ABSTRACT
Ever since the time of the ancient Greeks, scholars from a variety of fields have grappled with the idea of mental representation. Prior to the advent of behaviorism in the 1930s, most psychologists, philosophers, and linguists acknowledged the existence and important role of representation in the human mind but nevertheless argued about the nature, origin, and development of representational entities (Chomsky, 1980; Fodor, 1975). During the behaviorist period, these arguments were put on hold because the behaviorists maintained that (a) psychologists should only posit and employ constructs that help them predict or modify human behavior and (b) adding representational constructs (e.g., imagery, concepts, etc.) to a psychological theory does help a psychologist become more successful at predicting or modifying behavior (Skinner, 1974). Therefore, they argued that because representational constructs are fairly useless to the practice of psychological science (as they defined it), little time should be spent discussing the nature and origin of representations. During the 1950s, an increasing number of psychologists began to argue (or at least quietly acknowledge) that representations are useful explanatory constructs (Gholson & Barker, 1985). Then, after the Cognitive Revolution of the 1960s ushered in a plethora of cognitivist theories (e.g., Piaget, Vygotsky, schema theory, etc.), arguments about the nature and origin of mental representations reemerged.
