QUOTES XIII
Quotations about
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, COGNITIVISM, and ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
There was a time when the search for a 'cognitive psychology'
was for a psychology that would recognize experienced processes
of perception and thinking. Such a cognitive psychology would
be concerned with human consciousness as distinct from the mechanical
reflexes to which academic behaviourism had envisaged that consciousness
might be scientifically 'reduced.' Thus, over the years, psychologists
(and allied co-workers) like Albert Ellis, Edward Tolman, Charles
Osgood, George Kelly, Carl Rogers, Herbert Simon, Noam Chomsky,
George Miller, Jerome Bruner, Julian Rotter, Albert Bandura and
Aaron Beck would all, in their various ways, gain reputations
for seeming to champion, amidst the increasingly obvious sterility
of behaviourism, some variety of 'mentalism.' However, when the
breakthrough came, around 1975, the 'cognitive psychology' that
emerged was markedly less cognitive than many such forerunners
would have liked. Essentially, most academics who moved into cognitivism
took the view that the demise of behaviourism licensed them merely
to investigate internal, non-observable 'black box' mechanisms
and processes that had been banished under strict behaviourism;
and to adopt the electronic computer and its programs as the handiest
'models' of what perception and thinking might involve. 'Thinking'
and 'feeling' were to be used as mere labels for what were, to
cognitivists, nothing but the information-processing functions
of neurophysiological events. 'Perception', 'search', 'counting'
and 'recall' came to be thought of as being performed by black
boxes and brain parts rather than by people; and the everyday
cognitive psychology of 'flashes of insight' and 'failures of
will' was once more set aside.
Thus two very different exercises have claimed the title of
cognitive psychology. Still, both the ancient seekers after
true cognitivism (i.e. mentalism-but they dared not call it that
for risk of slipping into humanistic and phenomenological psychology)
and the harder-bitten, newer-style, ex-behaviourist exponents
of how-to-get-grants-to-play-with-computers have agreed on two
key matters.
(1) A riot of new, soft-edged, not-too-committal, not-too-measurable,
computer-semi-literate, user-friendly terminology was essential
to distinguish the latest 'New Psychology' from the old.
(2) The study of cognitive processes should certainly not have
anything to do with the Godzilla-like primaeval horrors of g
and IQ (Thus does modern psychology attempt to play Hamlet without
the Prince! Cognitivists wanted to re-instate in psychology an
interest in intelligent processes that the behaviourists had sacrificed
on the altar of the conditioned reflex; but they would find the
facts of life about intelligence too hot to handle and would come
to prefer the computer-admittedly a more agreeable form of retreat
for intelligent people than the smelly rodent laboratories of
psychology's past.)
The Newer-Model Cognitivism and its problems
The last twenty years have witnessed the establishment of
'cognition' as the core subject matter of scientific psychology
in the English-speaking world. Supposed 'models' of perception,
of attention, of decision-making, of memory, and of reasoning
have become allowable for psychologists. Diagrams with numerous
arrows between verbally labelled boxes (to suggest hypothesized
causal processes) are now as omnipresent in mainstream psychology
as they have always been (as 'flow charts') in occupational psychology.
Sometimes cognitive psychology can appear to be just one vast
'visual aid'. No longer do psychologists content themselves with
describing the externally detectable 'laws' and regularities of
input-output (stimulus-response) relations that were once the
main stock-in-trade of the Skinnerian behaviourist who abjured
mentalism. Unobservable 'information-processing mechanisms' and
(more recently) 'neural networks' are postulated that supposedly
allow people to be compared to computers and their programs and
operations- rather than to the behaviourists' billiard balls.
[A 'neural network' is meant to be more like a brain, thus rectifying
a previous deficiency of cognitivism in paying no attention to
actual biology. And few today would doubt that the mind depends
on the brain. Yet the interesting question is how this
happens. And this will never be shown by neural networks: for,
if they are ever successful at mimicking the brain, their designers
will not understand how they have done it any more than a proud
parent understands how the brain of the child of its loins has
come to cope with the video-recorder. For the human species, to
(pro-)create intelligence has no necessary connection
with understanding intelligence: this is what cognitivists
forget.]
The attraction of cognitivism doubtless owes something to its
apparent, much heralded 'recognition' of 'the mind', of intelligence
(so long as this is not 'ridiculously' defined via dreadful
old IQ!) and of consciousness. It also arises from the felt need
amongst many psychologists for a science of these familiar features
of mentality that does not require physiological, psychogenetic
or factor-analytic expertise that they do not possess. The idea
is that some true science of the mind can be established at a
level which is different from that of our ordinary-language accounts
of our experiences, abilities, plans and actions, while being
more elevated than crass materialism and phrenology. Importantly,
cognitivism seldom invokes the familiar psychoanalytic intermediary
of some darkly 'unconscious' mind having special facilities (for
'repression', 'perceptual defence', 'projection', 'rationalization',
'sublimation' etc.) that might furnish novel explanations of our
more mysterious actions. Rather, cognitivism's concern is usually
to 'explain', somehow, quite everyday abilities of which
we are virtually all reliably capable (e.g. recall, visualization,
reasoning and language-use) by reference to supposed 'mechanisms
and processes' that may be involved. Surging motivational pressures
and deliberate forgetting are not central in the newer-model cognitivists'
view of the composition of mentality.
Whether there truly exists such a level of computero-cognitive
explanation that is intermediate as between folk psychology and
biology is a moot point. Perhaps cognition (and emotion) are what
the brain does, and there is no other locale at which mental
events can be said to take place. - Rather similarly, perhaps,
what a word-processor does is to display text on a screen and
allow its correction: there is no other point within its operations
at which words per se are being 'processed.' It is sometimes
rudely suggested that cognitivism's black boxes of the mind and
its 'components' of mentality are but erstwhile homunculi stripped
of their more engaging faculties. Again, to account for why human
beings are more intelligent than animals, and for why human beings
differ among themselves in intelligence, would surely be real
achievements that might have been expected from cognitivism. Yet,
strangely, present-day cognitivists turn out to have no explanations
at all to offer-nor even any hypotheses, so determined are they
to dissociate themselves from the historic concerns (and poor
P.R.) of the London School. In their concern to avoid real-life
individual differences it is arguable that they have also missed
much of what people have cognitively in common.
Understandably, cognitivists envisage that mental ability is
resoluble into the efficient functioning of a number-well, a legion-of
'components', 'modules', 'resources', 'stores', 'scratchpads',
'desktops' and 'executives'. Yet it is not clear what these mental
mini-entities and castrate homunculi are actually supposed to
do. They may be said by their inventors to 'calculate', 'match-to-sample',
'represent' or 'decide'. But these operations of mini-entities
can hardly resemble what happens when people themselves
'calculate' etc. So just what are they-above and beyond
the whirring of physiological machinery (which cognitivists themselves,
not being physiologists, do not profess to understand)? Certainly
the number of proposed mini-entities of cognitivism now vastly
exceeds even the 150 mental abilities once envisaged by the master
psychometrician-psychologist, J.P.Guilford, who first tried to
formulate a comprehensive and structured list of cognitive components;
and it is so great as to be altogether superfluous to 'causing'
the important observable differences between species and between
people which are themselves relatively few in number. Moreover,
cognitivism's enfeebled, supernumerary conceptual fragments from
the dead world of artificial intelligence [still to produce a
robot with an IQ as high as 2] are not even allowed to achieve
any central thrust by operating as a team: for the very generality
of human differences in measured mental abilities runs flatly
contrary to the fondest assumptions of most cognitivists. (At
least, they dare not admit g in their ceaseless, politically
correct begging letters for government 'research' grants.) Frankly,
were it not for the taxpayer-funded largesse that flows to them,
cognitivists would be much happier explaining a world other than
the one in which we actually live-in particular, a world in which
Guilford's 150 abilities had indeed proved independent
of each other in empirical data. Yet there is no such phenomenon
to explain: there are only fond imaginings that this might be
so, resembling nothing more than the pilot work of psychometrician-psychologists
that went on long before cognitivism was a gleam in eye of a despairing
behaviourist.
Thus cognitivists are left with their attempt to model man on
the electronic computer-on to which can be tacked, as convenient,
extra sub-systems of hardware and software to improve its entirely
lacklustre performance in mimicking human intelligence. However,
it is just not obvious that nature contrives things this way in
man. Indeed, the evidence is quite otherwise: for level of general
intelligence is itself a powerful constraining factor on
the development and expression of most-if not all-mental abilities.
{See Quotes VIII and IX for 'differentiation' proposals-as to
how 'specific' abilities, independent of g, may emerge
only when g itself is sufficiently high.}
Whether cognitivism is any more successful with 'the mind' or
consciousness or intentionality than it is with intelligence can
be left to the pitiless objections of philosophers (e.g. P.M.S.Hacker,
1988, Appearance and Reality). Yet it is perhaps worth
pointing out one thing. A discipline that has, in twenty years,
barely moved beyond the naive componentialist, multiple-intelligence
visions of Thurstone, Guilford and Gardner {see Quotes VIII} seems
unlikely to say much very soon about its chosen target, 'the mind'-let
alone about those other, equally engaging aspects of personhood,
'the heart', 'the soul' and 'the spirit' (see Quotes VII).
*********************************************************************
For more coverage of 'cognitive psychology', see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
The book was first issued, in March, but then withdrawn by the
'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed modern canons
of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May
2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly
purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition
of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
******************************************************************
INDEX to QUOTES XIII
Page
(i) Sympathies for and hopes of the cognitive approach.
7
(ii) The background: 'information processing' and early
modern cognitivism. 9
(iii) Modern cognitivism: the full flowering. 10
(iv) Objections to the arrival of modern cognitivism. 12
(v) Problems of cognitivism. 16
(vi) Some defences of cognitivism. 23
(vii) Verdicts on modern cognitivism. 26
(i) Sympathies for and hopes of the cognitive approach
"Anyone who believes that inquisitions went out with
the triumph of secularism over religion has not paid attention
to the records of foundations, federal research agencies, professional
societies, and academic institutes and departments.... Macromutationists
in biology, catastrophists in geology, and cognitive theorists
in psychology are among those who have known inquisitions in psychology."
R.NISBET, 1982, Prejudices.
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press.
"The principal reason for the dominance in modern psychology
of the cognitive perspective is the failure of behaviourism (of
the Watsonian and Skinnerian varieties) to account for higher
cognitive processes in humans. This was precisely G.H.Mead's critique
of Watsonism. He said that Watson's attitude was like that of
the Queen in Alice in Wonderland: 'off with their heads'
- nothing above the spinal cord."
R.FARR, 1987, Presidential address to the British Psychological
Society, British Psychological Society Bulletin 40.
"Now that psychology has rediscovered cognition, and has
lost interest in behaviourism and its laws of learning, general
intelligence (g) has resumed its position as psychology's
main theoretical construct - on a par with the gene for geneticists,
with social class for sociologists, and with the atom for chemists."
C.R.BRAND, 1987, Nature 325, 26 ii.
"....the scientific notions of causality and mechanism, as
applied to human beings, were vehemently rejected (by Noam Chomsky,
1959, Language 35, in his critique of B.F.Skinner's behaviourism)
in favour of freedom and creativity. The human being was to be
newly, scientifically, but above all morally viewed as
a free-acting agent, not framed by any mechanical or animal analogy.
Creativity was to oust mechanism; freedom must replace determinism
in the new, cognitive psychology."
Carol A. SHERRARD (University of Bradford), 1988,
'Psychology and the values of the 1960's'.
"[My thesis is that] conditioning in humans is fundamentally
a cognitive process, and not an automatic, unconscious, peripheral
one, [in which] cognitive processes play little or no part. The
results both of an extensive literature review and of experiments
conducted substantiate this.... {For example, Experiment II showed}
almost immediate reversal of a conditioned responding from CS+
to CS- after subjects were [informed] of a reversal of stimulus
contingencies, as well as almost immediate extinction of conditioned
responding induced by instructions that UCS presentation would
no longer occur (10 human subjects). Experiment III found that
verbal operant conditioning did not happen in the absence of awareness
of response reinforcer contingencies)...."
Shane O'MARA, 1990, Irish Journal of Psychology 11.
"It is not without significance that one of Spearman's (1923)
major works bore the title The Nature of Intelligence and the
Principles of Cognition. Indeed, reading Spearman's (1930)
autobiography one finds that Spearman was centrally much more
interested in finding and establishing "laws" of cognition
than in measuring individual differences, and it was apparently
this interest that kept him focused on the factor of General Intelligence
because he believed that g embodied general laws of cognition
better than any group factor might do.... "Cognitive ability"
is not a new term: Wolfle (1940) used it more than fifty years
ago, as did Spearman (1923)."
J.B.CARROLL, 1993, Human Cognitive Abilities.
Cambridge University Press.
