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

On the other side of the antagonism, behaviourists have never accepted the
impact of Chomsky’s review or the outcome of the cognitive revolution. Schlinger
(2008, p. 335) argued that fifty years after its publication, Verbal Behavior (and
behaviourism) was still vital because it worked: “It seems absurd to suggest
that a book review could cause a paradigmatic revolution or wreak all the havoc
that Chomsky’s review is said to have caused to Verbal Behavior or to behavioral
psychology.”
The tone of the debate about Verbal Behavior is indicative of the tension and
conflict that characterized cognitivism’s revolt against behaviourist psychology. As
noted earlier, cognitivists such as Bruner viewed their goal as replacing, and not
revising, behaviourist tenets: “It was not a revolution against behaviorism with
the aim of transforming behaviorism into a better way of pursuing psychology
by adding a little mentalism to it. Edward Tolman had done that, to little avail”
(Bruner, 1990, p. 2).
One behaviourist position that was strongly reacted against by cognitivism
“was the belief in the supremacy and the determining power of the environment”
(Gardner, 1984, p. 11). Cognitive psychologists turned almost completely away from
environmental determinism. Instead, humans were viewed as active information
processors (Lindsay & Norman, 1972; Reynolds & Flagg, 1977). For instance, the
New Look in perception was an argument that environmental stimulation could
be overridden by the contents of beliefs, desires, and expectations (Bruner, 1957). In
cognitivism, mind triumphed over environmental matter.
Cognitive psychology’s radical rejection of the role of the environment was a
departure from the earlier cybernetic tradition, which placed a strong emphasis on
the utility of feedback between an agent and its world. Cyberneticists had argued
that,
for effective action on the outer world, it is not only essential that we possess good
effectors, but that the performance of these effectors be properly monitored back
to the central nervous system, and that the readings of these monitors be properly
combined with the other information coming in from the sense organs to produce a
properly proportioned output to the effectors. (Wiener, 1948, p. 114)
Some cognitivists still agreed with the view that the environment was an important
contributor to the complexity of behaviour, as shown by Simon’s parable of the ant
(Simon, 1969; Vera & Simon, 1993). Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960) acknowledged
that humans and other organisms employed internal representations of the
world. However, they were also “disturbed by a theoretical vacuum between cognition
and action” (p. 11). They attempted to fill this vacuum by exploring the relevance
of key cybernetic ideas, particularly the notion of environmental feedback,
to cognitive psychology.
Towards a Cognitive Dialectic 409