Cognitive Revolution, The
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Cognitive Revolution, The Sayantan Mandal Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Introduction The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s and exerted deep influence on psychology, linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. It was a reaction against the radical empiricist ways of behaviorism that had dominated the study of human and animal behavior since the early twentieth century.
Background In the early twentieth century, psychology had wandered a long way from being the “study of mind” that William James had envisioned it to be. Quite the contrary, psychologists had all but given up on issues concerning the mind and the mental, focusing instead on behavior as responses to physical stimuli. The behaviorists argued that mental events, such as beliefs and representations, were not publicly observable. Since my internal beliefs, say “I like red cars,” are not objectively available to others for observation, independently of my introspective recollections, behaviorists
argued that such concepts cannot be studied scientifically. Behavior, on the other hand, is very publicly observable and recordable. It is possible, for instance, to observe me repeatedly buying cars which are red and ascribe my decision to do so to similarly observable stimuli that reinforces my behavior, such as approving attitude of my friends and neighbors. As such recording observable behavior, documenting what factors in the environment (stimuli) correspond to them, and converting them to a behaviorist jargon were asserted by behaviorists to be the only means to bringing about scientific objectivity to the study of what living organisms do and why (Miller 2003). Primarily an American phenomena, behaviorism had an overwhelming influence on experimental psychology. For many behaviorists, consequently, there ceased to be any meaningful dichotomy between perception and discrimination, memory and learning, etc. This, however, had the negative side effect of erasing any distinction between describing a phenomena (e.g., If dropped, a ball falls downward.) and causally explaining the precise mechanisms underlying said phenomena (e.g., the effects, and origins, of gravitational pull). In 1951, George Miller published Language and Communication (Miller 1951) a study of language and linguistic phenomena, acknowledging the well-established behaviorist bias of the time in his preface. Miller’s work, however, was much less radical in its behaviorism compared to B.F. Skinner’s soon-tofollow Verbal Behavior (Skinner 1957), which
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. K. Shackelford, V. A. Weekes-Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1309-1
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practically reduced language to operantconditioned verbal behavior. It was Skinner’s book that sparked what has become, possibly, the most well-known criticism of behaviorism and one of the major manifestos of the cognitive revolution in the form of Noam Chomsky’s sc
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