(ii) The background: 'information processing' and early modern
cognitivism.
"....recent psychological evidence to the effect that
IQ differences can be psychologically understood as differences
in information-processing speed (Hamilton & Launay, 1976;
Nettelbeck & Lally, 1976; Elliott & Murray, 1977; Anderson,
1977) is no longer compatible with the notion that theorizing
about intelligence will lead to the overthrow of IQ testing."
C.R.BRAND, 1979, Bulletin of British Psychological Society
3.
"Our theory posits internal mechanisms of great extent and
complexity, and endeavours to make contact between them and the
visible evidence of problem solving. That is all there is to it."
A.NEWELL & H.A.SIMON, 1972, Human Problem Solving.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice Hall.
"....modern cognitive psychology is not just a psychology
of knowledge and thought, but rather a psychology rich in complex
mechanisms broadly conceived as 'cognitive'."
G.A.MANDLER, 1979.
(iii) Modern cognitivism: the full flowering
"According to the view of thinking that is emerging in
cognitive science, mental behaviour should be explained by identifying
the processes involved in problem-solving, rather than by producing
abstract descriptions of the outcome of thinking. The cognitive
science view is that intelligence is an abstraction and does not
have a cause."
E.HUNT, 1983, Science 219.
"Several prominent contemporary theorists of intelligence
base their theories in large part upon individual differences
in the speed with which people process information.... What is
critical is not speed per se, but rather speed selection
- knowing when to perform at what rate.... What remaining correlation
if left after sheer shared-speed requirements are taken into account
may well be accounted for in part by metacomponential processing.
There simply is no single scientifically meaningful level for
the study of intelligence."
R.J.STERNBERG, 1984, Behavioural & Brain Sciences 7.
"The fashion in psychology is to conceptualize the cognitive
system as being organized into separable processing modules."
A.YOUNG, 1985, Nature.
"My definition of intelligence is that intelligence consists
of those mental functions purposively employed for purposes of
adaptation to and shaping and selection of real-world environments."
R.J.STERNBERG, 1985, Science, 6 xii.
"....what seems to be indicated by intelligence is a "fuzzy"
set of partly irreconcilable concepts, ideas, and research questions....
rather than speak of intelligence per se, my preference
is to speak of constructs such as innate intellectual capacity
(Anlage), intellectual reserve capacity, learning capacity,
intellectual abilities, intelligent systems, problem-solving ability
and knowledge systems."
P.R.BALTES, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg & D.K.Detterman
What is Intelligence? Norwood, NJ. : Ablex.
"....conscious strategies can alter the demands that a task
makes upon elementary information-processing capacities and, through
them, upon biological capacity. Examples abound. Mnemonists free
themselves from limits on short-term memory capacity. People from
different cultures may approach the same task as an exercise in
verbal or in visual memory. The flexibility of the human cognitive
system is a sufficient reason to refuse to say "What causes
intelligence?" A far better question is "How are individual
differences displayed in this or that class of cognitive tasks?"
Such questions cannot be answered by assigning a person a number
based upon that person's relative standing in a population. The
conventional IQ score has no place in a computational theory of
intelligence."
E.HUNT, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg & D.K.Detterman,
What is Intelligence? Norwood, NJ. : Ablex.
"The real intent of Artificial Intelligence is, I claim,
to find out what intelligence is all about.... We can fairly easily
make a program write bad sonnets or play poor chess. Neither of
these feats seems much of a mark of intelligence.... It isn't
the tasks themselves that are interesting. What matters is how
they are done. Thus, I claim, the only way to know if our machines,
or people, are intelligent, is to make them explain how they did
what they did.... people can attempt to give rational explanations,
and ultimately that is how we must measure intelligence."
R.C.SCHANK, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg & D.K.Detterman,
What is Intelligence? Norwood, NJ. : Ablex.
"The amount of computational power that a dollar can purchase
has increased a thousand fold every two decades since the beginning
of the century. In eighty years, there has been a trillion
fold decline in the cost of calculation. If this rate of improvement
were to continue into the next century, the 10 teraops required
for a humanlike computer would be available in a $10-million supercomputer
before 2010, and in a $1,000 personal computer by 2030."
Hans MORAVEC, 1988, Mind Children. Harvard University
Press.
"What entities do we talk about in the domain of the cognitive?
One of the main functions of the brain is to "represent"
things. Collections of representations in the brain are often
referred to as "maps". A typical Ordnance Survey map
is a good metaphor for a brain map. Such a map contains information....
It has long been known that there is a map of the body spread
along the primary motor cortex from the legs (at the top) to the
mouth (at the bottom). ....there is a long way to go before consciousness
can be "explained" in terms of brain function."
Chris FRITH, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
20 x.
(Reviewing M.S.Gazzaniga, The Cognitive Neurosciences,
MIT.)
(iv) Objections to the arrival of modern cognitivism
"Cognitive psychology is really a dogma in search of
a theory."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1979, The Structure and Measurement
of Human Intelligence. Berlin : Springer.
"....the best tests of individual differences in cognitive
ability are non-cognitive in nature."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1982.
"Fundamentally the research program of the contemporary cognitive
psychologist does not differ from that of the behaviourist."
W.BECHTEL, 1982, Philosophy of Science 49.
"....the much vaunted revolution of cognitive science is
more promise than achievement."
J.C.MARSHALL, 1984, British Journal of Psychology 75.
"If this book [edited by J.Mehler] fairly represents the
state of cognitive psychology today, the field is a collection
of local topics or small constellations of topics."
R.ROSNER, 1984, British Journal of Developmental Psychology.
"Cognitive psychology is frequently presented as a revolt
against behaviourism; but it is not a revolt, it is a retreat."
B.F.SKINNER, 1984, American Psychologist.
"Such is the enormous range of g's correlations with
valued human characteristics, especially across the normal and
lower ranges of IQ and Mental Age, that the former endeavours
of psychometricians and the present-day efforts of 'cognitive'
psychologists to associate g especially with reasoning
or decision-making can be recognized as far too narrow."
C.R.BRAND, 1984, in H.B.Miles, Intelligence and Society.
North Humberside : Nafferton Books.
"If it turns out that a large proportion of the variance
in psychometric g is explained by the elementary cognitive
processes reflected in reaction time measurements, what will be
left over for Sternberg's metacomponents to account for, unless
it is mainly the 'real-life' manifestations of g in educational
and occupational achievements?"
A.R.JENSEN, 1984, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 7.
"It is [the] overinclusiveness [of Sternberg's theory] that
makes the theory scientifically meaningless and unacceptable.
