I think these research programs represent something without a clear historical precedent. Traditional economics and generative linguistics, for example, could be compared to pre-scientific disciplines that were overthrown by scientific disciplines. But both exhibit a high degree of formal and institutional sophistication. I don’t think pre-Copernican astronomy had the same level of sophistication. Economics also has data (although so did geocentric astronomy) whereas the generative tradition in linguistics considers data misleading and prefers intuitive judgement. What neither has is a systematic experimental research program or a desire to integrate with the natural sciences.
Cognitivism is essentially Cartesian philosophy with a computer analogy and experiments. In practice it just becomes experimental psychology with some extra jargon. Nativism, too, comes from Cartesian philosophy (Chomsky was quite explicit about this). While cognitivism has experiments it has an interpretation that isn’t founded in experiment (the type of computer the brain is supposed to be and the algorithms it could be said to run is not addressed) and an opposition to integration with the natural sciences (the so-called “autonomy of psychology” thesis).
These research programs are similar to pre-scientific research programs but have managed to persist in a world where you have to attempt to “look scientific” in order to secure research grants and they reflect this fact.
You point to many problems and I wouldn’t take any bets because of these. It would be too difficult to judge who had won. On the nature/nurture debate: Empiricism evolved into constructivism/interactionism (i.e., the developing organism interacting with the environment with genes driving development), which is the dominate view in biology, and it’s not obvious what, precisely, modern Nativists believe. But it is obvious that they still exist since naive nativist talk persists almost everywhere else. It’s similarly difficult to figure out what computationalists mean by their analogies and the degree to which they intend them to be analogies vs. literal propositions. This is probably why the natural sciences tend not to base research programs on analogies. What is clear is that they have a particular style of interpreting their results in terms of representations and sequential processing that is clearly at odds with biology and display no interest in addressing the issue.
Nativism, too, comes from Cartesian philosophy (Chomsky was quite explicit about this).
First, this is the genetic fallacy. Secondly, I don’t take Chomsky’s authority seriously.
The experimental evidence that, say, Steven Pinker presents in How the Mind Works for innate mental traits and for the computational perspective are sound, and have nothing to do with Cartesian dualism.
The point is that the views have their origins in philosophy rather than experiment. We’re not dealing with a research program developed from a set of compelling experimental results but a research program that has inherited a set of assumptions from a non-empirical source. This is more obviously the case with computationalism, where advocates have shown almost no interest in establishing the foundational assumptions of their discipline experimentally, and some claim that to do so would be irrelevant. But it’s also true for nativism where almost no thought is given to how nativist mechanisms would be realised biologically.
I think these research programs represent something without a clear historical precedent. Traditional economics and generative linguistics, for example, could be compared to pre-scientific disciplines that were overthrown by scientific disciplines. But both exhibit a high degree of formal and institutional sophistication. I don’t think pre-Copernican astronomy had the same level of sophistication. Economics also has data (although so did geocentric astronomy) whereas the generative tradition in linguistics considers data misleading and prefers intuitive judgement. What neither has is a systematic experimental research program or a desire to integrate with the natural sciences.
Cognitivism is essentially Cartesian philosophy with a computer analogy and experiments. In practice it just becomes experimental psychology with some extra jargon. Nativism, too, comes from Cartesian philosophy (Chomsky was quite explicit about this). While cognitivism has experiments it has an interpretation that isn’t founded in experiment (the type of computer the brain is supposed to be and the algorithms it could be said to run is not addressed) and an opposition to integration with the natural sciences (the so-called “autonomy of psychology” thesis).
These research programs are similar to pre-scientific research programs but have managed to persist in a world where you have to attempt to “look scientific” in order to secure research grants and they reflect this fact.
You point to many problems and I wouldn’t take any bets because of these. It would be too difficult to judge who had won. On the nature/nurture debate: Empiricism evolved into constructivism/interactionism (i.e., the developing organism interacting with the environment with genes driving development), which is the dominate view in biology, and it’s not obvious what, precisely, modern Nativists believe. But it is obvious that they still exist since naive nativist talk persists almost everywhere else. It’s similarly difficult to figure out what computationalists mean by their analogies and the degree to which they intend them to be analogies vs. literal propositions. This is probably why the natural sciences tend not to base research programs on analogies. What is clear is that they have a particular style of interpreting their results in terms of representations and sequential processing that is clearly at odds with biology and display no interest in addressing the issue.
First, this is the genetic fallacy. Secondly, I don’t take Chomsky’s authority seriously.
The experimental evidence that, say, Steven Pinker presents in How the Mind Works for innate mental traits and for the computational perspective are sound, and have nothing to do with Cartesian dualism.
The point is that the views have their origins in philosophy rather than experiment. We’re not dealing with a research program developed from a set of compelling experimental results but a research program that has inherited a set of assumptions from a non-empirical source. This is more obviously the case with computationalism, where advocates have shown almost no interest in establishing the foundational assumptions of their discipline experimentally, and some claim that to do so would be irrelevant. But it’s also true for nativism where almost no thought is given to how nativist mechanisms would be realised biologically.