A. Charles Catania (1994) Information, Cognition and Behavior:
. Psycoloquy: 5(39) Scientific Cognition (5)
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Psycoloquy 5(39): Information, Cognition and Behavior:
INFORMATION, COGNITION AND BEHAVIOR:
TELLING WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR
Book Review of Giere on Scientific Cognition
A. Charles Catania
Department of Psychology
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Baltimore, MD 21228-5398
catania@umbc2.umbc.edu
Abstract
My review of Giere's Cognitive Models of Science (1992)
is written from the standpoint of contemporary behavior analysis.
Science is an activity, so what we know about behavior should be
relevant to it. Yet cognitive approaches do not take facts about
behavior into account. The themes I consider include the
limitations of language, the ambiguity of knowledge structures, and
some implications of information processing. For example, cognitive
theories of information processing fail to deal with the finding
that organisms do not work to produce information per se; they only
work to produce information correlated with reinforcing events.
Cognitive models of science have little to say about those major
scientific innovations, obvious in retrospect, that were slow to be
accepted because their content was not what people wanted to hear.
Keywords
Cognitive science, philosophy of science, cognitive
models, artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitve
neuroscience.
References
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