Concept
Cognitivism (psychology)
Overview
In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that gained credence in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition. Cognitive psychology derived its name from the Latin cognoscere, referring to knowing and information, thus cognitive psychology is an information-processing psychology derived in part from earlier traditions of the investigation of thought and problem solving.
Behaviorists acknowledged the existence of thinking but identified it as a behavior. Cognitivists argued that the way people think impacts their behavior and therefore cannot be a behavior in and of itself. Cognitivists later claimed that thinking is so essential to psychology that the study of thinking should become its own field. However, cognitivists typically presuppose a specific form of mental activity, of the kind advanced by computationalism.
Cognitivism has more recently been challenged by postcognitivism.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Metaphysic is divided into that of the speculative and that of the practical use of pure reason, and is, accordingly, either the metaphysic of nature, or the metaphysic of ethics. The former contains all the pure rational principles—based upon conceptions alone (and thus excluding mathematics)—of all theoretical cognition; the latter, the principles which determine and necessitate à priori all action. Now moral…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Cognitivism is.
227.] Finite Cognition, when it pre-supposes what is distinguished from it to be something already existing and confronting it,--to be the various facts of external nature or of consciousness--has, in the first place, (1) Formal identity or the abstraction of universality for the form of its action. Its activity therefore consists in analysing the given concrete object, isolating its differences, and giving them the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Cognitivism is.
Thought moreover is simple, whilst the activities of the brain are compounded of the elementary activities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spontaneous or free, whilst all material activity is determined _ab extra_; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal goods and appetites, which would be impossible were it a corporeal function. For these objective reasons the principle of psychic life must…
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
States what Cognitivism is.
Related ideas
- Cognition
- Alan Turing
- Philosophy
- John Searle
- Learning
- Mathematician
- Information
- Mind
- Noam Chomsky
- Psychology
- Postmodern philosophy
- Knowledge
- Roger Penrose
- Scientific method
- Syntax
- Positivism
- Semantics
- Memory
- Embodied cognition
- Artificial life
- Computational theory of mind
- Reductionism
- Thought experiment
- Behaviorism
Place in the tradition
Part of Enactivism.