It deals, not only with intelligence, but with possible ways in
which intelligence is used in everyday life, modified by temperamental
and motivational factors, and influenced by educational, cultural
and other factors."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1984, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 7.
"....what is on offer (from cognitive psychology) is not
discovery and explanation, but pious speculations and grant proposals
that would only have bored, not intimidated, Binet and the other
founding fathers of mental testing."
C.R.BRAND, 1984, Behavior Research & Therapy.
"I accuse cognitive scientists of speculating about internal
processes with respect to which they have no appropriate means
of observation. Cognitive science is often only premature neurology."
B.F.SKINNER, 1985, 'Cognitive science and behaviourism'.
British Journal of Psychology 76.
"[The last section of R.J.Sternberg's 'triarchic theory of
human intelligence'] is particularly confusing, as it can easily
generate an infinite regress of metaprocesses, executive functions
and strategies. This is not the stuff of productive theories.
It is the replacing of mentality with spurious references to the
specific vocabulary of Artificial Intelligence and, unfortunately,
psychobabble." V.EGAN, 1986, Psychology News,
No. 44.
"Cognitive science, according to J.A.Fodor, should concern
itself with modules rather than central processes, because this
is an attainable scientific goal, whereas the scientific understanding
of central processes is most probably not.... cognitive science
is explicitly unconcerned with individual differences. When views
on modularity are directly translated into the individual differences
field they generate models of intelligence which are simple re-hashes
of the old specificity hypothesis (e.g. H.Gardner, 1983, Frames
of Mind)."
M.ANDERSON, 1986,
Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry 27.
"A machine cannot think, any more than a book can remember.
The meanings of the words on a printed page are bestowed by minds;
they have only a delegated intentionality.... Computer bewitchment
threatens to eclipse an appreciation of the biological and historical
depths of human nature."
L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1987, The Shaping of Modern Psychology.
London : Routledge & Kegan Paul.
"Psychology as a science is, in fact, in a shambles.... Psychology
is apparently abandoning all efforts to stay within the dimensional
system of natural science.... In following the Pied Piper of cognitive
science, psychology has lost its hold upon reality."
B.F.SKINNER, 1987, Upon Further Reflection.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice-Hall.
"Cognitivists need reminding when they come on strongly about
their re-discovery of 'the mind' that, once we begin to entertain
such lofty abstractions, 'the mind' must be prepared for some
competition - notably from 'the heart', 'the soul' and 'the spirit'.
In ordinary language, each of these four high-level metaphorical
components of personhood serves subtly different functions: not
all of them are capable of 'warmth', 'sensitivity', 'determination'
or 'tidiness', for example."
C.R.BRAND, 1987, Behaviour Research & Therapy.
"Chomsky's demonstrations were very widely accepted as decisive
arguments against Behaviourism, and in favour of a new conceptualisation
of psychology. However, of these apparently radical observations
about human cognition- its embodiment in innate competence rather
than learned performance, its generativity, its non-finiteness,
and its rule-governed transformations of deep structures into
surface structures - it is questionable whether any of them genuinely
inform the theories or methods of what is today called Cognitive
Psychology."
Carol A. SHERRARD (University of Bradford), 1988,
'Psychology and the values of the 1960's'.
"In relation to ordinary computer designers and programmers,
[students of artificial intelligence] may be compared with aeronautic
engineers who are concerned not to devise the most efficient aeroplane,
but to construct an artificial bird. Devotees of 'cognitive science'
may operate in a number of different disciplines - philosophy,
empirical psychology, artificial intelligence. The name is not
so much the demarcation of an area of study as a manifesto of
belief that the characteristic features of human mentality will
eventually be explicable in demythologized form by certain fashionable
scientific procedures."
Anthony KENNY, 1989, The Metaphysics of Mind. Oxford
: Clarendon.
"....the points {against behaviourism} contained in Chomsky's
(1959, Language 35) review [of B.F.Skinner's Verbal
Behavior] have been dealt with at length and have been satisfactorily
answered (Catania, 1973, Behaviorism 2; MacCorquadale,
1970, J. Exptl. Anal. Behav.)."
K.J.TIERNEY, 1990, Irish Journal of Psychology 11.
"As [Francis] Crick points out in The Astonishing Hypothesis,
there are at least five good reasons why brains are not
like computers. First, a computer can compute at more than ten
million operations per second, while a neuron fires at only 100
spikes per second. Second, computers work mainly by serial processing,
while the brain is usually massively parallel (hence computers
regularly crash, unlike brains). Third, neurons, but not transistors,
can modulate their behaviour during processing. Fourth, memory
in a brain appears to be stored in the very same locations that
carry out the processing, while memory in computers is quite separate.
Fifth, there is no clear distinction in the brain between hardware
and software."
Editorial, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 24 vi
1994.
(v) Problems of cognitivism
"A major item on the agenda of cognitive psychology is
to banish the homunculus. It is the homunculus that actually performs
the control processes in Atkinson & Shiffrin's (1968) famous
memory model,.... who is renamed the "executive" in
many models (clearly a promotion), and who decides on and builds
all those flow diagrams."
A.NEWELL, 1980, in R.S.Nickerson, Attention and Performance
8.
Hillsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
"[A schema] is some active array of physiological structures
and processes: not a center in the brain, but an entire system
that includes receptors and afferents and feed-forward units and
efferents. Within the brain itself there must be entities whose
activities account for the modifiability and organization of the
schema: assemblages of neurons, functional things still unguessed."
U.NEISSER, 1976, Cognition and Reality. San Francisco
: Freeman.
"Computational psychology is the only theoretical psychology
we can ever hope to achieve; [yet] it is in principle incapable
of addressing what many would regard as the prime question of
psychology: how symbolic processes guide our perception of and
action in the world."
J.A.FODOR, 1980, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 3.
"While cognitive psychology is now very extensively studied,
the will and the emotions are still sadly neglected."
A.BADDELEY, 1981.
"Humans may be an amalgam of several kinds of computers or
computer models, or may deviate from any kind of computer yet
described."
H.GARDNER, 1985, The Mind's New Science: A History of the
Cognitive Revolution. New York : Basic Books.
"The notion of an "executive process" in the brain
is always an invitation to fuzzy thinking."
H.H.SPITZ, 1986, reviewing R.J.Sternberg's 'triarchic theory
of intelligence'. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 9.
"{Re H.Gardner's The Mind's New Science,} the
description is of a social movement rather than of a body of data."
D.E.BROADBENT, 1986, Nature, 13 ii.
