Karl Duncker and Cognitive Science

Abstract

This chapter describes Karl Duncker and his significance for American psychology. It discusses Duncker as standing on shoulders of predecessors who extend back to the beginnings of modern psychology in Germany, and offering shoulders that connect these origins with the present–actually only four or five generations in all. The chapter examines most of the source materials, but from the standpoint of a researcher who participated in the cognitive revolution and has had occasion to think and write about it and its origins. It focuses on a paper by Allen Newell that used Duncker as a prototype of German research on problem solving during the first half of the twentieth century. The early instigators of the cognitive revolution came to understand clearly how Duncker's experiments and concepts fit their theories; they would have found it much harder to generate the theories from his formulation of them.

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