VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, [8] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 20:23:47 04/11/07 Wed
Author: Matheus Martins Corręa
Subject: Re: Task One Group Eight
In reply to: Adriana 's message, "Task One Group Eight" on 06:11:16 04/08/07 Sun

Classical Cognitivism and the Concept of Mind

Until the 1950s, Behaviorism had been dominant in the study of human cognition. It proposed to study human behavior exclusively through observable phenomena, regarding subjective experience as undetectable and therefore irrelevant--the mind was seen as a black box to which we have no access at all. But in that decade there was the rise of the cognitive sciences, which rehabilitated the notion of mind. The benefits this perspective brought us, specially in the development of new technologies, cannot be denied; however, when it comes to the understanding of actual human cognition, it left a lot to be desired.

The foundations of the cognitive sciences were built mainly by logicians, such as Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Turing demonstrated that it is possible to build a machine to solve any problems and exhibit any kind of behavior, including that of human beings, as long as the instructions to do so are well defined and formalized. That promoted actual attempts to create logarithms to model behaviors human beings display, specially those concerning logico-mathematical thought. Other objects of study included language, one of the main proponents being Noam Chomsky, who defended his concept of generative grammar.

One of the main flaws in this approach is best explained by the following analogy: when we open a word processor on a computer, we can observe how the interface looks on the screen. We can also see how each option works and what happens when we provide input through the keyboard. The endeavor of classical cognitivists was akin to writing a computer program that worked exactly like the word processor without actually looking into the original code. The code for the new program is roughly what cognitivists call the mind. However, as any programmer knows, the likelihood that both codes are the same is minimal at best.

Behaviorists argued against the utility of the concept of mind because we have no grounds to choose between two strictly explanatory models for phenomena. If a person received a phone call, for example, and mistook the caller for their mother, we could explain it in several ways. We could say that this happened due to a childhood trauma, or maybe because they have an unconscious longing for their mother. There is no way to choose which explanation is correct, or to assert that either is correct at all, unless there is actual evidence to back the claim up. Although recognizably less naive than this example suggests, the early cognitivists failed to produce the necessary hard evidence for their claims.

The redeeming quality of classical cognitivism is that, even failing to satisfactorily explain human behavior, the product of its researches left us with a number of technological advancements. Today's computers, for example, are direct descendents of the attempts of modeling the human mind. Also, with time, the cognitive sciences themselves evolved, addressing not only this issue but many others they faced.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.