"Younger and less intelligent people have been said to have
smaller and less elaborately organized knowledge bases; to use
fewer, simpler, and more passive processing strategies; to have
less metacognitive understanding of their own cognitive systems
and of how the functioning of these systems depends upon the environment;
and to use less complete and flexible executive processes for
controlling their thinking.... Although definitive analyses have
not been done, presently used tests of intelligence can be assumed
to measure base knowledge and cognitive strategies reliably and
validly." E.C.BUTTERFIELD, 1986, in R.J.Sternberg
& D.K.Detterman, What is Intelligence?. Norwood, New
Jersey : Ablex.
"Although [the Conference on Academic Performance of Minority
Children, at Cornell University in 1982] was convened on the assumption
that the study of school learning is within the scope of cognitive
psychology, we soon learned that the critical variables in this
area are also ecological and political."
U.NEISSER, 1986, in U.Neisser, The School Achievement of
Minority Children: New Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ : Erlbaum.
"Much thinking is extremely weird, and computers have not
yet captured this weirdness."
L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1987, The Shaping of Modern Psychology.
London : Routledge & Kegan Paul.
"Most cognitive theorists now admit that they need a model
of consciousness. The only adequate model, in my opinion, will
be a social one.... To describe events only in the language of
cognitive science is inadequate."
R.FARR, 1987, Bulletin of British Psychological Society 40.
"There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of one research worker
who designed a Parallel Distributed Processor system to simulate
an aspect of cognition. The simulation was highly successful,
but he spent the next several years doing experiments to try to
find out how the system he had constructed actually worked."
S.SUTHERLAND, 1987, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
27 ii.
"Schoolchildren of enormous mathematical talent resort to
different problem-solving strategies from those resorted to by
problem-solving machines."
F.FLIX (Berlin Humboldt University), 1988, to 24th International
Congress of Psychology (Abstract I22).
"The booksellers W.H.Smith's new computer, christened BOOKFINDER,
was being shown off at the company's Swindon offices when it was
asked to find a book with the word "cat" or "dog"
in its title. The machine excelled. "Catholic Dogma",
it suggested."
A Daily Telegraph report, repeated in Encounter 72,
v 1989.
"....Cognitive Psychology shows no consensus about what the
central phenomena of cognition are, has weak theoretical structure,
and has not seriously adopted the Chomskyan 1960's ideal to avoid
mechanical analogies and seek allegedly uniquely human possessions
of generativity, non-finiteness and deep structure. Rather, it
has kept the traditional concerns of Psychology with the nature
of the link between sensory stimuli and performance, and the measurement
of finite performance capacity. The analysis of creativity was
always more seriously addressed by differential psychologists,
ironically consigned to the same allegedly right-wing ghetto as
Behaviourists by critical social and cognitive psychologists."
Carol SHERRARD (University of Bradford), 1989.
"....whereas [a digital] computer processes information serially,
the brain is known to work in parallel fashion. In addition, although
the brain operates slower than the computer, the brain is "far
more adaptable, tolerant of errors, and context-sensitive"(P.Kline,
1988, Psychology Exposed). Furthermore, even the most sophisticated
supercomputer developed to date "seems unlikely to achieve
more than 1 per cent of the brain's storage capacity (J.T.Schwartz,
1988).... [Moreover] many cognitive models "seem to be theories
of pure reason" (D.A.Norman, 1980). This exaggerated rationalism
is a legacy from Descartes who was the first modern philosopher
to postulate a radical separation of mind from body. If human
beings are pure intellects, then their knowledge is purely intellectual
and the human body need not be taken into account in a theory
of cognition.... In a similar vein, Claxton (1988) reminded us
that, whereas human cognition grows ontogenetically "on the
basis of a vast amount of (mostly non-verbal) experience",
'the computer's knowledge' arrives codified, ready-made and relatively
fixed.... Despite obvious differences between the Classical and
the Connectionist approaches, they both appear to be forms of
computationalism, albeit different forms. The classical computational
architecture resembles Hobbesian ratiocination, and the Parallel
Distributed Processing approach seems like Lockean associationism."
G.CASEY & A.MORAN, 1989, 'The computational metaphor and
cognitive psychology'. Irish Journal of Psychology 10.
"In information-speak, it requires just 42 bits to remember
an eight-digit number string, yet it would appear that most humans
lack the memory capacity to do it.... Can it really be that human
have no more memory capacity than a microcomputer?....
By contrast with computers, brain memory is error-full, and uses
multiple different modalities. And it is on the basis of meaning,
not sequence, that I [can 'recall a 48-digit list - containing
a sequence of birthdays and friends' telephone numbers].... Meaning
implies a dynamic of interaction between myself and the digits;
meaning is a process that is not reducible to a number of bits
of information."
Steven ROSE, 1993, New Statesman & Society, 19 iii.
"Cognitive science has had far more than its share of modellers,
but precious few thinkers and theorists. If ever there were a
task that required good imagination intermingled with hard thought,
it is the job of understanding the human brain and mind."
E.S.REED, 1990, 'A surfeit of models'. Nature 348, 1 xi.
"[Current cognitive science consists of] several separate
disciplines jostling each other for position in a coalescence
that may be illusory."
J.LEIBER, 1991, An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Oxford
: Blackwell.
"Calculating devices were invented long before computers,
ranging from the humble abacus to the slide-rule and the mechanical
calculating machines invented in the nineteenth century. No one
was tempted to say that these gadgets could literally calculate
or think. Are electronic computers any different? It is tempting
to insist that they are, not merely because the tasks that they
can be used to undertake are so much more complex, but also because
they surely follow rules. For do we not programme them with ever
more sophisticated algorithms, and do they not follow these instructions
meticulously? No; one can no more literally instruct a compute
to do anything than once can instruct a tree, though one can make
a tree grow in a certain way, and one can make a computer produce
the result of vastly complex calculations. One can replace a complex
rule with a sequence of simpler rules compliance with which will
ensure the same outcome, and human beings can typically follow
such simple rules quite mechanically, i.e. without reflecting.
