Because the current resurgence of the mentalistic interpretation of cognitive events runs counter to scientific norms, it prompts a thorough analysis of the source and nature of Cognitivism. As to the source, Cognitive psychology is definitely a continuation of the spiritistic way of thinking developed by the Church Fathers as early as the 2nd century B.C. The evidence of this continuity is well symbolized by the antiscientific writings of St. Augustine.
What Cognitivism basically signifies is that such activities as perceiving, thinking, reasoning, and so on comprise some sort of transcendent internal entity or process not amenable to observation. Clearly events are being verbally transmuted into mystical psychic constructs. How such errors can be accounted for is by (a) the power of traditional beliefs and (b) the misunderstanding of Behavioristic doctrine. ln conclusion, the article also raises the question of whether mentalism can ever be extruded from psychology, with suggestions concerning the scientific treatment of cognitive events.
In this article I consider the activities traditionally called cognitive in the light of the recent Cognitivistic movement. It appears clear that the Cognitive movement has precipitated a number of problems which have again brought into serious question the nature of such behavior as perceiving, thinking, reasoning, remembering, and so on, as well as whether psychology can be a science at all. But problems of cognitive activities are of great importance not only for psychology, but for all the sciences. They even loom beyond the sciences with massive consequences for the logic and philosophy of science and the appreciation of all the intellectual institutions which pervade the current scene.
Unfortunately, a deep canyon separates psychologists interested in the nature and significance of cognitive events. On one side stand those who insist that cognition is the class name for noetic acts of organisms that are in principle no different from any other adaptations to ambient objects and conditions, while on the other are massed those who assume that cognition involves mystical, transspatial processes that are immune to direct observation. The latter group comprise the members of the Cognitivist movement. Although current Cognitivism is surely a regressive movement it is hailed by many as a powerful new dispensation in psychology. Obviously there is revealed here a clash of basic premises, which separate behavioral occurrences from the beliefs and verbal references of psychologists about such behavior. As will appear throughout my presentation an alternative title for my article might well be, The Unsuccessful Struggle of Psychology to Become a Science.
As a definite and organized movement current Cognitivism was set up as an attack upon and a rival to Behaviorism (Observer, 1977, 1978). Basically Behaviorism was attacked on the ground that it extruded mental states, as the presumed mainstay of psychology, from the psychological domain. The justifying argument was that psychological events cannot be relegated to studies of conditioning. Protest was made against the neglect of research into problems of perceiving, imaging, remembering, and thinking, though this had never happened. What could not be denied perhaps was that in North America, psychological reflex behavior and its development into animal learnology has been extremely conspicuous. It seemed as if psychologists were severely bitten by Pavlov's salivating dogs.
Cognitivism appeared, too, as a rival to Behaviorism for recognition as a general type of psychology. Its proponents assumed that conditioning as a method for modifying the gross behavior of infrahuman organisms, much as it might serve as a naturalistic procedure for the development of some type of psychological behavior, cou!d not be accepted as the exclusive model for describing and interpreting everything in the psychological domain.
A secondary but important factor in the emergence of current Cognitivism is a semantic circumstance. Psychologists opposing the conditioning enterprise assumed that a great part of psychological activity was being neglected when the terms "cognition" and "cognitive psychology" were avoided. This is of course a great error. Consider the terms "cognition," "cognitive," "cognitive psychology." Certainly there is no objection to the terms and their usage when they refer to particular kinds of behavioral adjustments. Language and terminology are polysemous and metaphorical and thus the sole criterion for proper employment in science is accurate reference. Why not generalize and categorize perceiving, thjnking, reasoning, imaging, problem solving as cognitive behaviors?
However, the current Cognitivistic movement exists as a militant polemical crusade. It is to counteract Behaviorism and its conception of the nature of psychology and science, which the Cognitivists regard as faulty. Consequently, cognitive terms are employed for the resuscitation of psychism into psychology. What a curious way to bring psychological theory into line with psychological events. What a misleading procedure for making psychology a science by formulating constructions not from observation of events, but from traditional and historical transcendentalism.
To characterize Cognitivism as inimical to scientific psychology obligates us to compare scientific with nonscientific occupations. It may be well at this point to be reminded of the essentials of scientific enterprises. Briefly put, the primary function of every scientific discipline is to achieve valid systems of propositions concerning a particular type of event, since it is obvious that the general subject matter of all the sciences is interbehavior of two or more things. For example, in astronomy, the motions of the earth relative to the sun; in physics it may be gravitational attraction of two or more bodies, or the interbehavior of particles in atoms; in chemistry, the interaction of two or more reagents, whether elements or more complex substances; in biology, the interbehavior of organisms with their environments, for example, food objects, or other organisms whether symbiotic, predator, parasitic, or mutualistic; and in psychology, the interbehavior of organisms with other organisms, or inorganic things, with an accumulation of repertoires of behavior.
These interbehaviors of things whether inorganic bodies or organisms together with the conditions under which they interact constitute fields with definite boundaries as indicated in Figures 1, 2, and 3.
These fields may be called crude data or preanalytic events. When, as in Figure 4, observers manipulate, describe, or interpret these fields we regard them as analytic events. Whatever a scientist does with respect to these fields, he is required to match his propositions with the pristine fields. Failing to do so results in serious disagreements concerning the descriptions and interpretations of cognitive or some other interbehavioral domam.
THE STRUCTURE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL FIELDS
Analysis of a pristine psychological event or field brings to light the following prominent factors. Centrally there is a biological organism or person in interaction with a stimulus object. In complex human fields there are media of contact between the responding organisms and the stimulating object. The boundaries of the field include setting factors which influence the pattern of the interbehavior.
Since the Cognitivistic movement does not conform to the specifications of science it is now our task to inquire into the source of the theory that differential responses, judging, imaging, decision making or any other psychological events involve extraspatial factors. That source surely lies in the social history of psychology.
THE SPIRITISTIC CAREER OF PSYCHOLOGY
It has been the great misfortune of psychology that early in its career the organism that interacts with other things in the specific fields of behavior was split into two; the one part the tangible and tactile phase was called the body, and the other, an invisible and intangible part, the soul, and later the mind. It is this dichotomization of events including organisms that is the source of Cognitivistic theory (see Figure 5).
The internal intangible states alleged to be involved in cognitive processes hark back to the spiritistic doctrines which were invented under the auspices of the faith and heliels of the clerics who lived at the dawn of the mentalistic era, say, the second century B.C. As the mentalistic or spiritistic doctrine developed, cognition was made to consist of the operation of the knowing propensities of the soul.
The fundamental significance of the spiritistic or mentalistic viewpoint can be fully appreciated by the scrutiny of the antiscientific and antinaturalistic writings of St. Augustine (FIgure 6), the pace setter of modern spiritism.
Figure 6. Saint Augustine.
In his famous Confessions he writes,
And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder, that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with mine eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars, which I had seen, and that ocean which I believe to be, inwardly in my memory, and that, with the same vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And l know by what sense of the body, each was impressed upon me. (Augustine, 1949, pp.212-213)
Not only does Augustine disdain those who accept natural things as knowledge and reality as against the great internal images of soul or memory, but deliberately rejects the activities and findings of scientists, as in the following quotation:
Wherefore, when it is asked what we ought to believe in matters of religion, the answer is not to be sought in the exploration of the nature of things [rerum natura], after the manner of those whom the Greeks called "physicists." Nor should we be dismayed if Christians are ignorant about the properties and the number of the basic elements of nature, or about the motion, order, and deviations of the stars, the map of the heavens, the kinds and nature of animals, plants, stones, springs, rivers, and mountains; about the divisions of space and time, about the signs of impending storms, and the myriad other things which these "physicists" have come to understand, or think they have. For even these men, gifted with such superior insight, with their ardor in study and their abundant leisure, exploring some of these matters by human conjecture and others through historical inquiry, have not yet learned everything there is to know. (Augustine, 1955, Ch. 3, 9)
It is customary to regard the great rise and cultivation of scientific techniques and achievements as the Renaissance of the classical naturalistic ways of thinking as compared with the mysticism of theological traditions. And it is a commonplace that by the 18th century modern psychology advanced to the idea that psychology should be an autonomous science. In that period the theological aspect of the psychic processes seemed to lose the attraction of philosophers and scientists. As we have indicated, "soul," from the vocabulary of religion, was exchanged for "mind," "self," or just "consciousness" as the internal aspect of organisms. Some writers, mainly Continental, insisted that the human mind is a unity in close continuity with soul, while others, mainly British, thought more in terms of associated sensations and images which composed mental units which together formed a union of pluralities.
