ABSTRACT
I have been heartened by indications of two general shifts in psychological theorizing. The first, which was already underway by the time of Chomsky's (1959) review of Skinner's (1957) book Verbal Behavior, is, I think, now securely established. It is the shift from an exclusive preoccupation with learning and hence with environmental influences during the life of a single individual, implicity regarded as a kind of structureless tabula rasa, and toward concern for the highly developed structure that each organism brings with it into the world by virtue of its evolutionarily conferred biological endowment and through which environmental events have their particular effects and internal interpretations. The second shift, though related to the first, is more recent and perhaps less widely accepted. It is a shift from a preoccupation with discrete sequential processes presumed to mediate observed behavior to a concern with structurally dense parallel or analogical representations that are operated upon by those processes and that, in turn, guide and constrain those processes (Shepard, 1975, 1981; Shepard & Cooper, 1982).
