The origins of cognitive thought.

Abstract

Words referring to feelings and states of mind were first used to describe behavior or the situations in which behavior occurred. When concurrent bodily states began to be noticed and talked about, the same words were used to describe them. They became the vocabulary of philosophy and then of mentalistic or cognitive psychology. The evidence is to be found in etymology. In this article, examples are given of words that have come to describe the feelings or states of mind that accompany doing, sensing, wanting, waiting, thinking, and several other attributes of mind. The bodily states felt or introspectively observed and described in these ways are the subject of physiology, especially brain science. is felt when one has a feeling is a condition of one's body, and the word used to describe it almost always comes from the word for a cause of the condition felt. The evidence is to be found in the history of the language-in the etymology of the words that refer to feelings (Skinner, 1987). Etymology is the archaeology of thought. The great authority in English is the Oxford English Dictionary (1928), but a smaller work such as Skeat's (1956) Etymological Dictionary of the English Language will usually suffice. We do not have all the facts we should like to have, because the earliest meanings of many words have been lost, but we have enough to make a plausible general case. To describe great pain, for example, we say agony. The word first meant struggling or wrestling, a familiar cause of great pain. When other things felt the same way, the same word was used. A similar case is made here for the words we use to refer to states of mind or cognitive processes. They almost always began as references either to some aspect of behavior or to the setting in which the behavior occurred. Only very slowly have they become the vocabulary of something called mind. Experience is a good example. As Raymond Williams (1976) has pointed out, the word was not used to refer to anything felt or introspectively observed until the 19th century. Before that time, it meant, quite literally, something a person had 'gone through (from the Latin expirirO, or what we would now call an exposure to contingencies of reinforcement. In this article, review about 80 other words for states of mind or cognitive processes. They are grouped according to the bodily conditions that prevail when individuals are doing things, sensing things, changing the way they do or sense things (learning), staying changed (remembering), wanting, waiting, thinking, and using their minds. Doing The word behave is a latecomer. The older word was do. As the very long entry in the Oxford English Dictionary shows, the word do has always emphasized consequence-the effect one has on the world. We describe much of what we ourselves do with the words we use to describe what others do. When we are asked, What did you do?, What are you doing?, or What are you going to do? we say, for example, I wrote a letter, .... am reading a good book, or I shall watch television. But how can we describe what we feel or introspectively observe at the time? There is often very little to observe. Behavior often seems spontaneous; it simply happens. We say it as in It occurred to me to go for a We often replace i t with thought or idea (The thoughtor idea--occurred to me to go for a walk), but what, if anything, occurs is the walk. We also say that behavior comes into our possession. We announce the happy appearance of the solution to a problem by saying I have it! We report an early stage of behaving when we say I feel like going for a walk.' That may mean 'I feel as have felt in the past when have set out for a walk.' is felt may also include something of the present occasion, as if to say Under these conditions often go for a walk, or it may include some state of deprivation or aversive stimulation, as if to say I need a breath of fresh air. The bodily condition associated with a high probability that we shall do something is harder to pin down, and we resort to metaphor. Because things often fall in the direction in which they lean, we say we are inclined to do something, or have an inclination to do it. If we are strongly inclined, we may even say we are bent on doing it. Because things also often move in the direction in which they are pulled, we say that we tend to do things (from the Latin tendere, to stretch or extend) or that our behavior expresses an intention, a cognitive process widely favored by philosophers at the present time. We also use attitude to refer to probability. An attitude is the position, posture, or pose we take when we are about to do something. The pose of an actress suggests something of what she ~s engaged in doing or is likely to do in a moment. The same sense of pose is found in dispose and propose (I am disposed to go for a walk; I propose to go for a walk). Originally a synonym of propose, the word purpose has caused a great deal of trouble. Like other words suggesting probable action, it seems to point to the future. The future cannot be acting January 1989 • American Psychologist Copyright 1989 by lhe American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/89/$00.75 Vol. 44, No. I, 13-18 13 now, however, and elsewhere in science purpose has given way to words referring to past consequences. When philosophers speak of intention, for example, they are almost always speaking of operant behavior. As the experimental analysis has shown, behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences, but only by consequences that lie in the past. We do what we do because of what has happened, not what will happen. Unfortunately, what has happened leaves few observable traces, and why we do what we do and how likely we are to do it are therefore largely beyond the reach of introspection. Perhaps that is why, as will show later, behavior has so often been attributed to an initiating, originating, or creative act of will.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 232 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.