Showing papers on "Cognitivism (psychology) published in 1992"

Towards a Practice of Autonomous Systems

Abstract: When the electromagnet (relay) is energized, the plunger is pulled into the coil against the bias of the plunger spring. The pin projecting laterally from the plunger is captive in the opening in the cam pivoted on the frame. The pin moves down and strikes a ramp portion in the cam and is deflected to the bottom of the notch where it impacts the cam and rotates it to a position in which the cam surface actuates the switch actuator. The internal switch spring acting on the actuator exerts force on the cam surface and cooperates with the contour to hold the cam in either position. When the coil is de-energized, the plunger moves out and the pin is deflected by the return guide surface of the frame to pass to the opposite side of the cam centerline and into position to actuate the cam in the opposite sense when the coil is again energized.

Essentialism and selectionism in cognitive science and behavior analysis.

Abstract: Contingencies of selection, be they phylogenetic or ontogenetic, merely set boundaries on units; they do not provide blueprints. Thus, variability is fundamental to all products of selection. Skinner, by characterizing the units of analysis in behavior as generic in nature, established his science squarely within the selectionist paradigm, thereby avoiding the tendency, common throughout psychology, to slip into essentialist analyses. The distinction between essentialism and selectionism is refined in this article, and prominent examples of essentialism in linguistics, theories of memory, theories of representation, associationism, and even in behavior analysis are identified. Recent trends in cognitive science—specifically, research on adaptive networks—is amenable to a selectionist interpretation, suggesting the possibility of future fruitful interactions with behavior analysis. In this article we import a distinction from evolutionary biology—that between selectionism and essentialism— to discuss contrasting trends in cognitive science. Largely because of the prestige of Darwin's theory, essentialism is out of fashion as an explicit doctrine in science. However, one can pay lip service to selectionism and still subscribe to essentialist assumptions, employ essentialist locutions, define essentialist units of analysis, and worse, pursue research guided by these assumptions, units, and locutions. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, B. F. Skinner consistently repudiated essentialism (although he never used the term) both in his science and in his verbal behavior. Of particular significance, we argue, was Skinner's early methodological claim that the appropriate units of analysis in a science of behavior are to be defined empirically, rather than a priori (Skinner, 1935, 1938). By putting this claim into practice, Skinner set the stage for a thoroughgoing selectionist science and so avoided much of the fruitless inquiry engendered by implicit essentialist assumptions. The field of behavior analysis has generally, although not always, hewn to Skinner's precepts and remains psychology's most consistently selectionist enterprise. In contrast, many contemporary cognitive scientists, while accepting selectionism at the phylogenetic level, explicitly reject Skinner's position without subscribing to an alternative selectionist methodology; consequently, much normative cognitive science, we argue, is prone to essentialist assumptions and locutions that have engendered research, which, from a selectionist's point of view, is uninterpretable. In our opinion, the distinction between behaviorism and cognitivism is less fundamental than the distinction between selectionism and essentialism. Behavior analysts are well advised to consider those cognitive analyses that are selectionist and question any behaviorist analyses that smack of essentialism. We close on the optimistic note that current trends in cognitive science, particularly the growing interest in adaptive networks, or parallel-distributed processing, are amenable to selectionist interpretations. This suggests the possibility of fruitful interactions between such models of cognition and radical behavioral accounts of complex human behavior.

Piaget's Enduring Contribution to Developmental Psychology.

Abstract: Piaget's transformation of society's conception of childhood thought and intelligent is described in 4 periods in the history of his research program, which spanned from the 1920s to the 1980s. The account stresses the enduring contribution to developmental psychology of Piaget's constructivism, his description of developmental mechanisms, his cognitivism, his explication of structural and functional analysis, and his address of epistemological issues and nontraditional methodologies

The consumer situation: An integrative model for research in marketing∗

Abstract: The paper is concerned until the growth of knowledge in consumer research and its implications for our conceptions of consumer behaviour and marketing management. It argues that, despite its success in initiating the modern era of consumer research, cognitive psychology's very pre‐eminence is now a barrier to intellectual development in the field. Scientific progress requires the juxtaposing of alternative theoretical stances with cognitive consumer psychology to encourage an interplay of competing explanations. The paper begins this process by developing a model of purchase and consumption based on a critical reappraisal of behaviour analysis, a psychological paradigm which is antithetical at almost all points to cognitivism. This original model provides a unique interpretation of the major classes of consumer behaviour: maintenance, accumulation, pleasure and accomplishment. The paper considers the implications of the model for our understanding of consumer choice and marketing management. It concludes ...

