The mind's new science: A history of the cognitive revolution

Harris, Michael

doi:10.1016/0306-4573(86)90079-8

Cited by 21 publications

(31 citation statements)

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“…However, a countervailing force from both linguistic and psycholinguistic traditions collectively biases us to abstract away from (or ignore altogether) the admittedly noisy and hard-to-measure sociocultural reality of the linguistic code, and how humans wield this code in the service of everyday sociocultural needs. This bias likely arose from historical factors operative during the emergence of psycholinguistics that emphasized methodological rigour with a high degree of quantitative precision and may have been driven by a touch of behaviorism-envy (recounted in Gardner, 1987;Harris, 1995). It is baked into operational definitions of language that prioritize its symbolic and referential properties, and how humans encode and decode these properties (e.g., the so-called "message model", reviewed in Bavelas & Chovil, 2000).…”

Section: Historical Antecedentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking multilingual experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism

Titone

Tiv

2022

Bilingualism

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In “The Devil's Dictionary”, Bierce (1911) defined language as “The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.” This satirical definition reflects a core truth – humans communicate using language to accomplish social goals. In this Keynote, we urge cognitive scientists and neuroscientists to more fully embrace sociolinguistic and sociocultural experiences as part of their theoretical and empirical purview. To this end, we review theoretical antecedents of such approaches, and offer a new framework – the Systems Framework of Bilingualism – that we hope will be useful in this regard. We conclude with new questions to nudge our discipline towards a more nuanced, inclusive, and socially-informed scientific understanding of multilingual experience. We hope to engage a wide array of researchers united under the broad umbrella of multilingualism (e.g., researchers in neurocognition, sociolinguistics, and applied scientists).

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Section: Historical Antecedentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking multilingual experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism

Titone

Tiv

2022

Bilingualism

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“…A similar doctrine emphasizing universal cognitive features emerged during the cognitive revolution (Gardner, 1985). During this period, linguists, computer scientists and psychologists came together to produce a framework for thinking about cognition as computation or information processing.…”

Section: The Newtonian Principlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, the field which grew out of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 60s and with roots stretching back to the late 19th century, focused on the mind as a general computational system(Gardner, 1985). This contrasts with alternative approaches developed by cultural psychology and cultural evolution, discussed below.…”

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confidence: 99%

Beyond Newton: Why Assumptions of Universality are Critical to Cognitive Science, and How to Finally Move Past Them

Kroupin¹,

Davis²,

Henrich³

2023

Preprint

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Fifty years of cross-cultural researchers critiquing classical cognitive science’s omission of cultural variation suggests an unresolved tension deeper than this surface conflict. We propose that the intransigence of classical cognitive science can be explained by the action of a tacit Newtonian principle (NP) that the proper subjects of cognitive science are universal properties of the mind. If we jettison the NP, it is not clear how we can rule out that cognitive science should apply to a myriad of ungeneralizable case studies (e.g. studying the idiosyncrasies of some individual or group). In fact, this collapse into hermeneutics has occurred in some branches of cognitive research within living memory. The status of the NP as both problematic and necessary explains why the culturalist critiques calling for the dismantling of the NP consistently gone unheard: Calls to cut away a rotten beam may well fall on deaf ears if the beam is all that holds up the roof. In order to break out of this cycle, we propose an alternative to the NP, combining cultural evolutionary theory with a newly-developed principle of articulation. We go on to show how this alternative framework provides a more productive and accurate approach to incorporating both universal and culturally-specific cognitive features as evidenced by ethnographic, biological and cognitive data as well as motivating a range of new directions of research.

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“…The cognitive revolution within psychology (Gardner, 1987;Miller, 2003) ignited debates on the extent to which human decision making holds up to normative rational choice models. Laying the groundwork for the following decades, Simon (1964Simon ( , 1979Simon ( , 1981 put forward a model of bounded rationality, which intentionally incorporated constraints on the cognitive information-processing capacities of the decision maker.…”

Section: A Cognitive Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Perhaps because its birth coincided with the cognitive revolution (Gardner, 1987;Miller, 2003), most of the experimental study of human rationality-and its shortcomings-has drawn on cognitive psychology to identifying systematic limitations on human judgment and decision 1 The heuristics-and-biases approach has also received criticism from a program of research on error management theory (Haselton & Buss, 2000;Haselton & Nettle, 2006). Drawing on an evolutionary lens of analysis, this research program argues that if the costs of false positive and false negative errors are asymmetric, then systematically biased behaviors can reduce costly errors over time, even compared to non-biased behaviors.…”

Section: B Social Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reputational Rationality Theory

Dorison¹

2023

Preprint

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Traditionally, research on human judgment and decision making draws on cognitive psychology to identify deviations from normative standards of how decisions ought to be made. These deviations are commonly considered irrational errors and biases. However, this approach has serious limitations. Critically, even though most decisions are embedded within complex social networks of observers, this approach typically ignores how decisions are perceived by valued audiences. To address this limitation, this article proposes reputational rationality theory: a theoretical model of how observers evaluate targets who do (vs. do not) strictly adhere to normative standards of judgment and choice. Drawing on the dual pathways of homophily and social signaling, the theory generates testable predictions regarding when and why observers positively evaluate error-prone decision makers, termed the benefit of bias hypothesis. Given that individuals hold deep impression management goals, reputational rationality theory challenges the unqualified classification of response tendencies that deviate from normative standards as irrational. That is, apparent errors and biases can, under certain conditions, be reputationally rational. The reputational rewards associated with cognitive biases may in turn contribute to their persistence. Acknowledging the (sometimes beneficial) reputational consequences of cognitive biases can address long-standing puzzles in judgment and decision making as well as generate fruitful avenues for future research.

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The mind's new science: A history of the cognitive revolution

Cited by 21 publications

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Rethinking multilingual experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism

Rethinking multilingual experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism

Beyond Newton: Why Assumptions of Universality are Critical to Cognitive Science, and How to Finally Move Past Them

Reputational Rationality Theory

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