2500 quiz 1

example of an analytic statement

"A bachelor is an unmarried male" is analytic -- it contains no new information, but rather just takes apart the meaning of the word "bachelor": a married bachelor or a female bachelor would be a contradiction.

a priori

"before", usually in the sense of knowledge we can have before experience, because it's necessarily true (like an analytic statement).

1967

(an arbitrary date for the beginning of Cognitive Psychology:) Ulric Neisser publishes his textbook called Cognitive Psychology, outlining the areas of study (e.g., attention, memory, perception, language) that had begun yielding to investigation in the decade previous and presenting a consensus view of the new field that solidified its popularity and led to its rapid ascendance.

noumena

(kant) the "things-in-themselves" which give rise to the appearances we can sense, but which are themselves beyond our sensing and therefore completely and forever unknowable to us. For Berkeley, there is no logical ground for believing in such a realm

BF skinner

(operant)

Thorndike

(operant)

four definitions of psych.

1. the science of mind and behavior 2. the science of experimental epistemology 3. the science of knowing and experiencing 4. the science of things that move around on their own

1913

John Broadus Watson declares that to be a science, psychology must only study the observable and thus must be a science of behavior, rather than of mind; this inaugurates roughly six decades of dominance of American psychology by Behaviorism.

synthetic a priori

Kant's term for knowledge we have about experience (synthetic), before experience(a priori

synthetic statement/ example

Kant's term for what Hume called a statement about matters of fact. "A bachelor is mortal" is true, but not by definition -- the mortality of bachelors is a matter for observation. To say "A bachelor is immortal" is false, but not a logical contradiction --because if an immortal man never married, we'd call him a bachelor. The contradiction only comes up if we talk about a bachelor being married or female.

analytic statement

Kant's term for what Hume called a statement about the relations among ideas. Any statement whose opposite is a contradiction (not just a falsehood) is analytic -- it's necessarily true.

associationism

Plato: reminiscence of encounters with ideal forms; "rationalism" learn by connecting experiences in world Aristotle: principles of similarity, contrast, contiguity;

induction

Scientific laws are found by induction, and tested by deduction (e.g., experiments test to see if the consequences of a law are true: if a falling body's acceleration doesn't depend on its mass, and I drop two balls of different masses from the same height, then they should hit the ground at the same time -- and they do, so the law statement is supported). But Hume says it's merely habit or "custom" to believe inductive conclusions.

4 important terms in classical conditioning

US- unconditioned stim. CS- conditioned stim. UR- unconditioned response CR- conditioned response

1879

Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Germany, founds the first laboratory dedicated to psychology, separating psychology from philosophy for the first time.

phenomena

according to Kant, appearances or sensation -- all that is ever available to our senses, and therefore all that we may ever really know about. For Berkeley, this world of sensations is all that exists since any "real world" (beyond our experience of it) is unnecessary.

quantitative

accumulate more associations; emphasis on amount of experience

qualitative

acquire new concepts; emphasis on content of experience

mentalist

admits "mind" as an explanatory entity (where "mind" is given a physical interpretation) (cognitive)

physicalist / materialist

admits only physical processes in explanations ("mind" is considered to be illusory) (behaviorist)

a posteriori

after", usually in the sense of knowledge we can only have after experience, because it's contingently true -- that is, it just happens to be so and the only way for us to find out about it is through observation (like a synthetic statement).

classical conditioning phenomenon

all animals learn what leads to what, through experience

scientific materialism

all that exists is matter in motion, includes mass, length, etc. doesn't include color, sound, taste, etc.

why is knowledge decomposable into components

approach is atomistic (emphasis on basic components), analytic (study whole by breaking it down into parts), reductionistic (whole is best understood through understanding parts: whole equal to sum of parts)

deduction

argument proceeding from the general to the specific: "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Therefore, Socrates is mortal." This is necessarily true; in a sense, the conclusion is already contained in the premises.

what kind of psychology grows out of the empiricist/associationism view?

