driving force of which is the denial of mental representations, at least in the social psychology. Potter and Wetherell (1987) detach discourse analysis from the cognitive science in their programmatic book, and they place both analysis and explanation to a social psychological level, which is independent from cognitive representations.
