The Cognitive Revolution

• What is the nature of scientific

“revolutions”?
• What are the major paradigms or
metatheories in psychology?
• Can psychology be described as having
experienced “revolutions” (particularly a
cognitive one)?
• What is the place of cognitive psychology in
the discipline today? Is it a or the unifying
paradigm?
Revolutions in Science
1. What is normal science?
• What is a paradigm? What is its role in
normal science?
• Explain the metaphor of “puzzle-
solving” as describing work in normal
science
• What are the consequences of having
paradigms?

2. How does a paradigm shift take

place? How does it begin?
4. Why are paradigm shifts called
“revolutions”?
Revolutions in Science
Thomas Kuhn, 1962
Science as characterized by
successive periods of…

• Normal science
• Anomaly and crisis
• Paradigm shift—REVOLUTION
• Back to normal science
Normal Science
PARADIGM
a scientific framework, a body of
research and achievements, that a
community of scientists is
COMMITTED to
Normal Science
The PARADIGM defines the discipline
• What the substantive issues and pertinent
questions are
• How questions are to be investigated
(methods & techniques that are
appropriate)
• How findings are to be interpreted

It is commitment to and consensus on

the paradigm that defines normal
science!
Normal Science
“Work” in normal science is
highly DIRECTED.

4. Uncovering facts
6. Matching facts with theory/predictions
8. Further articulation of theories (and the
paradigm itself)

…resulting in the field

becoming more precise, narrow, and
rigid!
Those unwilling or unable to accommodate
their work to [the paradigm] must proceed
in isolation… (p.19)

Work under the rubric of a paradigm can

proceed in no other way, and to desert the
paradigm is to cease practicing the
science it defines… (p.34)
Normal to Extraordinary
Science
Discovery of anomalies…
• findings that persistently
violate paradigmatic
expectations of the current
normal science
• via more sophisticated tools
& technologies

• greater conceptual &

methodological
…impossible if NOT precision
for the existence of a
paradigm & the resulting narrowly defined
science!
Crisis!
Scientists react with
RESISTANCE & DENIAL

• proliferation of alternative & competing

explanations
• willingness to “try anything”
• explicit expressions of discontent
• the recourse to philosophy & debates over
fundamentals
And the winner is…
Rejection of old paradigm in favor of a
new one!
– Does NOT necessarily provide the
“correct” answers, only better, more
promising than competitor
– Old paradigm not “wrong”, but has
simply lost

Shifting of allegiances (and death to

those who continue to resist!)
Back to Normal
When the transition is complete, the
profession will have changed its view
of the field, its methods, its goals…
NORMAL science again!

…though the world does not change with a

change of paradigm, the scientist
afterwards works in a different world…
(p.121)
Back to Normal
“The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a
new one…is far from a cumulative
process, one achieved by an articulation or
extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is
a reconstruction of the field from new
fundamentals, a reconstruction that
changes some of the field’s most
elementary theoretical generalizations as
well as many of its paradigm methods and
applications.” (p. 84-85)