behaviorist

empiricism

born as clean slate ("tabula rasa"); experience is source of knowledge;

nativism

born with innate ideas, experience gives occassion knowledge

two types of conditioning theories

classical and operant

what kind of psychology grows out of the nativist/rationalism view?

cognitive

what is behaviorism based in?

conditioning theories

classical conditioning

create a new relfex/signal, how animals learn about regularities in their environment that are out of their control

secondary qualities

depend on the perceiver, ex. like color, sound, taste

classical conditioning model

describe phenomena in terms like CS, US, propose that their pairing close together in time creates an association, theorize about it if strengthens or weakens it

why isn't knowledge decomposable into components?

emphasis on holism (consider the whole rather than the parts), structure (relations among parts within the whole), irreducibility (whole cannot be understood through understanding parts: whole greater than sum of parts)

epistemology of empiricism

empiricism / behaviorism / learning / animal

top down processing

experience is interpreted by knowledge (cognitive)

peripheralism

external stimuli are essence of knowledge (behaviorist)

david hume

his view is like that of Berkeley but without even the mind itself as an active entity); he claimed all simple ideas are copies of sensations (which he termed "impressions"), and can be associated according to laws of similarity (or "resemblance"), contiguity, and causation to form complex ideas

operant conditioning

how animals learn about regularities in their environment that are in their control, get rewards for their actions/ reinforcement

centralism

ideas / brain processes are essence of knowledge (cognitive)

what is cognitive psych. based in?

in information processing theories

how is psych. scientific?

it makes models, pared down simplified idealized descriptions, uses physical representations, makes predictions, the mind is like a computer program, things get left out

bottom-up processing

knowledge built up from raw experience (behaviorist)

john locke

knowledge through experience, no ideas are innate, the mind combines simple ideas into more complex ones

rationalism

learn by operation of mind - manipulation of concepts and ideas Plato: reminiscence of encounters with ideal forms;

behaviorist

machine metaphor

two origins of knowledge

nativism and empiricism

two types of qualities that locke thought our senses present

primary and secondary

dualism

proposed by Descartes, idea that the mind and body are two different substances, with only the body subject to mechanistic laws of physics

two changes that occur during learning

qualitative and quantitative

primary qualities

qualities that are in the perceived object, ex. size, shape, solidity, motion, number

example of operant conditioning

rat presses bar in cage, then gets reward (reinforcement), dog training

how's knowledge arrived at?

rationalism and associationism

epistemology of rationalism

ratonalism/ cognitvism / memory/humans

classical conditioning procedure

ring bell for dog then give it food, this creates a new association

example of classical conditioning

ring bell → give dog food, dog learns to salivate at bell (pavlov)

concrete

study body's interactions with objects and events (behaviorist)

abstract

study mental representations of objects and events (cognitive)

natural science vs. social science

study of natural phenomena vs, human culture and institution. both are sciences, and use the scientific method

George Berkeley's argument

that Locke's distinction fails since our knowledge of primary qualities comes through the senses (mainly touch) as well; thus all we have evidence for are the sensations or ideas in our experience, not a world of real objects giving rise to sensation

Immanuel Kant

that instead of innate ideas we must have innate structuring and processing mechanisms which act as filters for experience, i.e., a means for the construction and interpretation of experience

descartes epsitemology

that the senses are unreliable and deceptive, so true knowledge must come from the mind's innate ideas (self, God, geometry, and some others) and its direct inspection of the world (which is occasioned by clues from the senses)

historical effect of descartes reasoning

to identify mentalism with dualism and hence to make talk of minds fall outside the purview of science

materialism

universe is made of one substance, physical matter which includes themind

example of a synthetic a priori

we are predisposed to interpret the events we observe in terms of cause and effect, a description that our minds impose -- so the cause and effect relation isn't observable itself, but is a necessary description of the events in our experience before we ever observe one event cause another. Thus Kant's response to Hume's argument is to say causation is a matter of observation that is also true by definition