ABSTRACT
Although theories about generalization (or transfer) have abounded since the time of Aristotle’s DeAnima, the scientific debate over it did not take shape until the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, researchers at the two main centers of “associationism” in the United States, the University of Chicago and Columbia University, argued about the nature and developmental course of transfer. At Columbia, Edward Thorndike (1905) attacked the then-popular belief in the “theory of formal disciplines,” which alleged that training in one discipline enabled students to think more rationally in other disciplines. Learning Latin, for example, was thought to lead to a better understanding of English, not simply because these two languages shared many cognates but also because learning Latin was regarded as an exercise that promoted the development of logical reasoning. (Learning chess was also promoted in some quarters for the same reason.) Reasoning is reasoning, so the thinking went, and therefore learning how to reason in one context was thought to transfer to reasoning in other contexts. Thus, it was the presumed ubiquity of transfer that was responsible for its appeal. It represented a parsimonious way of accounting for the obvious fact that humans do not require explicit learning of all matters.
