Psy 416: Reasoning and Problem Solving
Historical sketch

Nativism and rationalism: (starts ca 400 BCE) Knowledge is inborn—Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Chomsky. We gain knowledge by thinking and understanding the possibilities according to rational principles of logic and reason. The rationalistic view is that we have innate knowledge of rational that we can apply to any set of facts or ideas to arrive at new insights or to solve problems. My Meno excerpt (large type Meno)

(FYI--many proof's of the Pythagorean Theorem ; an interesting dynamic proof )

Recently, there is a new view of nativistic cognition. This comes from the rapidly expanding field of evolutionary psychology. They differ from the classical rationalists in that they presume that we cannot think rationally about everything, but that our categorization and reasoning processes basically derive from our evolutionary history. It is not the case that we think rationally, but rather our minds have evolved to let us function in a varied and complex environment and our thought processes are shaped by our evolutionary successes. Pinker (1997) develops this approach for cogniton in general and Lakoff and Nunez (2000) specifically try to base mathematical reasoning on bodily experiences.

Problem: Can you double a square? How do you do it? Find the length of the sides of a square whose area is exactly double that of a given square. Try before reading the assignment.

Empiricism: (Starts ca 350 BCE) Knowledge requires experience—Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Watson, Skinner. Everything that we know must first be presented to our sense organs Representations of different sense units (stimuli) combine according to specific principles to form knowledge. Associationism is the belief that the mind works according to principles of the combination of elements.

Problem: How can a cat learn to get out of a problem box?

Many but not all of the associationists believed that mind must function in a mechanical way with potentially well specified laws of association of mental elements combining the elements into the larger ideas. Mayer talks of atomism, mechanism, empiricism, and imagery. Associationism including atomism, mechanism, and empiricism is still with us. Modern neuroscience and cognitive approaches to problem solving have created very popular new approaches using associationistic principles, especially in connectionist, PDP, or neural net theory.

Some more historical perspectives

Common Sense: (ca 1730) We have built in faculties of mind which provide the answer—Reid. How do I know that a rose is "out there" instead of  in my head? Faculty psychology dominated psychology and education until the 20th Century.

Wundt: (ca 1880). Complex mental processes must be studied through the artifacts of humans and cannot be studied directly by experiment. Experimentally one can only study components of sensation.Artifacts are the products of human activities: Books, paintings, houses, computers, cities, governments, languages, domesticated animals, armies, telephone systems, universities, footballs, football games, football leagues.

Külpe and the Würzburg School: (ca 1910) Experimented on complex mental processes and concluded that reasoning requires concepts such as directed thought and unconscious processes. Külpe gave subjects problems to solve, answers were analyzed and Reaction Times (RT) were measured. Sometimes the process was interrupted and subjects described what they were thinking or imaging.

**Gestalt and Holism: (ca 1912). Experiments in perception and problem solving. Concluded that thinking is a holistic process based on the gestalt or form of the phenomena to be reasoned about. Elements are defined in relation to their context rather than the other way around. Reasoning processes include, (re)organization, insight, autonomous processes.

Information Processing: (ca 1960)—computation, input, transformation, storage, and output of information. Information processing analyses have become the core of Cognitive Psychology and much of the content in this course is at least partially dependent upon this approach. Almost everyone in the field, classical rationalists, evolutionary nativists, modern behaviorists, connectionists, and Gestaltists; whether they are studying learning, memory, perception, or problem solving will use information and information processes at least as a component of their empirical or theoretical work.