Talk:Cognitivism (psychology)

message: The wiki article on positivism states, and I agree, that positivism is the philosophical (i.e. not scientific) belief that scientific knowledge is the only valid knowledge. More specifically, "positivist" is a term used in epistemology.  Hence it not logically possible to describe a scientific field as either positivist or not positivist. Obviously, within a scientific field you have to assume that the only valid knowledge WITHIN THAT FIELD is scientific knowledge, but calling this assumption "positivist" distorts the language. No claim is being made about nonexistence of nonscientific knowledge OUTSIDE the field. I feel quite certain that, whatever "cognitivism" might reasonably be defined as, its practitioners view it as part of science and not part of philosophy.  Hence describing it as "positivist" is at best anachronistic.
Now admittedly there are a very few cases where "positivism" has an accepted and useful meaning within a scientific or quasi-scientific field, but this is not one of them. 
One case where the term "positivist" is meaningful is "positivist sociology." That is an older term that actually depended on Comte's earlier usage of the term, which is not the same as modern usage (see e.g. Thomas Meaney, "The Religion of Science and Its High Priest," The New York review of Books, OCTOBER 25, 2012 at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/25/religion-science-and-its-high-priest). In effect, "positivist sociology" merely means "the historically first stab at a fully scientific sociology."  Similar terms were used in related fields such as criminology. However using this term for cognitivism cannot possible be correct, because cognitivism split off from the already fully scientific approach of behaviorism.
A second case is in the theory of legal interpretation, where legal positivists claim that validity of a law is unrelated to its merits--rather far afield from this discussion.
It seems to me that when philosophers like Searle apply the term "positivist" in cases like this, they may be claiming that cognitive studies has not yet made a full split from philosophy. This is a confusing question, because philosophers do in fact continue to make contributions to cognitive science as well as to several other scientific fields. However when they do so, to the extent that they  make successful contributions they are  doing science rather then traditional philosophy. In any case they are certainly not doing epistemology. 
Adding to the confusion, cognitive studies does in fact deal with the practical question of how people arrive at what they think they know (or act as if they know), which almost sounds like epistemology but isn't.  Epistemology deals with the logical validity of knowledge, not necessarily directly with its acquisition process. And in any case, cognitive scientists as such are not making claims about the validity of, for example, divine revelation. Some of them do go too far and make such claims, but they are acting out of their element. 
Burressd (talk) 22:04, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Positivism" is an irrelevant putdown 

message: The very recently created article Cognitivism (philosophy of education) overlaps significantly with this article, and has little new to offer. I propose to merge it into this one. hgilbert (talk) 03:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal