The cognitive revolution

Abstract

The “cognitive revolution” in psychology emerged from postwar developments in information theory and computer science. The development of the electronic computer created a new and technically proven model of the mind as a mechanical information processor, conceived of as operating on the same sorts of “rules and representations” employed by “intelligent” machines (Bechtel, 1988). One of the peculiarities of the cognitive revolution was that many of its pioneers came to conceive of their own intellectual achievement in terms of Thomas Kuhn's (1970) analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions, according to which one general theoretical or methodological paradigm is replaced by a radically different paradigm, under the pressure of accumulating empirical anomalies (Lachman et al., 1979). Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published in 1962, as the new forms of cognitive psychology were being advanced and developed by Jerome Bruner (1915–), George Miller (1920–2012), Ulric Neisser (1928–2012), Allen Newell (1927–1992), and Herbert Simon (1915–2001). As James J. Jenkins (1923–2012) later remarked, during the early years of the cognitive revolution in psychology, “everyone toted around their little copy of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ” (Jenkins, quoted in Baars, 1986, p. 249). Although there was no revolution in the strict Kuhnian sense, the development of cognitive theories from the 1950s and 1960s onward did mark a genuine discontinuity with behaviorist theories, including later “liberalized” neobehaviorist theories in terms of internal “mediating” r–s sequences (Miller, 1959; Osgood, 1957). Although the primary stimulus for the cognitive revolution came from without, the empirical problems faced by neobehaviorism in the 1950s and 1960s created an intellectual climate that left many psychologists predisposed to theoretical and methodical change. As Jenkins put it, “things were boiling over…a new day was coming” (Jenkins, quoted in Baars, 1986, p. 249). Information theory The primary stimulus for the growth of cognitive psychology came from outside academic psychology, notably from developments in logic, mathematics, and computer science, which were a product of applied research on radar, message encoding, and missile guidance conducted during the Second World War.