A genealogical critique
of the computational model of mind
by Fred J. Evans
Albany: SUNY Press, 1993
ISBN 0-7914-1249-0 $49.95 hardcover
ISBN 0-7914-1250-4 $16.95 softcover
Posted on 07/20/2003 8:20:07 PM PDT by unspun
Critiques of psychology are and have been legion throughout its relatively short life as an institutionalized discipline. In fact, it has been frequently noted in recent years that psychology is in a "crisis" even though such claims go back to Karl Bühler's (1929) well known book or even to the very founding of the discipline in the closing decades of the nineteenth-century. Typically the crisis is purported to be one of unity, the self-proclaimed science of psychology was and remains a plethora of positions which rarely, if ever, lend themselves to a single scientific view on the terms of the logical empiricist notion of the unity of science. For many who, like me, are not self-proclaimed "scientists" on this view, this cacophony is exactly as it should be and, if Fred Evans has his way, that is how it will remain.
Evans takes on the current core of psychology - cognitivism - by adopting what he calls a "genealogical psychology." This is the "evaluative interpretation of discursive positions " that includes the identification and evaluation of the "voice" of that discourse (p. 207). A voice is akin to Bakhtin's notion of utterance, the central element of language. "Utterances are the basic elements of the discursive positions or voices that make up a dialogue" (p. 191). One immediate consequence is that meaning is always constituted in a dialogue or in an interplay of voices. There is no univocal identity to discover since utterances point endlessly to new revisions of themselves. On this dialogical view, linguistic agency belongs to "voices, which are always more than their enunciators and less than social discourse" (p. 195). The voices exist as discursive positions which also identify the enunciators. Simultaneously, as enunciators we are always capable of maintaining or resisting discursive positions in the fabric of social life.
Evans, however, only presents his conceptions of genealogical psychology and the interplay of voices in the closing chapters of his book. The bulk of the book works its way towards this position by a powerful and sustained critique of cognitive psychology. In fact, the first eight chapters develop a genealogical psychology of cognitivism, a psychology that seeks not consensus but the continuation of a dialogue that was in danger of hardening into a single, oracular voice. In all of the critical literature in psychology there has rarely been such a damning statement of the technocratic rationality that lies behind the enterprises of cognitive psychology and cognitive science and serves as the "operative goal of the society and individuals that they presumably serve" (p. 213). If the book consisted only of the critique it would already have served the community of critical psychologists well.
Unlike more conventional critiques of cognitive psychology from within the discipline or without (typically from philosophy), Evans is concerned to show how the enterprise is not only incoherent and circular from within but that it stands as the culmination of Western nihilism. For Evans, the computational model of mind is "the culmination of immaculate perception and domination-observation, of what we shall refer to as the analytic observer or analytic perspective. . . we shall show that the self constructed by cognitive psychology is a 'proto-technocrat' and the formalization and universalization of the 'last man'" (p. 49-50).
Evans's genealogical critique, is a Nietzschian and Foucaultian reading of the development of the computational model of mind, equating the emergence of technologies of mind with the transformation of the Enlightenment ideals into an administrative, technocratic passive nihilism. Although supplanting behaviorism, cognitive psychology formalized and mechanized reason. Technocratic rationality was defined precisely around Turing's notion of an "effective procedure" and the eventual mechanization and instantiation of these procedures in the computer. On Turing's account any rational behavior is an effective procedure or capable of being characterized by an algorithm and such procedures can be imitated by a Turing machine of which the computer is an example. On these grounds Evans argues that cognitive psychology is an advance over behaviorism in a "perverse manner." Behaviorism left us with a mind which it did not acknowledge but could also not encapsulate within its theories and programs. Cognitivism is formulated on computational rules and legislates "in advance what features of the world can count as inputs to the system and what objectives can count as the goals of such a system" (p. 70-71). The system is strictly administrative and removed from the world, however, making "cognitive psychology's humanism" a "ruse or strategy for completing the implicit program of behaviorism, that is, for establishing the hegemony of technocratic rationality" (p. 71).
Evans is not content however to critique the technocratic rationality of cognitive psychology but demonstrates that the philosophy of science which supports this enterprise is itself a variant of the received view of logical empiricism. Moreover, this methodology, while providing cognitive psychology with a "neutral" and "objective" basis, already presupposes what cognitive psychology has purportedly discovered, namely the "privileged status of the analytic observer." On Evans's account there are two circularities in cognitive psychology: "the greater circularity of first defining science in terms of one's psychological theory and then claiming that this science is an independent source of verification for one's theory; and the 'lesser circle' of designing experiments that artifactually produce the behavior they are supposed to discover" (p. 99).
Evans's critique proceeds from an internal and methodological analysis of particular programs in cognitive psychology to the broader social, historical problems inherent in the attempts to discipline the body and make it adaptable to a world in which it is required to become part of an administrative society and live within the real of new information technologies. What makes this analysis so compelling is its completeness. While there have been multiple critiques of cognitive psychology and cognitive science more generally that argue against its inherent disciplinary functions, few critics have tackled the literature from inside as well. It is these sections of the book that are most dense and perhaps less interesting for the non-psychologist. Evans chose several theorists from cognitive psychology, most notably Johnson-Laird, and shows how, on their own arguments, their cognitive systems simply do not allow one to understand the simplest of sentences nor the operations of metaphors in everyday discursive practices.
