The Beauty of Deep Structure

This chapter charts the rise of Noam Chomsky’s Transformational-Generative Grammar, from its cornerstone role in the cognitive revolution up to its widely heralded realization in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. That realization featured the development of an evocative concept, Deep Structure, a brilliant nexus of meaning and structure that integrates seamlessly with Chomsky’s companion idea, Universal Grammar, the notion that all languages share a critical, genetically encoded core. At a technical level, Deep Structure concentrated meaning because of the Katz-Postal Principle, stipulating that transformations cannot change meaning. Transformations rearrange structure while keeping meaning stable. The appeal of Deep Structure and Universal Grammar helped Transformational Grammar propagate rapidly into language classrooms, literary studies, stylistics, and computer science, gave massive impetus to the emergence of psycholinguistics, attracted substantial military and educational funding, and featured prominently in Chomsky’s meteoric intellectual stardom.

Applications of cybernetics to psychological theory: Historical and conceptual explorations

This article outlines links between cybernetics and psychology through the black box metaphor using a tripartite narrative. The first part explores first-order cybernetic approaches to opening the black box. These developments run parallel to the decline of radical behaviorism and advancements in information processing theory and neuropsychology. We then describe how cybernetics migrates towards a second-order approach (expanding and questioning features of first-order inquiry), understanding applications of rule-based tools to sociocultural phenomena and dynamic mental models, inspiring radical constructivism, and also accepting social constructivism. Psychology, however, enters the cognitive revolution, adhering to the computer metaphor of first-order cyberneticians to streamline human consciousness. The article concludes by outlining how second-order cybernetic approaches emerging in the 1990s may provide cues to psychologists to adopt mixed methods, and bioecological models in the information age, uniting understandings of observable human activity, inner perceptions, and physiological processes across contexts to understand consciousness.

Hierarchical structure in language and action: A formal comparison

Since the cognitive revolution, language and action have been compared as cognitive systems, with cross-domain convergent views recently gaining renewed interest in biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Language and action are both combinatorial systems whose mode of combination has been argued to be hierarchical, combining elements into constituents of increasingly larger size. This structural similarity has led to the suggestion that they rely on shared cognitive and neural resources. In this paper, we compare the conceptual and formal properties of hierarchy in language and action using tools from category theory. We show that the strong compositionality of language requires a formalism that describes the mapping between sentences and their syntactic structures as an order-embedded Galois connection, while the weak compositionality of actions only requires a monotonic mapping between action sequences and their goals, which we model as a monotone Galois connection. We aim to capture the different system properties of language and action in terms of the distinction between hierarchical sets and hierarchical sequences, and discuss the implications for the way both systems are represented in the brain.

Reconstructing the Study of Human Cognition

The study of human cognition is a prominent part of psychology and related disciplines. While the modern approach begun during the Cognitive Revolution hasbeen seemingly successful, it is not without concerns. I address five concerns with how human cognition is studied: (1) reliance on homogeneous participant sampleswhen trying to generalize behavior to real-world contexts; (2) focus on controlling for or ignoring "extraneous" variables; (3) assumption of a generic human actor instead of a focus on individual and contextual variation; (4) insufficient theory building.I contend that these concerns are deeply connected and that the solution is a significant change in how we study human cognition, similar in scope to the Cognitive Revolution. We need to reconsider the assumption of cognitive universals and how that assumption is built into the norms of the discipline. I propose a reconstruction of how researchers study human cognition by implementing acombination of methodological approaches and theoretical positions. These combined approaches (1) integrate human heterogeneity, (2) consider human behavior in context, (3) incorporate multiple levels of analysis and non-cognitivefactors, (4) focus not only on averaged behavior but variation across individuals and context, (5) create theory that combines cognition and context.

Innate mechanism or acquired instrument: nature of language as basis for understanding cognitive abilities of human beings

The article contains a critical review of modern problems of Universal Grammar theory by Noam Chomsky. It examines the origins of the theory, the process of its development, the transition to the ‘Second Cognitive Revolution’ and some recent objections to Chomsky’s hypothesis about the innate status of our knowledge of language.

Cognitivist Frameworks of Learning and Instruction

This chapter summarizes the main research results on the functioning of human memory and how cognitive instructional models integrate these findings into their proposals for optimizing learning. It also covers some of the main cognitive theories of instruction where we highlight the cognitive theory of multimedia learning and the cognitive load theory. These theories appeared alongside an emerging framework called the “cognitive revolution” in the 1950s. In this framework, human cognition can be compared to a biological computer that represents and processes information that comes from the outside world through various sensory systems. This information must be recorded in memory and then retrieved so that any biological or digital system can perform the activities that are expected in various situations. Learning in this framework is to form new mental schemes in long-term memory, to integrate simple and already formed schemes into more complex ones, and to automate some schemes through a compilation process. The cognitive theories of instruction take the way human memory works very seriously.

Social Cognition

Contemporary models of how the mind operates and methods for testing them emerged from the cognitive revolution in the middle of the 20th century. Social psychology researchers of the 1970s and 1980s were inspired by these developments and launched the field of social cognition to understand how cognitive approaches could advance understanding of social processes. Decades later, core social psychology topics, such as impression formation, the self, attitudes, stereotyping and prejudice, and interpersonal relationships, are interpreted through the lens of cognitive psychology conceptualizations of attention, perception, categorization, memory, and reasoning. Social cognitive methods and theory have touched every area of modern social psychology. Twenty-first-century efforts are shoring up methodological practices and revisiting old theories, investigating a wider range of human experience, and tackling new avenues of social functioning.

Which Axial Age, whose rituals? Habermas and Jaspers on the ‘spiritual’ situation of the present age

Can we keep relying on sources of values dating back to the Axial Age, or do cognitive changes in the present age require a completely new foundation? An uncertainty arises with the crisis of values that can support the human in the age of artificial intelligence. Should we seek contemporary access points to the archaic origins of the species? Or must we also imagine new Anthropocenic-Axial values to reground the human event? In his most recent work, Habermas affirms the continuing importance of the contemporary access to the First Axial values, but before him Jaspers anticipates that a second cognitive revolution opens areas that may be receptive to new value foundations. Habermas’ justification of the postsecular turn may not be thinkable without Jaspers’ discovery of the postaxial imaginary.