But a machine cannot follow a rule mechanically, no matter whether
the rule is simple or complex, since it makes no sense to talk
of a machine following a rule.... A being can only be
said to be following a rule in the context of a complex
practice involving actual and potential normative activities of
justifying, noticing mistakes and correcting them by reference
to the relevant rule, criticizing deviations from the rule, and,
if called upon, explaining an action as being in accord with the
rule or teaching others what counts as following the rule. ...could
one say that...machines are making calculations independently
of human beings? No, no more than one can say that the revolving
globe tells the time independently of human beings' conventions
of time-measurement... One could readily build a computer from
a very large toy railway set with a huge number of switch-points
and storage depots for different types of carriages to be shunted
into until called upon for further operations (i.e. a 'computer
memory'). This computer would be cumbersomely large and slow,
but in essence its operations would not differ from the latest
gadgetry on the computer-market. Would one say, as hundreds of
trains rush through complex networks of on/off points according
to a pre-arranged timetable (a programme), depositing trucks in
sidings or depots and collecting others, 'Now the railway-set
is calculating', 'Now it is inferring', or 'Now it is thinking?'
Does it make any difference if the 'railway-set' is miniscule
and the 'trains' move at the speed of electric current?.... ....What
prevents the literal applicability of concepts of thought, reason,
and inference to our calculating devices are not deficiencies
in computational power, which may be overcome b y fifth-generation
computers. Rather, it is the fact that machines are not alive.
They have no biography, let alone autobiography. The concepts
of growth, maturation, and death have no application to them,
nor do those of nutrition, health, and reproduction. It makes
no sense to attribute to a machine will or passion,
desire or suffering. The concepts of thinking and
reasoning, however, are woven into this rich web of psychological
faculties. It is only of a living creature that we can say that
it manifests those complex patterns of behaviour and reaction
within the ramifying context of a form of life that constitute
the grounds, in appropriate circumstances, for the ascription
of even part of the network of psychological concepts.... Thinking
is a capacity of the animate, manifest in the behaviour and action
characteristic of its form of life. We need neither hope nor fear
that computers may think; the good and evil they bring us is not
of their making. If, for some strange and perverse reason we wished
to create artificially a thinking thing, as opposed to a device
that will save us the trouble of thinking, we would have to start,
as it were, with animality, not rationality. Desire and suffering
are the roots of thought, not mechanical computation. Artificial
intelligence is no more a form of intelligence than fool's gold
is a kind of gold or counterfeit money a form of legitimate currency."
P.M.S.HACKER, 1990, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind.
Oxford : Blackwell.
"J.T.Bruer (Schools for Thought: a Science of Learning
in the Classroom, MIT Press) claims [that educational innovations
such as 'exposing students to words in the same category']....stem
from advances in cognitive psychology. Perhaps they were triggered
by that discipline, but they come perilously close to common sense....
[And, using Bruer's] techniques for teaching physics...., students
took more than a week to learn Newton's laws instead of the normal
day or two."
Stuart SUTHERLAND, 1993, Nature 364, 8 vii.
"In artificial intelligence, studying theories of inference
and knowledge representation usually begins by examining their
capabilities in toy domains. Toy domains are specially
contrived micro-worlds about which very little needs to be assumed.
There is, however, a long-standing problem with this approach.
Theories of inference which are adequate in such domains (e.g.
the inference engine in SHRDLU: Wino grad, 1972) tend to fail
disastrously when they are scaled up to deal with real-world
inferential problems involving more information. This is because
they are generally computation-intractable."
M.OAKSFORD & N.CHATER, 1992, Theory and Psychology 2.
"Conscious minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines
implemented - inefficiently - on the parallel hardware that
evolution has provided for us."
D.C.DENNETT & M.KINSBOURNE, 1992,
Behavioral & Brain Sciences 15.
"....a task routinely mastered by four-year-old children
is too richly structured to be accounted for by any known general-purpose
mechanism operating in real time (e.g. Chomsky, 1975; Pinker,
1991). Despite three decades of effort by Standard Model psychologists
to get general-purpose cognitive machinery to learn grammar, their
theories have fared no better than did their behaviourist predecessors.
....newly proposed domain-general connectionist and associationist
models were computationally insufficient to solve even so narrow
a problem as the acquisition of the past tense in English....
Thirty years of such findings have forced many cognitive psychologists,
against their inclination, to accept domain-specific hypotheses
about language learning - to conclude that humans have as part
of their evolved design a language acquisition device (LAD), which
incorporates content-dependent procedures that reflect in some
form "universal grammar.""
John TOOBY & Leda COSMIDES, 1992, in J.H.Barkow, L.Cosmides
& J.Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and
the Generation of Culture. New York : Oxford University Press.
"There is no basis for attributing intelligence or consciousness
to neural networks....No scientific credibility should be attached
to the belief that consciousness must be an emergent property
of complex systems."
David START, 1995, 'Cunning humans, selfless machines.'
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 28 iv, p.17.
"The story of Henry Ant, composed by a computer program
called Tale-Spin, is ammunition for those who say computers cannot
be creative: "Henry Ant was thirsty. He walked over to the
river bank where his good friend Bill Bird was sitting. Henry
slipped and fell in the river. He was unable to call for help.
He drowned. The End."
Aisling IRWIN, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
1175, 12 v.
"Why should people compulsively pull out their own hair?
And why should some people believe that their relatives or friends
have been replaced by replicas?....[The book Eccentric and
Bizarre Behaviors] should be brought to the attention of those
research workers in artificial intelligence who believe that by
writing programs that behave intelligently they are simulating
the human mind."
Stuart SUTHERLAND, 1995, Times Higher
Educational Supplement, 22 xii.
"If [Daniel] Dennett hopes that consciousness will spontaneously
evolve in his expanding artificial brain....why not start with
"simple" biological brains themselves, and save all
the waiting and the work?"
Susan GREENFIELD, 1996, 'Dances with neurons.'
Times Higher, 2 ii.
"....you cannot download a headache as computer aficionados
might download a problem-solving strategy. First-person consciousness
is locked into the biological body, but cognitive processes are
not."
Susan GREENFIELD, 1996, 'Towering inferences.'
Times Higher, 11 x.
(vi) Some defences of cognitivism
"....a growing number of theorists have become disillusioned
with the prospects of psychological theories based on the traditional
conceptions of internal symbol manipulation (e.g. to theories
that describe mental processes using formalisms similar to programming
languages like LISP and PASCAL). For all the strengths of the
traditional approach, it has often proved to be too costly to
carry out seemingly simple (but intensive) computations in real
time (e.g. stereopsis), and too rigid to capture the nuances of
human cognition.... [The latest] approach, which goes by various
names, including connectionism, parallel distributed
processing, and neural network modelling retains the
idea that the mind is a computer program, but insists that the
program runs on a kind of computer very unlike the familiar digital
computer that sits on so many desktops...."
J.RUECKL, 1989, American Journal of Psychology 102.