Categorizing and Combining Theories of Cognitive Development and Learning

Abstract: The present paper considers the centrality of meta-theoretical belief systems (MTBSs) for theories of cognitive development and learning. It is argued that MTBSs guide and constrain the construction of theoretical models and developmental mechanisms. Moreover, it is shown how MTBSs can be effectively used to categorize theories and to address the issue of whether theories of cognitive development and learning can be coherently combined to form larger, more comprehensive theories. The paper proceeds by first defining the nature of theories and then defining eight major MTBSs: nativism, empiricism, constructivism, structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, neobehaviorism, and cognitivism. Following this exposition, it is shown how MTBSs underlie model construction. Next, the issue of whether theories can be combined is discussed in terms of the logical compatibility of their underlying MTBSs. Then, two contemporary theories which combine constructs from several different theoretical perspectives are described to illustrate how theories can be combined coherently. Finally, implications are drawn.

Positivism and the Prospects for Cognitive Science

Abstract: It may seem perverse to speak of positivistic tendencies in modern cognitive science. The rise of the cognitive tradition, after all, marked the end of the most blatantly positivistic period in psychology’s history; and, however one might judge the merits and limitations of cognitivism, a common view is that it has at least saved us from the positivistic excesses of the behaviorists. Yet this is only partly true. As Stephen Toulmin (1969) has pointed out in a related connection, “even though we slay our intellectual parents, we cannot help but inherit from them” (pp. 50–51); and so have the cognitivists, without fully realizing it, inherited certain attitudes and tendencies from the positivists. This is not to overlook some rather obvious differences between the two traditions. As an empirical enterprise, contemporary cognitive science is not a positivistic science by any stretch of the imagination. Its basic terms of reference are seldom clearly tied to observations; and some current styles of cognitive research, for example, certain approaches to computer modelling, are even explicitly nonempirical in character.

Cognitivism, Contemporary Film Theory and Method: A Response to Warren Buckland

Abstract: As its title indicates, my book-Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory-rejects a great many of the presuppositions of the cinema studies establishment in the United States and Britain today. Moreover, since the British journal Screen was the source of many of those presuppositions, it is not surprising that it published a scathing response to Mystifying Movies. That response took the form of a substantial article by Warren Buckland entitled "Critique of Poor Reason." Screen sent neither me nor my publisher a copy of this review article. I came across it over a year after its publication date. I wrote to Screen requesting an author's right to refute Buckland's charges in an article of comparable length. Screen suggested that I write a five-page letter to the editor, or, if I wanted to write an article, that it connect my dispute with Buckland to larger methodological issues in the debate between psychoanalytic film theory and my view, which is sometimes called cognitivism. The following article was my attempt to implement the second option. Screen rejected the article. Whether Screen rejected it as a result of a judgment that it does not sufficiently address significant methodological issues or as an attempt to repress alternative voices in the predictably Stalinist manner of Lysenko is a question for the reader to resolve. . . .

Condillac, inventeur d'un nouveau matérialisme

Abstract: Condillac as the inventor of a new materialism. ; The originality of Condillac's materialism does not lie in his ontology but in his theory of knowledge. The development of modern cognitivism enables us to judge more favourably its radically new elements, namely the rejection of faculties in favour of self-organisation and the explanation of intellectual performance by stacking up acquired systems of information processing. The role of language as action (affirming consists in pronouncing a statement) allows us to understand how the most abstract cognitive activity depends on the human being's corporeal participation in the world.

The Other Side of Representation: Critical Theory and the New Cognitivism

Abstract: What remains here and now of Hegel is a still unanswered question: is a general theory of representation possible? Hegel himself assumed both that such a theory was at hand and that its appearance would mark the beginning of a shift from the picture-thinking of all prior consciousness to the new age of absolute knowledge. The audacious conceit of the Phenomenology of Spirit, of course, is its claim to be the text which both presents the general theory and triggers the final revolution, the text which brings to an end the very history it relates. Yet the Phenomenology itself has also blocked the revolution it announces.

Language, Rule-Governed Behavior, and Cognitivism: On Moerk's Integration of Skinner's and Chomsky's Approaches to Language

Abstract: This is a friendly critique of Moerk’ s synthesis of cognitive and behavioral approaches to language. The critique addresses four dangers we all have trouble avoiding: (a) the confusion of rule-governed and contingency-controlled behavior, (b) the acceptance of the mentalistic implications common to cognitive terminology, (c) the nonrigorous use of behavioral concepts, and (d) the acceptance of the structuralist limitations common to linguistics.

