The radical constructivist dynamics of cognition

Abstract

The early days of psychology in the 19th century were those of introspection. Because introspection is a first-person approach it doesn’t lend itself to objective communicability, one of the pillars of science. With the rise of positivist philosophy (e.g., Carnap 1932), which demands science to stick solely to observable entities, B. F. Skinner and John Watson introduced the behaviorist approach which rejected any metaphysical speculation about non-observable descriptions such as cognitive processes. The task of psychology was to “predict, given the stimulus, what reaction will take place; or, given the reaction, state what the situation or stimulus is that has caused the reaction” (Watson 1930, p.11). After decades of dominating psychology in the US, doubts were cast on behaviorism as whether it is powerful enough to account for more sophisticated phenomena such as language. In his 1959 paper, Chomsky overthrew behaviorist psychology by showing that one has to assume the internalization of linguistic rules, otherwise people would not be able to generate novel and yet grammatically correct sentences they have never heard before. However, speaking about internal processes was out of reach for behaviorists as they claimed that “cognitive constructs give [...] a misleading account of what [to] find inside”(Skinner 1977, p.10). As a result, a new paradigm, cognitivism, appeared about at the same time as the discipline artificial intelligence (AI).1 Both emphasize internal computations that link sensory input with action output. As Steven Pinker (1997) pointed out, cognitive “psychology is engineering in reverse [...] one figures out what a machine was designed to do.” Uneasiness with the idea that we are mere machines rather than the unique pinnacle of creation, and especially recollecting holistic philosophies such as phenomenology and early psychological streams like gestalt-psychology as well as improved computational power that allows for sophisticated dynamical interactions among a huge number of

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