Reductionist Research Programmes in Psychology

Abstract

Contemporary psychology has been dominated by two distinct paradigms, each of which have given rise to comprehensive and fruitful research programmes. The functionalist programme purports to explain our cognitive capacities — what Noam Chomsky (1965, pp. 3 ff.) dubs our “competence” — in terms of the operations and transformations effected on the available “information”. Explaining, e.g., an ability such as color perception means isolating the cues on which we rely in making our judgments as to color, and proceeding to explain how, on the basis of information available from such cues, we could come to reach our actual judgments. This will involve explaining, for example, how it is that our perceptions of color are constant and reliable despite substantial variation in the intensity of light impinging on the retina — particularly since the intensity of such light seems to be the only relevant parameter which could guide our judgments.

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