The Rise of Cognitivism and Functionalism

Psychological behaviourism, having swept aside the prevailing orthodoxy of introspectionism early in the twentieth century, was then itself replaced by a new paradigm in psychology – cognitivism. While accepting a broadly behaviourist denial of introspection, cognitive psychology rejected the behaviourist claim that the subject matter of psychology is just patterns of behaviour. Cognitive psychology looked for mechanisms behind these patterns and found them by positing internal representations as causally explanatory entities.

These internal representations do not have to be conceived of as inhabiting a special mental realm. They are to be conceived of as being implemented in the hardware of the brain, just as data in a computer is implemented in the hardware of the computer. So, with the development of computer technology in the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of Chomskian linguistics came the thought that by applying the way we think about computers to people we can discover the hidden mechanisms that govern our behaviour.

Still, the assumption that representations are identifiable entities within the functioning of the cognitive mechanism looks like a throwback to the theory of ideas propounded by the British empiricists, which the associationist introspectionists were trying to implement in their psychology. The key assumption there was that subjects represent something in their thought or speech by having an entity in their mind that represents that thing. The work of representation is passed by this assumption from the subject to an idea in a subject's mind.