Just over twenty years ago, Schwartz (1982) critically reviewed a number of cognitive psychological approaches to thought disorder in existence at the time. He found most of them wanting, by virtue of what he considered to be errors in their experimental methods, faulty observations, tautological reasoning or theoretical models that were too simple. The targets of his attack included virtually all the leading theories of the day, such as Goldstein's (1944) impairment of abstract thinking (not found in studies using properly matched controls), Von Domarus' (1944) failure to adhere to the laws of normal logic (unsupported by actual studies of reasoning in schizophrenic patients), Chapman and Chapman's (1973) bias to the strong meaning of words (not specific to thought disorder) and Salzinger et al.'s (1978) so-called immediacy hypothesis, which proposed that verbal behaviour was excessively controlled by stimuli in the environment (better explained in other terms).

One of the few cognitive approaches which escaped Schwartz's criticism was overinclusive thinking, discussed in the next chapter. Another he remained optimistic about was a disorder of attention; this was not the then fashionable theory that schizophrenic patients were unable to filter out unwanted information from consciousness (which Schwartz disapproved of on theoretical grounds and was not destined to stand the test of time), but a more active form of attention concerned with the selection of responses.