"Artificial intelligence is now more than forty years old....
A massive amount of scientific, intellectual and financial investment
appears to have resulted in very little, either as a pointer to
the way our brains work or [in] improvements in the usefulness
of computers."
Igor ALEKSANDER, 1990, Nature 348, 29 xi.
"How....does one learn effectively without a supervisor?....
The goal of an unsupervised learning algorithm is to extract meaningful
features or variables from a set of input patterns.... This is
the goad of Principal Component Analysis, a standard tool of engineering
and statistics {and differential psychology}.... Remarkably enough,
it turns out that the first neurobiological learning rule to be
formulated, Hebb's rule, is closely related to Principal Component
Analysis."
G.MITCHISON & R.DURBIN, 1992, 'Neural networks conduct factor
analyses?!' Nature 355, pp.112-113.
"Essentially, a neural network is a way of processing information.
It consists of a number of units, or nodes, arranged in layers;
each unit is connected to several other units elsewhere in the
network. Units can be either active or inactive: active units
send signals to other units that either excite or inhibit them....
A single unit may receive competing signals from many other units,
the combined effect of which will turn it either on or off. Information
entering the system at one end, in the form of a pattern of activity
among the units in the first layer, is processed through the network
and eventually emerges as an output - the activity of the final
layer. The interest of these structures lies in the fact that
they can learn. By modifying the strengths of the connections
between the units according to certain rules, a network can then
generalise correctly to patterns it has not 'seen' before."
Georgina FERRY, 1992, Oxford Today: the University Magazine
4.
"The contributors to Against Cognitivism [eds. A.Still
& A.Costall, 1991, Harvester Wheatsheaf] are not of one mind
as far as their preferred alternatives to cognitivism are concerned....
[some] seem to regard the Gibsonian approach as forming at least
part of the answer.... [their] recommended cures appear far worse
than the disease."
M.W.EYSENCK, 1993, The Psychologist 6.
"G.Edelman and his colleagues at the Neurosciences Institute
[Rockefeller University] have been deeply interested in...."synthetic
neural modelling," and have devised a series of "synthetic
animals" or artefacts [called DARWINs} to test the Theory
of Neuronal Group Selection.... they are not robotic in the least
but (in Edelmann's words) "noetic." They incorporate
both a selectional system and a primitive set of values.... Unpredictable
variations are introduced in both the artefact and its environment.
DARWIN IV, or NOMAD, wanders around like a curious infant, exploring....objects,
reaching for them, classifying them, building with them, in a
spontaneous and idiosyncratic way (the movement of the artefact
is exceedingly slow, and one needs time-lapse photography to bring
home its creatural quality). No two individuals show identical
behaviour...."
Oliver SACKS, 1993, 'Making up the mind',
The New York Review, 84 iv.
"[Margaret Boden, in e.g. The Creative Mind] has categorised
objections to the ideas that computers could be creative. They
are:
the brain-stuff argument (computers are made of non-biological
material so they cannot be creative);
the empty program argument (computers will never grasp meaning);
the consciousness argument (consciousness is essential to creativity
and artificial intelligence cannot be conscious); and
the non-human argument (creative beings would deserve rights,
computers do not have rights, therefore computers cannot be
creative).
She rejects the first three.... "I would say that computers
can't be truly creative, for moral and political reasons. If a
computer literally has creativity then it literally has desires
and interests-it would be part of our ethical world. "
Aisling IRWIN, 1995, interviewing Margaret Boden, Times Higher
Educational Supplement, 1175, 12 v.
"Instead of 'representing' the world or in any way thinking
about it (or even making calculations or inferences about it)
what computers do is to by-pass such processes while delivering
what are for human purposes satisfactory input-output translations.
A computer does not play chess; rather, it mimicks chess-playing.
- If it did play chess, it would be appropriate to ask
whether it enjoyed its game! (For a sustained refutation of the
notion that computers or robots 'represent' or otherwise possess
mentality, see Hacker (1990, Chapter I, 'Men, minds and machines')."
C.R.BRAND, 1996, The g Factor. Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
(vii) Verdicts on modern cognitivism
"Although cognitive psychologists threw out behaviorism's
cumbersome anti-mentalism, they uncritically adopted behaviourism's
equipotentiality assumption. In mainstream cognitive psychology,
it is assumed that the machine is free of content-specialized
processes and that it consists primarily of general-purpose mechanisms.
Psychologists justify this assumption by an appeal to parsimony:
It is "unscientific" to multiply hypothesized mechanisms
in the head. The goal, as in physics, is for as few principles
as possible to account for as much as possible. Consequently,
viewing the mind as a collection of specialized mechanisms that
perform specific tasks appears to be a messy approach, one not
worth pursuing. Anthropologists and sociologists easily accommodated
themselves to these theoretical changes in psychology: Humans
went from being viewed as relatively simply equipotential learning
systems to very much more complex equipotential information-processing
systems, general-purpose computers, or symbol manipulators."
John TOOBY & Leda COSMIDES, 1992, in J.H.Barkow, L.Cosmides
& J.Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and
the Generation of Culture. New York : Oxford University Press.
"The community of researchers calling themselves cognitive
scientists has expanded dramatically, including a startling reincarnation
of many former behaviourists. This is consistent with the increasing
emphasis placed on "inter-disciplinarity" in several
areas. Traditional departmental divides have been challenged and
new groupings have come together, often with the support of large
research grants.... But what does inter-disciplinarity mean in
practice? For example, why and how should we expect a psychologist
to co-operate successfully with a computer scientist, say, when
the different branches of psychology often have trouble talking
to each other? Is cognitive science a unitary enterprise? Some
recent work from within the field has challenged the idea - except,
perhaps, a common focus on cognition. Indeed, the compendious
Oxford Companion to the Mind....has no entry for cognitive
science at all.... Barbara Von Eckhardt (What is Cognitive
Science?) restricts her exposition to (cognitive science)
studies of "adult, normal, typical cognition", jarringly
coded as ANTCOG." Michael SCAIFE, 1993, Times Higher
Educational Supplement, 2 iv.
"Publicly, [AI pioneers] made extraordinary claims that to
make a machine with the intelligence of a human was merely a matter
of making computers bigger and faster. The discovery that their
results seemed to fall short of their claims tended to be a much
more private affair. As an idle thought, where would an aircraft
designer be with a similar record of failure? The answer is that
he would be unemployed if not in jail."
Igor ALEKSANDER, 1993, Nature 364,
reviewing D.Crevier, Artificial Intelligence.
