Danziger (1994) distinguished between the insider-scientist and the outsider-historian models for the history of psychology. The present paper contends that since in psychology history has a contemporary relevance, there is a place for insider history in the discipline; hence, a mixed model is appropriate. Issue is taken with Danziger's view of insider history as inherently celebratory. It is finally argued that it is doubtful if critical history bridges the gap between the two historiographical models.
This paper investigates connectionism's potential to solve the frame problem. The frame problem arises in the context of modelling the human ability to see the relevant consequences of events in a situation. It has been claimed to be unsolvable for classical cognitive science, but easily manageable for connectionism. We will focus on a representational approach to the frame problem which advocates the use of intrinsic representations. We argue that although connectionism's distributed representations may look promising from this perspective, doubts can be raised about the potential of distributed representations to allow large amounts of complexly structured information to be adequately encoded and processed. It is questionable whether connectionist models that are claimed to effectively represent structured information can be scaled up to a realistic extent. We conclude that the frame problem provides a difficulty to connectionism that is no less serious than the obstacle it constitutes for classical cognitive science.'It appeared that Newell and Simon were well on their way to fulfilling the prediction they had made in 1958 that 'in a visible future. . . the range of problems (computers) can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.' (. . .) Simon's claims fell into place as just another example of the phenomenon which Y. BarHillel had called the fallacy of the successful first step.' In a talk I gave at RAND, I compared AI to alchemy to make the point. Like the alchemists trying to turn lead into gold, I said, AI had fancy equipment, a few flashy demos, and desperately eager patrons, but they simply had not discovered the right approach to the problem' Hubert Dreyfus describing his evaluation (originally published in 1965) of Newell and Simon's early work in classical AI (Dreyfus and Dreyfits, 1986, pp.6-7).
Reductionism in psychology is often linked with the mind-body problem. This paper reviews the reductionism debate and concludes that many of its controversies can indeed be traced to the relation between reduction and the metaphysical mind-body problem. It is proposed that reductionism, by bridging different theories, rather should be considered as a scientific stance which favours interdisciplinary co-operation. This perspective on reductionism throws a new light on the classical model of reduction, which may capture important aspects of intertheoretic reductions if it is recognized that the bridges between theories do not need to comply completely with the classical conditions. These ideas are illustrated by analysing an example of reductionistic research concerning the psychology and neuropsychology of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
It is maintained that in contradistinction to the natural sciences, in psychology (and other human sciences) `history is not past tense'. This is borne out by the contemporary relevance of a specific part of the history of psychology, which focuses on the internal-theoretical significance of history for the conceptual `household' of the discipline. From this perspective, several issues in the Danziger-Van Rappard-Dehue debate are addressed.
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