It cannot be overlooked that although a sentiment for science was awakened, no attempt was made to extrude psychism from psychology. Students of the history of psychology recall how Herbart (1891) argued for a mathematical as well as a metaphysical treatment of mental states, and so regard him as one of the earliest mathematical model builders for psychology. In this period, too, interest developed in making the organic body into a parallel and tangible support of the invisible mind.
As a phase of the aberrant attempt to naturalize the mind or soul it was specified that mind possessed two powers, one concerned with knowledge or thought while the other operated as the prime mover or motion of the acting organisms. Long prevailed the view that the soul or mind possessed only these two faculties--the cognitive and the conative. Later, Tetens and Kant (Kantor, 1969) proposed to add a feeling or affective faculty to the other two. So the development of the cognitive and other powers or faculties is nothing more than an incident of spiritistic philosophy. Psychologists adopted these beliefs that have become strongly featured in the psychology of the 2Oth century.
It is quite evident that the faculty concept belongs only to a soul-mind system. There certainly is no point in faculties when studying psychological events as they occur. On the basis of the field study of interactions a classification of types of behavior would require a very large number of factors. Account would have to be taken of the functions of stimulus objects, the operation of media, the various surrounding circumstances as well as what particular organisms do on the basis of prior behavior in similar or dissimilar circumstances.
An important lesson concerning the imposition of spiritistic interpretations upon events is observed in the history of psychology when experimental psychologists fitted events into the spiritistic and psychic traditions of ancient times. An interesting paradox of the history of psychology is that experimental psychologists date the birth of scientific psychology from the work and thinking of the incurable mystic Fechner (1860/1966), and the spiritistic philosophy of Helmholtz (1866/1962), Wundt (1908-11), Külpe (1909), and Ebbinghaus (1885/1964). All these outstanding figures regarded their manipulations as lighting up the cimmerian darkness of the soul as transformed into consciousness, sensations, feelings, thought elements, and other psychic processes.
What is especially to be noted here is that the transcendental viewpoint has served for many centuries as a basic intellectual institution, and an invariable premise for all thinking and reasoning in Western European culture. It is precisely such cogitation that constitutes the essence of the current Cognitivistic movement. We may look upon such transcendental beliefs as the postulates or premises of most workers in psychology and in the other sciences. Even after psychology claimed to be an experimental science, students of psychology still made their descriptive and interpretative propositions fit into a system based on psychic postulates.
The enormity of the cultural development of the dualistic premises and their influence on all intellectual enterprises bids us elaborate on the consequences. Of the two influences upon psychological development, the existence of (a) behavior fields and (b) spiritistic tradition, the latter proved to be the more powerful. As we should now point out even the elaborate development of many sciences as activities to ascertain the nature and behavior of things does not prevail as against the spiritistic institutions. In the psychological tradition, of course, the soul and its activity have been merely renamed mind, self, or consciousness.
Despite the rhetorical disguises. employed today, the subtle but disastrous influence upon current psychological thinking cannot be gain-said.
Transmutation of events. When Augustine, like everyone else, describes such pristine cognitive types of events as visual perceiving, he plainly stresses the object seen as well as the visual act of seeing and of course the attention of the mind. As the following quotation indicates, Augustine, as everyone else must, appreciates dimly the field-like character of psychological events.
When, then, we see any corporeal object, these three things, as is most easy to do, are to be considered and distinguished: First, the object itself which we see; whether a stone, or flame, or any other thing that can be seen by the eyes; and this certainly might exist also already before it was seen; next, vision or the act of seeing, which did not exist before we perceived the object itself which is presented to the sense; in the third place, that which keeps the sense of the eye in the object seen, so long as it is seen, viz., the attention of the mind. (Augustine, 1887, xi, Ch. 2, 2)
Still, he transmutes all the factors into essences and experiences of soul.
Sensation does not proceed from that body which is seen, but from the body of the living being that perceives, with which the soul is tempered together in some wonderful way of its own; yet vision is produced. (Augustine, 1887, xi, Ch. 2, 3)
Organocentricity. A close consequent of soul postulation is the current principle that in any behavior system the primary factor consists of the act, movement, or change in the interacting organism. In current psychological thinking organocentricity is represented by the asymmetrical notion that learning is something that occurs in the organism (Hilgard, 1956). Here is a flagrant deviation from the domain of occurring events.