Problems and Prospects for Cognitive Constructionism in Postpositivist Psychology

Abstract: Over a third of a century has passed since the philosopher Passmore (1967) announced the demise of positivism. While positivism seems to have disintegrated rather quickly and its epitaph already written, behaviorism, positivism’s closest ally on the psychology side of disciplinary boundaries, is fading away only gradually. It is often said that cognitivism has replaced behaviorism as the dominant perspective in North American psychology. However, it is not easy to assess the merits, problems, and prospects of cognitivism, because like behaviorism and positivism, it comes in many varieties. Like hardy strains of adaptive organisms, these perspectives resist extinction; they mutate and reappear in more or less benign, beneficial, deceptive, as well as insidious forms. Although never consecrated as official doctrines (even Skinner denied being a positivist), varieties of neopositivism have deeply shaped the way many of psychologists look at the world. For decades, Carnapian positivism served as an implicit and loose but pervasive metatheoretical framework that tried to unite the diverse areas within psychology and to integrate them with a unified body of scientific knowledge. However, the Carnapian ideal of the unity of science has failed to materialize, and it is clear that a unity in fields of knowledge cannot be forced under the imperial domination of a single discipline ruling by the decree of doctrines such as reductionism. Nevertheless, today as in the past, there is a need for a broad metatheoretical framework within which the specialists in the varied fields within and across the boundaries of psychology could meaningfully communicate and collaborate with one another.

Perception, Connectionism, and Cognitive Science

Abstract: Recent findings in neurophysiology and cognitive science point to the same conclusion: cognition can be explained without appeal to the representations and rules of earlier cognitivist explanations. Yet if this is true, we want to know what form the alternative explanation will take and what processes are responsible for cognitive phenomena like perception. In this paper l discuss three issues: (1) the correct characterization of the alternative to cognitivism; (2) the resulting view of perception based on the alternative; and (3) the implications of this alternative explanatory framework for cognitive science.

Iconology and Imagination: Explorations in Sociogenetic Economies

Abstract: This paper is both about human cognition, its origin and development; and about prevailing notions of cognition and rationality, their origin and history. What I shall propose, more speculatively than argumentatively, is that to understand the linkage between these two genetic processes is one way to understand, or to give content to, the concept of sociogenesis. The linkage in question is both reflexive (it involves the relationship between thought, and thought about thought), and productive (it involves processes which make possible new kinds of thought). I shall further propose that the “site,” or “space,” which these linking sociogenetic processes inhabit and populate is what I shall refer to, following Castoriadis (1987), as the social imaginary. My starting point is the observation that the cognitive sciences find themselves today in a situation of crisis. The established, or “classical,” paradigm of cognitivism is under attack on many fronts, ranging from its account of cognitive processing mechanisms, to its underlying “objectivist” philosophy. Cognitivism is (very summarily) the view that human mental processes can be characterized in terms of the manipulation of a set of discrete, arbitrary physical tokens, by a set of explicitly statable algorithmic rules operating upon those tokens. While I do not wish to rehearse here every one of the manifold criticisms of cognitivism that have been advanced in the last decade or so, it is possible to summarize some of their principal features under the following four major themes: I address these issues at length in Sinha (1988); see also, amongst many others, Markova (1982), Bruner (1990), and Plunkett and Sinha (1991).

Perception, connectionism, and cognitive

Abstract: Recent findings in neurophysiology and cognitive science point to the same conclusion: cognition can be explained without appeal to the representations and rules of earlier cognitivist explanations. Yet if this is true, we want to know what form the alternative explanation will take and what processes are responsible for cognitive phenomena like perception. In this paper I discuss three issues: (1) the correct charac­ terization of the alternative to cognitivism; (2) the resulting view of perception based on the alternative; and (3) the implications of this alternative explanatory framework for cognitive science.

Belief and Cognitive Architecture

Abstract: Considerable debate in philosophy of psychology has recently focussed upon two central themes. One concerns the ontological status of propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires, the other on the proper computational account of cognitive architecture. In the ontological debate, the two most prominent positions are eliminativism, which claims that commonsense psychology is false because there are no such things as beliefs and desires; and versions of intentional realism, which counters that beliefs and desires actually do exist in the mind/brain. In the cognitive architecture debate, there are again two outstanding views: classical cognitivism, which holds that cognition is something closely akin to symbol manipulation; and parallel distributed processing (or connectionism), which roughly maintains that cognition is the distributed activation of several simple, non-symbolic processing units. Furthermore, in spite of their different topics, the two debates have been linked by a number of authors who suggest that where you stand in the cognitive architecture debate should help determine where you stand in the debate over prepositional attitudes. So, for example, writers like Jerry Fodor have used the plausibility of classical cognitivism to defend a realist interpretation of propositional attitudes, while writers like Steve Stich and myself have argued that certain forms of connectionism support eliminativism.

Subject and World

Abstract: In Chapter 2, I set out the central tenets and philosophical framework of cognitivism, the background philosophy within which the information-processing approach to human speech perception research is situated, and called attention to certain respects in which it could be considered to have an inappropriate understanding of the nature of the Subject of speech perception.