In short, Evans argues that the widespread acceptance of the computer model of mind is due to three factors: the prevalence of analytic discourse, the hegemony of a technocratic rationality fostered by a technocratic elite, and cognitivism's intrinsic Nietzschian notion of the passive nihilism of the "last man."
Cognitive psychologists should read this book, if only to understand their own failures. Nevertheless cognitive psychology is not a monolithic enterprise - it too consists of competing voices attempting to scramble to the top of the pyramid that is scientific prestige. Evans is aware of this of course but his choice of examples are already severely dated. This in no way diminishes the power of his argument for by simple extrapolation, much of what he says about Johnson-Laird is still relevant and true for present-day cognitivists. Nevertheless, because of the fluidity of key notions in cognitive psychology (e.g., representation, cognition, consciousness) what is accepted one year has been turned over the next. For example, in response to various critiques of what John Haugeland has now termed "Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence," psychologists have not only turned to connectionism (or parallel distributed processing models) but have argued that perhaps the mind is not encapsulated and disembodied after all. Instead mind is seen as a form of activity and meaning is a form of "situated action" (Bem & Keijzer, in press; special issue of Cognitive Science, 17, 1993, no. 1). Apparently, recognizing body and world simultaneously have led some to believe that cognitive psychology can be given a new lease on life, even if that lease comes with the attempt to import into cognitivism what it cannot, on a strict computational account, support. In this sense then, Evans's book is both dated yet at the same time it will no doubt be a crucial work in the literature which has been critical of the cognitive enterprise and to which a few cognitivists have responded.
Whereas the timeliness of the examples do not detract from the argument, what does is Evans's conflation of the pretense of cognitive psychology to be a technocratic rationality with its limited achievements. What has and will change us is our immersion in an information society, driven by rapid changes in knowledge networks and the continual eradication of boundaries between the academy and the world of the corporation. Cognitivism champions this movement and on this count Evans is correct to argue that it adheres to a technocratic rationality. But when cognitivism fails in, for instance, capturing accurately the cognitive processes of workers, administrators, the public, and so on, the world's technocrats do not stand by and admire the marvels of cognitive models of mind. Indeed, cognitive psychology must continually adapt to the world of informatics in order to succeed. Evans is too quick to identify cognitive psychology with this technocratic landscape rather than understanding it as a response. He might have been more nuanced or perhaps asked a more reflexive question. Cognitive psychologists, like many social scientists attempting to make it in the marketplace of ideas, must continually fight a rearguard as well as a promotional battle. With critics like Evans and Dreyfus (1993) nipping at their heels, the cognitivists are forever adjusting their theories to counter the worst of their academic enemies. At the same time they must gloss over their worst problems to sell their wares. When they face the world (and their world can include non-cognitivist colleagues in the academy, granting agencies, publishers, and so on) as spokespersons they present a unified and powerful science. This is the one Evans saw and has rightly critiqued. On his own account of genealogical psychology, the wave of discourse (cognitivism) "carries the risk of dissolution into 'Babel'" but is also "part of the community's diachronic movement toward unity" and "embodies nihilistic or oracular tendencies" (p. 209). This much, at least, counts for cognitive psychology as well as his own genealogical psychology. By crediting cognitive psychology with more influence than it might possibly have, Evans was able to motivate a powerful critique. The critique itself however dictates that he be less impressed with the status of this self-proclaimed science.
Finally, not all cognitive models have been solely or simply influenced by the analogy of the computer or the impressive logic of the Turing machine. As Gigerenzer has noted, psychology in the US has frequently relied on an implicit "tools-to-theories heuristic" (e.g., Gigerenzer et al., 1989). By this he means that the development of some new techniques and tools which have their origins outside psychology are converted into theories of cognition once they have become familiar objects or analytic strategies. Although the computer is one familiar case of this heuristic, other cognitive models in psychology have been cobbled together out of modern developments in statistics. Once these statistics became familiar as a tool for analyzing experimental results they were institutionalized and became, after a time, a model for rationality itself in, for example, various theories of perception, judgment and decision-making. Although Evans would be correct if he were to claim (as I am assuming he would) that these theories too adhere to a technocratic rationality, their attraction for psychologists is not a function of any computational logic they might have but is the outcome precisely of the already familiar statistical models which support these theories.
Like other critics who hail from the discipline itself and have adopted a Bakhtinian alternative (e.g., Shotter, 1993), Evans reminds us that entire traditions for understanding people in their everyday worlds (as opposed to predicting their activities in special institutional circumstances) have been neglected in our psychologies. In reminding us, he revives the possibility of recovering these traditions for our own discursive positions, for entering into conversations with those who have tried to find a place for psychology outside the realm of a strictly natural science model. By showing us how such a psychology might be conducted, Evans breaks through the nihilism which still holds the mainstream of psychology in thrall. Such a careful work deserves a careful reading.
References
(It is so difficult for some to ignore the invisible.)
...then I think you may enjoy this, as well (but this is not to say that postmodernism has any satisfactory answers, or that I would speak against the effective study of the relationships of human realities by approximations that is good psychology.)
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Me or him?
Yep, people trying to figure out people. A serious of Barbra Streisand moments.
I expect that the writer has an education which provides him and his colleagues a context and heuristic for the words he uses --even the order in which he uses them.
OK. The study of psychology, as described in the above article, appears to be bad science fiction.
Sounds like the liberals' daily sound bite press release.
yitbos
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Correct. If you look, for example, at liberal sociology, it is an entire system of thought or pseudoscience which has been devised to avoid analysis of problem, but which pretends to analyze those problems.
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