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Reductionist Research Programmes in Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Robert C. Richardson
Robert C. Richardson*
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
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Extract

Contemporary psychology has been dominated by two distinct paradigms, each of which have given rise to comprehensive and fruitful research programmes. The functionalist programme purports to explain our cognitive capacities — what Noam Chomsky (1965, pp. 3 ff.) dubs our “competence” — in terms of the operations and transformations effected on the available “information”. Explaining, e.g., an ability such as color perception means isolating the cues on which we rely in making our judgments as to color, and proceeding to explain how, on the basis of information available from such cues, we could come to reach our actual judgments. This will involve explaining, for example, how it is that our perceptions of color are constant and reliable despite substantial variation in the intensity of light impinging on the retina — particularly since the intensity of such light seems to be the only relevant parameter which could guide our judgments.

Type
Part VI. Reduction in Biology and Psychology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 171 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Preliminary research relevant to this work was supported by grants from the University Research Council and the Taft Committee at the University of Cincinnati. I am thankful for their support.

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