375: Historical Approach

1. History of the Cognitive Approach
1. Epistemology
1. Greek Views
1. How you acquire knowledge (perception)
2. How you maintain know knowledge (memory)
3. Whether knowledge is innate or learned (learning theory)
2. Plato
1. Rationalist (A Priori)
1. Nature
2. Thought that knowledge was innate
3. Aristotle
1. Empiricist (Tabula Rasa)
2. Nurture
3. Thought that knowledge is acquired through experience
4. Dark Ages
1. Decline of intellectualism, rise of spiritualism up until the Renaissance
5. Renaissance
1. Rediscovery of Greek thought
2. Rene Descartes
1. “I think therefore, I am”
2. Matter is divisible and doubtable, but you cannot doubt that you are thinking
3. Cartesian Dualism
1. 2 Kinds of Substance
1. res cogitans
1. The mind
2. res extensa
1. The body
2. The penial gland
1. a gland that sits in the middle of the brain where res cogitans and res extensa come together
2. This is the only thing that, to the naked eye, does not have bilateral symmetry (however, it is bilateral under the microscope)
3. Therefore it was where the soul resided
3. The Mind-Body problem
1. The major alternative to dualism is materialism
1. The position that physical material is all there is
2. Problems with both
1. how does the physical interact with the mental
1. or, in other words, how does a lump of gray matter give us this
2. Rationalism 
1. A Priori
1. knowledge is before experience
2. All knowledge can be found through reasoning
3. Empiricism
1. Locke, Hume, Berkley
1. Knowledge is a posteriori
1. All knowledge is gained through experience
2. Tabula Rasa (blank slate)
4. Psychology = science of the mind
1. Can we apply the scientific method to the mind?
1. How do we observe a thought?
1. Start with one's own thoughts
2. Structuralism
1. Thought we needed to get to basic structure of thought
2. Wundt 
1. Came up with a method to break the mind down into its different parts
2. 3 Elementary States
1. Sensations
2. Images
3. Affections
3. Problems with introspection
1. Are my sensations the same as your sensations?  Probably not, for example, on a cold day people from california are probably colder than people from alaska
2. Observing a thought changes that thought
3. Poor between subjects reliability
4. Imageless thought debate (cannot be answered with introspection method)
1. Titchener: thoughts always have images
2. Kulpe: thought is possible w/o images
1. Dr. Kirwan feels very strongly that thoughts without images are absolutely possible
5. Behaviorism
1. Lets ignore what happens in the middle and just focus on what we can observe
1. Focus on Input TO Processing TO Output
2. John Watson
1. Observable only 
2. Theory must be parsimonious
3. Break behavior down into irreducible concepts
4. Experiments with little Albert
1. Conditioned the kid to be afraid of white mice