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1 Reber (1987) The - Rise - and - Surprisingly - Rapid - Fall - of - Psycholing
1 Reber (1987) The - Rise - and - Surprisingly - Rapid - Fall - of - Psycholing
1 Reber (1987) The - Rise - and - Surprisingly - Rapid - Fall - of - Psycholing
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Fig. 1. Noam Chomsky's Science Citation Index count from 1964 to 1983.
(a) Nativism
Now I want to be very clear here. Nothing I have said cuts one way
or the other with respect to the truth of nativism, its ultimate role in
the development of a science of the psychology of language, or the
logic of any of the previous arguments. 1 am only emphasizing factors
that I suspect played a role in the diminishing of the influence of the
Chomskyan approach; logic and truth aside, nativism has worked to
the disadvantage of the psycholinguistic science that embraced it.
(b) Isolationism
The Chomsky-inspired psycholinguistics views language as the ulti-
mate unique behavior for it is conceptualized as doubly isolated from
other psychological processes. Not only is language viewed as unique
to man, a presumption shared with many other perspectives, but it is
also viewed as unique within man. This position is actually a corollary
of the content specific nativism in that the knowledge base hypo-
thesized is encapsulated and only serves language; it is not seen as
containing anything in the way of general processing systems. The
resulting psyeholinguistic science here becomes one in which it is
presumed that nothing about language can be learned by the
examination of any other cognitive or perceptual process - and vice
versa.
This is a very touchy point. Notice what it asks of a cognitive
psychologist with an interest in language. It argues that linguistics and
psycholinguistics, disciplines which have been put forward as properly
within the umbrella of cognitive psychology, will, in the final analysis,
only be admitted in a sealed box. This notion that the proper focus of
the science of psycholinguistics is an encapsulated module (to use the
newly favored term) has never sat well with psychologists. It has been
tried and found wanting on more than a few occasions since it evolved
out of the philosophy of Thomas Reid through faculty psychology,
McDougall's instinct theories, Gall and Spurzheim's phrenology, the
19th century physiologists' fascination with cortical localization of
function, and up to the specific-factor theories of intelligence such as
Guilford's. Suspicion here is, thus, no big surprise. A good deal of the
frustration and even anger among the participants at the Piaget-
Chomsky debates held a few years back (Piatelli-Palmarini, 1980) can
be traced to this issue. Piaget's system, of course, is one that is
332 ARTHUR S. R E B E R
(e) Functionalism
The functionalism I am concerned with here is not the functionalism
that maintains that mental states may be viewed as equivalent to
functional states. That point of view, associated largely with Hilary
Putnam, is an attempt to deal with the mind/body problem and
(perhaps) avoid the culs-de-sac of behaviorism and physicalism. While
there are some deep aspects of Putnam's functionalism that are shared
by the brand of interest here, it should be clear that his is a philoso-
pher's toy and mine a psychologist's.
Actually, within experimental psychology functionalism represents a
loose confederation of attitudes more than anything else. It is not a
theory of the organism nor is it a set of dictates or tenets. Rather, it is
an approach to the examination of things psychological that is so
much a part of the field that its existence is hardly noticed. It derived
from a formal school of thought in psychology of the same name
(although usually capitalized there) founded at the University of
Chicago during the 1890s under the guidance of John Dewey and
James Rowland Angell and was carried on there by Harvey Carr and
elsewhere by various students of these men.
The name of the school of thought was actually first used by
Titchener who planned it as an epithet to be used against psy-
chologists who were, in his mind, wasting their time by studying the
functions of consciousness rather than its structure. Angell pulled off a
stunning public relations ploy by wrapping Titchener's intended insult
about his shoulders and treating it as an honor. Functionalism was thus
born as an orientation that focused on the functions and the adaptive
significance of mind and mental acts. It was unabashedly Darwinian in
spirit but, under Dewey's guidance, deeply cognizant of the need to
336 ARTHUR S. R E B E R
view all acts as the result of the delicate coordination between the
individual and the context within which each act took place.
As a distinct school of thought it was sh0rt-lived. For one, it was too
narrowly focused on the study of consciousness, and for another, it
was too kind to opposing points of view such as Structuralism and
Psychoanalysis. It became ultimately a victim of radical behaviorism.
Ironically, in its liberalness it nurtured and trained the man who "did it
in", one John Broadus Watson who some years after taking his degree
at Chicago attacked his mentors' school of thought for having timidly
tried to make peace with the dragon of Structuralism when it should
properly have slain it. He then proceeded to clean the slate of both of
them and thereby establish an experimental psychology untainted by
messy things like mind and mental states with causal properties.
