Cognitivism

Cognitivism is an approach to the mind and behaviour that, on the one hand, espouses an experimental, or more generally an empirical approach to understanding psychological functioning, and, on the other hand, claims that mental activity should be modelled as the processing of information using an internal symbol system, with discrete abstract symbols. Cognitivism, as a term, does not have the currency of, say, behaviourism or connectionism. However, as an approach to much of psychology, it is equally if not more important than those movements with more familiar names. The heyday of cognitivism was from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. So, when I was a student (of psychology in the United Kingdom) in the 1970s it seemed that almost all of psychology, except perhaps psychophysics, was cognitive psychology. And anything that wasn’t, wasn’t worth talking about. Cognition is the act of acquiring knowledge, and requires such ancillary skills as perception, language use, memory, thinking and reasoning, hence its ubiquity. Even the other two faculties of the human mind with which cognition is traditionally contrasted, conation and affection, cannot be easily separated from cognition. Both can have cognitive components, and both can impinge on the acquisition of knowledge. The cognitive approach was supposed to apply to these aspects of behaviour as well. By the 1970s the cognitive revolution of the 1950s had borne fruit. Behaviourism had been routed, and even theories of learning, the former bastion of radical behaviourism, were becoming cognitive (though there had been cognitively oriented theories in other branches of behaviourism – the concept of a cognitive map originated with Tolman in the 1930s). Developmental psychology was seen as being primarily about cognitive development, perhaps not surprisingly given the legacy of Piaget. Even social psychologists were turning to issues in what they called social cognition. I was only partly aware that I was steeped in an Anglo-Saxon tradition, according to which behaviourism had swept aside introspective approaches that led to irreconcilably different conclusions in the 1910s. It had then dominated North American psychology, in particular, up to the 1950s, when it adopted what was in some ways its most radical form, under the inuence of B. F. Skinner. Skinner’s refusal to model internal processes was characterised by cognitivists as intellectually bankrupt, and Chomsky was widely regarded as having shown Skinner’s approach to be incapable of providing a satisfactory account of how people acquire and use language, an ability

central to cognition. Karl Lashley’s analysis of structure in what he called the serial order of behaviour also suggested that the associationist principles underlying behaviourism were not sufcient to explain action, language and other aspects of human activity. Cognitivism as a major force in psychology has its roots in a computational (information processing) metaphor for the mental processes and behaviour of people and other animals. So, just as there had been an interest in, broadly speaking, computational metaphors before the twentieth century, there had been approaches to mind and behaviour that might be classed as cognitive (e.g., in the work of Leibniz, Pascal, and Babbage). However, with the advent of computers and other systems for the transmission of information, and the concomitant interest in related mathematical analyses, such as information theory and the (abstract) theory of computation, the metaphor nally took hold. These analyses showed that it was possible, pace Skinner, to describe in detail what happened inside a device that transformed inputs into outputs.