The solipsistic principle. As a result doubtless of the derivation of the soul principle from cultic practices and craving for personal salvation, the mind and consciousness have historically been regarded as unique and private. Not only is this the basis for the notions of immediacy and ultimacy of mental experience, but also for centuries there has prevailed the notion that only one's mind is available for knowledge; other minds are not certainly existent, but presumably inferred. The common example is to assert that the aching of one's tooth is absolutdy inaccessible to other than the individual who is suffering the pain at the time. Obviously it is only spiritistic presupposition that prevents modern writers from appreciating that all events are private and unique. The fall of A is not the fall of B nor the digestion of A the digestive process of B, or vice versa.
The introspective principle. The emphasis of current Cognitivists on transcendental inner factors is directly traceable to the Augustinian type of spiritism. One of the manifestations of this basic epistemological theory and practice is the introspective principle according to which cognitive behavior makes necessary the investigation of extraspatial counterparts to the observable activities of organisms. Whatever identity and certainty of knowledge that can be gleaned from self-observation can only be obtained from the rejection of the transcendental factors.
While examining the origin and development of the Cognitivistic movement it may appear an inevitable result of cultural history, yet the growth period of Cognitivism coincided with the century-old ambitions of psychologists to make their discipline scientific. So it must also appear puzzling that prescientific doctrines flourish in the 20th century. After all, psychology has been a laboratory discipline throughout a century and its devotees have been aware of the enormous development of technology through the age of electricity. The solution of this enigma may be sought in the misunderstanding of the Behavioristic revolution which created a storm in the psychological domain following the assimilation by psychologists of the doctrine of evolution.
At the beginning I mentioned that the Cognitivistic movement had serious implications for the sciences, philosophy, and other intellectual pursuits. Now I want to illustrate the evil effect of maintaining mysterious and mythical factors in scientific work. I call attention to samples of fallacious thinking on the part of eminent scientists. Consider for example the solipsistic operationism of Bridgman (1936), the confusion of the observer with the observed by such masters as Bohr (1958), Born (1949), Heisenberg (1958), and many others, also the creationistic notion of supplying laws to nature, and many other such transcendental propositions.
So disastrous are mentalistic principles for psychology and other intellectual enterprises that to eliminate them seems necessary. But so powerful are spiritistic institutions and the language in which they are embodied that the questions arise: if and how is it to be done. To the credit of many Cognitive psychologists it must be noticed that they would prefer that psychology be a science, but do not realize how this is to be brought about. I consider now various measures for doing so, one invalid and the other effective.
Probably the most confusing and futile procedure for ameliorating the deficiencies of the mentalistic tradition is to assert that the brain is the seat of consciousness or mind. One of the many attempts to rationalize a belief in soul or mind is to make consciousness an epiphenomenon hovering over the brain. But this clearly emphasizes the presence of spirits and is no solution of any mind-body problem. Accordingly the next suggestion is to substitute the brain for the mind altogether. Thus the faculties of the soul have been made into centers in the brain. Cognitivists believe that psychology can be scientific by equating pure phantasms of the soul with functions of a tangible organ. Of course the entire identification is purely verbal and involves spurious interpretations of an important organ, the functions of which are quite other than the identity theory attempts to make out. Misinterpretations of biological things and events are examples of serious intellectual misdemeanors.
I propose that a simple but effective remedy for achieving scientific psychological propositions is at hand. It is simply to cleave securely to pristine events. This means analyzing the interbehavior of organisms or persons as they perceive events, image them when absent, solve problems, perform judgments, remember engagements, and so on. A convenient name for such study is Interbehavioral psychology. When observers are free of spiritistic postulates they find no need to describe such behavior fields in spiritistic terms.
Figure 7. Newton's Solar Spectrum Experiment.
Photo courtesy of Bausch & Lomb.
To demonstrate the difference between the Cognitivistic and Interbehavioral approaches to psychological events we examine briefly Newton's great historical experiment on light and colors. As every student of psychology knows, Newton held a glass prism in the pathway of a small beam of light with the result that a spectrum of colors appeared on a colorless surface (see Figure 7).
