contextual transition between behaviorism and cognition

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what was the context that surrounded the transition between behaviorism and cognitivism. The social and political context and why did it take so long for cognition to take place in terms of learning processes.

-- daniela lopez (danielitalopez@yahoo.ca), April 14, 2001

Answers

Hi Daniela, Wow, what an ambitious question! And I think any answer would surely have to be conjecture. For my 2 cents worth the social and political context is, the great behavioral theory people who were driving that approach died. I think it has taken so long for conitive research to spool up (as the computer people would say) because it is a very slippery problem that consumes a lot of resources to study. So part of the social context is we now have bigger institutions with much more resources than ever before. We also have significant labor savings machinery. Not long ago all those t-tests where achived with a pencil instead of SPSS. Notice the cognitive revolution roughly follows advances in computer technology. Wouldn't it be interesting to see what Hull's variables do in a well designed model running on a new Apple though? For the future, we'll probably see a big improvement in our knowledge in cognition (and behavioral approaches as well) when either mathematicians become interested in psychological problems or when psychology departments require their students to know much more math. I'm not sure there is a definitive answer to your question, but I think your answer lies between who is interested in what question and how much resources they have at hand, and resourses seem to have multiplied rapidly in the recent past. Hope this helps, best, David

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), April 15, 2001.

The main features of the socio-political context were, I think, the heightening of the Cold War, which brought with it the Viet Nam War and the introduction of the widespread use of computers in the military, and in science more generally. To bring this trend to bear on cognitive science in particular, I believe (though you would have to check) that the early research of both Noam Chomsky and George Miller (leaders of the early "cognitive revolution") were funded in part by military grants. The U.S. military saw computational linguistics work at the time as possibly having a bearing on code-breaking (recall that the UK had used very early computers to break the Germans'"enigma" code during WWII). There were also obvious military uses for Artificial Intelligence more generally, and many of these projects were funded by the Government as well.

In addition there was the generally "revolutionary" atmosphere of the 1960s, which may have made "revolutionary" ideas in particular discipines, such as psychology, more acceptable than they would have been a decade earlier (though this might be much harder to pin down in a rigorous historical way).

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), April 16, 2001.


You could try reading chapter 3 (or 1-3) of Plans and the STructure of Behavior, by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram, for their perspective on some of this.

-- Frances Balcomb (francesb@email.arizona.edu), September 07, 2002.

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