Cognitivism and Internalism

Abstract

Cognitivism represents the major shift in the study of cognition after behaviourism and underpins the main theories and methodologies of cognitive science. In contrast to behaviourism, which focuses on observable behaviour, cognitivism posits internal representations. The explanatory focus turns to the processing of these representations to explain cognitive phenomena such as memory and is also used to explain observable behaviour. Cognition is simply defined as the processing of representations.

Modern philosophy has never been able to quite shake off the Cartesian idea of the mind, as something that “resides,” —such is the term, — in the pineal gland. Everybody laughs at this nowadays, and yet everybody continues to think of mind in this same general way, as something within this person or that, belonging to him and correlative to the real world.

— Charles Sanders Peirce