Cognitivism
Cognitivism is a philosophy or theory of cognition that was dominant in psychology between the late 1960s and mid 1980s. The essence of cognitivism is the idea that cognition is the product of algorithm-like rules, processed in 'internal' mental space. Some cognitivists go on to argue that these rules are actually identical to the algorithms used by digital computers. Despite the fact that the immediate creators of cognitivism were active in the 1950s and 1960s, as Hubert Dreyfus has pointed out, the idea that cognition consists of rule following is really a very old idean and can be traced back to Plato. Normally, cognitivists go on to argue that the key way in which 'thoughts' or 'cognitions' are produced is by rules acting on representations.
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Cognitivists were encouraged in this view of cognition by Shannon's contemporary work, which laid the foundations for modern day information science. In the 1940s and 1950s Shannon wrote a number of seminal papers which provided a neutral and objective way of defining 'information.' Given the power of this new concept, it was an obvious temptation for psychologists to see whether Shannon's concept of information could be adapted in a psychological context. And so, in the 1950s and 1960s, psychologists such as Berlyne and Hick attempted to quantify, for example, the amount of information that human beings accessed from a visual scene, and to make objective predictions as to how much information a human's visual system could 'process.' These early psychologists were behaviorists, a point which is sometimes missed: and their efforts foundered, because, of course, human beings do not process information in Shannon's sense: they understand meaningful information, which is not the same as Shannon's definition. Nonetheless the concept of information was incredibly successful in one specific area: it was useful in terms of assessing how much information digital computers could process. Given this success, Berlyne and Hick's failure was overlooked, and psychologists began to posit the idea that human beings processed information in the same sense as digital computers do.
The word cognitivism is used in several ways:
- In ethics, cognitivism is the philosophical view that ethical sentences express propositions, and hence are capable of being true or false. More generally, cognitivism with respect to any area of discourse is the position that sentences used in that discourse are cognitive, that is, are meaningful and capable of being true or false.
- In aesthetics, cognitivism is the view that a work of art is valuable if it contributes to knowledge.
- In psychology, cognitivism is the approach to understanding the mind which argues that mental function can be understood as the 'internal' rule-bound manipulation of symbols.
- In psychology, anecdotal cognitivism is a methodology for interpreting animal behavior in terms of mental states, comparable to the mental states of humans. For example, the methodology attempts to determine the cognitive capacity of animals through observation without the necessity that this observation be regulated or controlled as in an experiment; however, behavior in an experiment can be interpreted using the methodology.
- Cognition - the study of the human mind.