"The technological predictions of the sixties read very strangely
now. Computer speed and memory were already doubling every year.
Soon, said the pundits, computers would overtake the human brain
itself.... But computers are still as wooden and stupid as they
ever were. They are just as wooden and stupid in 128 pointless
fonts and 16 million indistinguishable colours."
D.JONES, 1993, 'Daedalus', Nature 364.
"Towards the end of a century of psychology dominated by
behaviourist, cognitive and sociological approaches, it would
be the ultimate triumph of Darwin to find the psychology of the
next century returning to the individual mind and its emotions
seen as products of evolution."
C.BADCOCK, 1993, Personality. & Individual Differences
14.
"....the word "cognition" is seriously misunderstood
and seriously misapplied in contemporary psychology; ....many
who describe themselves as cognitive psychologists miss the core
of their subject."
J.MACNAMARA, 1993, 'Cognitive psychology and the rejection of
Brentano.' Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour 23.
"....the information-processing model of cognition is the
clearest legacy of utopianism. This theory of human cognition
is influential in the United States and offers the computer as
a model for human thought. This model is utopian to an even greater
degree than other cognitive theories. It is based on the assumption
that human problem-solving can be broken down into incremental
steps which are in essence acquired rule-bound skills. Its authors
assume that the way in which human mentation follows rules of
logical inference is best exemplified by the way in which a computer
processes information, e.g. as elementary bits of data."
M.W.BARCLAY, 1993, Theory and Psychology 3.
"...the great merit of [D.Gelenter's] The Muse in the
Machine is that it tries to put emotion into artificial intelligence;
its great weakness is that it fails.... [Joseph Weizenbaum many
years ago] pointed out that....no computer could genuinely have
[our evolutionarily selected drives]: at most its might exhibit
a desire for the nearest electric plug. No matter how successful
we were in simulating [human] emotions and drives on a computer,
the program would still be a simulation, not the real thing."
S. SUTHERLAND, 1994, Nature 369, 2 vi.
"Cognitive psychology is based on the idea of the "mind
as computer" while clinical psychology has been influenced
heavily by behavioural ideas based originally on animal studies,
said Professor Baddeley {whose MRC Applied Psychology Unit at
Cambridge was celebrating its 50th anniversary}."
Aisling IRWIN, 1994, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
7 x.
"....when researchers met at Dartmouth College in the summer
of 1956 to lay the groundwork for Artificial Intelligence, none
of them could have imagined that, forty years later, we would
have come such a short distance toward that goal. Indeed, what
few successes AI has had point up the weaknesses of computerized
reasoning as much as they do its strengths.... Ask a medical program
[i.e. 'expert system'] about a rusty old car and it might blithely
diagnose measles."
LENAT, D.B. (1995). 'Artificial Intelligence.' Scientific
American 273.
FINIS
(Compiled by C.R.Brand, Dept Psychology, University
of Edinburgh.)
For more coverage of cognitive psychology, see:
BRAND, C.R. (1996) The g Factor.
Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
"The nature and measurement of intelligence is a political
hot potato. But Brand in this extremely readable, wide-ranging
and up-to-date
book is not afraid to slaughter the shibboleths of modern "educationalists".
This short book provides a great deal for thought
and debate."
Professor Adrian Furnham, University College London.
The book was first issued, in February, but then withdrawn, in
April, by the 'publisher' because it was deemed to have infringed
modern canons of
'political correctness.'
It received a perfectly favourable review in Nature (May
2, 1996, p. 33).
For a Summary of the book, Newsletters concerning the
de-publication affair, details of how to see the book for scholarly
purposes, and others' comments and reviews,
see the Internet URL sites:
http://laboratory.psy.ed.ac.uk/DOCS/crb/internet.html
http://www.webcom.com/zurcher/thegfactor/index.html
For Chris Brand's 'Get Real About Race!'-his popular exposition
of his views on race and education in the Black
hip-hop music magazine 'downlow' (Autumn, 1996)-see:
http://www.bhs.mq.edu.au/~tbates/intelligence/Brand_downlow.html
A reminder of what is available in other Sections of
'P, B & S.'
Summary Index for PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY
& SOCIETY
(This resource manual of quotations about individual and group
differences, compiled by
Mr C. R. Brand, is kept on the Internet and in Edinburgh
University Psychology Department Library.)
Pages of Introduction
3 - 11 Full Index, indicating key questions in
each Section.
12 - 14 Preface. - Why quotations? - Explanations and apologies.
15 - 51 Introduction: Questions, Arguments and Agreements
in the study of Personality.
-Some history, and a discussion of 'realism vs 'idealism.'
52 - 57 Introductory Quotes about the study of personality.
Sections
General problems
1 'Situational' vs 'personological' approaches to
human variation.
2 'Nomothetic' vs 'idiographic', 'subjective' and relativistic
approaches.
3 Personality dimensions-by factor analysis and otherwise.
4 'Superstructure' and 'infrastructure.' - The 'mind/body problem'.
5 Nature versus Nurture? - Or Nature via Nurture?
6 The role of consciousness in personality and 'multiple personality'.
7 The 'folk psychology' of personality components.
Intelligence
8 The measurement of intelligence. - Does g exist?
9 The bases of intelligence. - What is the psychology
of g?
10 The developmental origins of g differences. - The nature
and nurture of g.
11 The importance of intelligence. - The psychotelics
of g.
12 Piagetianism: Kant's last stand?
13 Cognitivism: 'The Emperor's New Mind?'
Propensities
14 Neurosis, emotion and Neuroticism.
15 Psychosis, psychopathy and Psychoticism.
16 Crime and criminality.
17 Genius and creativity.
Popular proposals - psychoanalytic, phrenological and prophylactic
18 Psychoanalysis: 'Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'?
19 Hemispherology: a twentieth-century phrenology?
20 Psycho-social Engineering: therapy, training or transformation?
Group differences
21 Age and ageing - especially, the role of g in 'life-span
development'.
22 Psychological sex differences. - Do they exist? Must they
exist?
23 Social class. - Does it matter any longer?
24 Racial and ethnic differences. - Their role in 'lifestyles'
and cultural attainments.
Ideological issues
25 The psychology of politics and ideological extremism.
26 The politics of psychologists and allied co-workers.
27 Equality and Community: the 'utopian' package of political
aims.
28 Freedom and Responsibility: the 'legitimist' package of political
aims.
Pragmatic questions
29 Carry on differentializing?
30 Carry on psycho-testing?
Appendix: Factor Analysis. - 'Garbage in, garbage
out'?
=============================================