ABSTRACT
The past 20 years have seen an increasing emphasis on the idea that an organism actively contributes to the processes that psychologically characterize it. The passivity of the organism, assumed in the older forms of behaviorism, is apparently an idea no longer held by the majority of social and other psychologists. Markus and Zajonc (1985), in their chapter on the cognitive perspective in the Handbook of Social Psychology conclude that “one can no longer view today’s social psychology as the study of social behavior. It is more accurate to define it as the study of the social mind” (p. 137). Such a conclusion represents, at least on the surface, a radical departure from the assumptions and working principals of older systems and the system of the behavior analysts discussed in the previous chapter. This contention suggests a shift toward a Kantian inspired epistemology and away from that of the British empiricists. As Johnson (1989) recently suggested, “the very term ‘cognitive science’ would have been deemed an oxymoron by empiricist psychologists during the 19th and early 20th centuries” (p. 27). However, the issue is complicated and we need to examine it in some detail.
