This article asks why the analogy between humans and computers was understood by cognitive psychologists to mean that "minds exist and that it is our job as psychologists to study them". Earlier psychologists, such as Clark Hull, used analogies between humans and complex machines such as telephone switchboards to defend a rigorous behaviorism. How, then, did the computer metaphor of mind come to be seen as the root concept underlying a paradigm shift from behaviorism to cognitivism? To answer this question, this article examines the life and work of George A. Miller, one of the most prominent of a generation of psychologists who began their careers as "good behaviorists" but later came to embrace cognitivism.
This article explores Herbert Simon's attempts to build Carnegie Tech's Graduate School of Industrial Administration into a center for interdisciplinary social research. It shows that despite the pressures toward disciplinary specialization created by the rapid growth of the postwar social sciences, there were strong countercurrents supporting interdisciplinary work. Support for interdisciplinary work came from a network of powerful new patrons that were interested in transforming social science into behavioral science and that supported mathematical, behavioral-functional analysis whatever the topic of study. These patrons deliberately defined their goals in terms of solving problems, not building disciplines, and the networks of advisory committees they created enabled certain entrepreneurial researchers, such as Simon, to exert influence across a range of fields and institutions.
This essay argues that shifts in patronage for the postwar behavioral and social sciences were linked intimately to both intellectual and institutional changes. This broad argument comprises two subarguments: first, that there were in fact two distinct, successive patronage systems for postwar social science--not one, as is commonly assumed; and, second, that the first postwar patronage system played a major role in enabling a series of behavioral revolutions and interdisciplinary syntheses across the social sciences, while the second postwar patronage system encouraged the development of specialized concepts, techniques, and technologies within the disciplines. The essay also suggests that the widespread concern among social scientists in the 1970s and 1980s that their fields were fragmenting was at least in part an unintended consequence of the rise of the second system.
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