But the set of attitudes that formed the implicit foundation of
Functionalism continued after the demise of the formal school. The
legacy of Angell and his now long-expired school is an integral part of
contemporary psychology. It encompasses a number of other trends
and prejudices of the field. It envelops the pragmatism of James and
Peirce; the liberal attitudes of Woodworth; the focus on the practical
utility of action of neo-behaviorism; the holism of Dewey with its
preference for examination of the intact, functioning individual inter-
acting with the environment; and, in interesting ways, even the
general processing orientation of the neo-Piagetians.
This functionalism is, moreover, utterly neutral on many deep issues
that have often split areas in philosophy and psychology asunder, such
as acts vs. contents, behaviorism vs. mentalism, empiricism vs.
rationalism, even environmentalism vs. innatism. Adherence to a
functionalist perspective in contemporary psychology does not pre-
judice one in any particular fashion on these kinds of issues. B. F.
Skinner regards himself as a functionalist as do I. Adherence simply
means that one looks to the functional role that a given process or
specific pattern of behavior has in the context within which it occurs.
Adoption of this point of view merely invites the recognition that
people have available a large number of capacities and processing
modes and that circumstances dictate which one will have optimum
functional value and hence which one will be manifested in thought or
action.
Contemporary functionalism is, however, antagonistic to the claims
of the Chomsky-inspired psycholinguistic science in nearly every
THE RISE AND FALL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 337
respect. The failure of this science to reckon with the deeply ingrained
functionalist spirit is arguably the single most significant factor in its
failure to establish itself as a robust science within psychology.
In summary, as I read the current scene in the cognitive sciences,
the recently re-emergent discipline of psycholinguistics inspired by the
always novel and frequently brilliant insights of Noam Chomsky has
had but a brief run. In fact, looking back, it appears to have faded
surprisingly quietly leaving behind a vigorous and active cognitive
psychology that includes within it a sub-speciality on the psychology
of language.
The new psycholinguistics was heralded as a revolution in the early
1960s and treated as though it were one throughout the 1970s. In fact,
from the classical Kuhnian view, it really should have conquered. It
had the essential ingredients: weak targets in behavioristically
dominated experimental psychology and taxonomic linguistics, a very
large number of empirical anomalies which these approaches had
swept under the conceptual rug, a novel approach introduced by a
scholar entering from a discipline outside of and uncontaminated by
the dogma of the field and, an immediate and enthusiastic reception
from a substantial part of the scholarly community in the field which
was waiting for something new and different. How could such a
revolution have failed to materialize?
The answer, I believe, is simplicity itself. No matter how revol-
utionary the early psycholinguists thought they were, the orientation
itself wasn't really very revolutionary. In fact, it was more of a
reformist endeavor than anything else. It succeeded in forcing a
reappraisal of the nature of language and it mandated psychologists to
modify in important ways their approach to the subject matter. These
were important advances but they were little more than reforms. And,
even had the new psycholinguistics become the dominant paradigm in
the study of language, it still would have .had only a reformist charac-
ter. It would have remade one domain of cognitive psychology but it
would have encapsulated it and isolated it from the rest of the field.
One does not revolutionize a field by balkanizing it.
And, while this local reformation was taking place, the real revol-
ution in the cognitive sciences gathered force quite independently of
psycholinguistics. Here the efforts are much more than reformist; the
very fabric of the field is being altered. The very definition of "an
important question" has been changed; the terminology has taken on
338 A R T H U R S. R E B E R
a new cast reflecting the influence of the various disciplines that are
now contributing, including artificial intelligence, epistemology,
neurology, and the like; the operative assumptions have been modified
to admit a host of novel and intriguing procedures; the means for
testing theories has moved in new ways. This new cognitive science,
significantly, has been for the most part quite comfortable with the
factors outlined above. That is, it is an approach that is not partic-
ularly wedded to a content specific nativism; it is strongly interactive
and does not necessarily encapsulate or modularize capacities; it is not
dominated by a particular theory of knowledge; it is (more-or-less
anyway, this one may be a problem in the future) largely concerned
with the data from experimentation rather than with the evaluation of
formal theory and, most important, it is easily adaptable to the
functionalistic spirit that still runs in the marrow of experimental
psychology.
REFERENCES
Department of Psychology
Brooklyn College and
Graduate Center of CUNY
New York, N.Y. 11210
U.S.A.