Newton stressed that no color is present in light rays or in the optic pathway, so as a dualist he asserted that colors are produced in the mind or sensorium. The different colors of the spectrum are owing to the different refrangibilities of light rays or corpuscles each of which causes ks own spectrum color to appear. What he called the sensorium was either an epiphenomenon hovering about the brain or a homuncular phantasm seated in the brain (see Figure 8).
What Newton could not know was that the colors of the spectrum were produced by the prism so the refraction process is the stimulus object of the field; no miraculous creation in the brain or sensorium is part of the pristine spectrum event. If Newton had been at home in color as well as light, he might have noticed that the great range of pigmental hues did not match up with his psychic interpretations. It is clear that Newton was violently transforming colors into sensations or impressions of a nonexistent mind, a procedure which a great line of philosophers in the grand British Empiristic tradition, such as Locke (1959), Berkeley (1949), and Hume (1896), built into tremendous antiscientific philosophical systems. Cognitivists of all periods adopt this mode of thinking. It is well known how Cognitivists have converted sensations into images as psychic states when primary stimulus objects are absent. It is the combination of sensations and images which for the Cognitivists are the ingredients of what they call perception, but which of course are actually perceiving fields.
Following our analysis of the Cognitivist movement, it is a fitting conclusion to point out that everything its proponents interpret as consciousness or mental states can be satisfactorily described in naturalistic terms. Perhaps the mildest criticism that can be made against the Cognitivists is their ignorance that for over a half century the literature of psychology could boast of at least one treatise that completely rejected mind-body assumptions and which presented the main types of psychological behavior in the form of naturalistic fields without even mentioning psychic states. The futility of Cognitive psychology may be well illustrated by considering some examples of the most subtle fields, those in which imagery plays a large part as in thinking, remembering, and reasoning.
The unique feature of imaging behavior is the interaction of a person with a stimulus object which is not present. This can only be done by means of a substitute object which has in some manner been previously associated with the original stimulus object (see Figure 9).
Figure 9. Implicit Ikhavior Field.
An example is asking what kind of numbers are on the court house clock in the public square. "Are they Arabic or Roman?" Generally the answer will be one or the other. But actually there are no numbers, only empty spaces. The question in this case is the substitute stimulus for the clock. Any object or event, however, can serve a substitute stimulus function.
Adequate attention to substitute stimulus fields clears away the mystery of mental or neural storage, retention, and retrieval. Where is the verbal or thought action which is stimulated by the question, "who was the 20th president of the United States?" No where of course. A valid description of the entire happening is that a previously organized field is now vestigially repeated. The failure to reorganize the original field by the absence of either the stimulus, response, or setting factor is forgetting.
The performance of the most subtle behavior must include in its description an individual's action. But this occurs only when in contact with interacting objects. Included also are the conditions under which the interbehavior takes place. It is only the influence of transcendental premises that interprets the person's action as taking place in parts of the organism such as the head or brain.
All fields in which substitute stimuli play a part are well named implicit behavior. Such behavior belongs essentially to the same series of activities as any less subtle adjustment. Only the patterns of the fields are different. Interestingly enough when thinking is taken to be actually planning, judging, approving, or disapproving, as it should be, instead of day dreaming or silently reminiscing, the behavior may include manipulating a pencil, looking at maps or other types of interbehavior.
How well the substitute stimulus hypothesis replaces the mystical storage interpretations may be judged by the everyday occurrence of a person who stops in his tracks and walks back into his home out of which he has just emerged with some object that he did not carry before. That was an act of remembering. It may sometimes be difficult for the observer to be certain what the person's substitute stimulus was in a particular case, but one may be sure that there was some object or condition which served as a substitute stimulus. Note that the activity of the remembering or forgetting behavior is entirely a natural activity which may include a substitute stimulus whicb is of an entirely different composition from the original stimulus object.
Students of psychology may assume with confidence that if they are observing an event, even as complex and subtle as thinking, reasoning, perceiving, remembering, forgetting, choosing, or any misbehavior like an illusion or mirage, there is a scientific analysis available for a rational interpretation. The only question is how capable a student is to dispose of the blinders of fatuous spiritistic tradition in order to see things and events as they actually occur.