Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

Siegelman, 2005). The Macy conferences broadened the range of participants who
attended the 1944 Princeton meeting to include psychologists, sociologists, and
anthropologists.
The success of the Macy meetings prepared the way for a variety of similar interdisciplinary
conferences that in turn set the stage for cognitive science. One of these
was a 1956 conference organized by MIT’s Special Interest Group in Information
Theory. This conference included presentations by Newell and Simon on their logic
machine, and by Chomsky on generative grammar (Miller, 2003). Thus conference
participant George Miller, trained in the behaviourist tradition, would have heard
computer scientists and linguists freely using representational terms to great effect.
The success of cognitivism in other disciplines, communicated to psychologists
who participated in these interdisciplinary conferences, led to a reaction
against behaviourism in psychology. “No longer were psychologists restricted in
their explanatory accounts to events that could either be imposed on a subject or
observed in one’s behavior; psychologists were now willing to consider the representation
of information in the mind” (Gardner, 1984, p. 95).
George Miller (2003) has provided a personal account of this transition. His
first book, Language and Communication (Miller, 1951), deliberately employed a
behaviourist framework, a framework that he would completely abandon within a
few years because of the influence of the cognitivist work of others. “In 1951, I apparently
still hoped to gain scientific respectability by swearing allegiance to behaviorism.
Five years later, inspired by such colleagues as Noam Chomsky and Jerry
Bruner, I had stopped pretending to be a behaviorist” (Miller, 2003, p. 141).
However, because cognitivism arose as a reaction against behaviourism in
North American experimental psychology, cognitive psychology developed by
taking an antagonistic approach to almost all of the central behaviourist positions
(Bruner, 1990; Sperry, 1993). “We were not out to ‘reform’ behaviorism, but to
replace it” said Bruner (1990, p. 3). In psychology, the cognitive revolution,
was not one of finding new positives to support the important role of cognition,
many of which were already long evident. Rather, the story is one of discovering an
alternative logic by which to refute the seemingly incontestable reasoning that heretofore
required science to ostracize mind and consciousness. (Sperry, 1993, p. 881)
Consider but one example that illustrates the tone within psychology during the
cognitive revolution. Skinner’s (1957) account of language, Verbal Behavior, elicited
a review by Noam Chomsky (1959b) that serves as one of the pioneering articles
in cognitivism and is typically viewed as the turning point against psychological
behaviourism (MacCorquodale, 1970; Schlinger, 2008). Some researchers, though,
have objected to the tone of Chomsky’s review: “It is ungenerous to a fault; condescending,
unforgiving, obtuse, and ill-humored” (MacCorquodale, 1970, p. 84).
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