"Pre-Cognitivism": Anticipations of Cognitive Science in the Early 20th Century

28 Mar 2004 15:54

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This is not an altogether well-defined category in my mind. Roughly, I mean people active in the period 1900--1950 and who I can easily imagine embracing cognitivism, had it only been available, and in its absence tried to find more or less mechanistic or logical-computatinal approaches to studying thought; those who lit candles during the dual darkness of behaviorism and Freudianism. Of course, this is a whiggish and perhaps even anachronistic way of approaching these thinkers, sometimes a little whiggery is not amiss. And anyway one could ask, counterfactually, why these individuals and their efforts did not succeed in launching a science of human thought, or regard them as pointing out directions in which cognitive science could have, but did not, proceed (perhaps for good reasons!).

See:
• W. Ross Ashby
• Jean Piaget
• I. A. Richards
• L. S. Vygotsky
• Norbert Wiener [But as an immediate and acknowledged ancestor of cognitive science, he may not count]

To read:
• Roberto Cordeschi, The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics
• Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer, The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea [blurb]