The western mind is European, the European mind is Greek; the Greek mind came to maturity in the city of Athens (Needham, 1978, p. 98).

The view of mental activities as actions (e.g., "thinking is talking to ourself," Watson, 1919) as opposed to their being considered indications of the presence of a consciousness or mind as a separate entity, are central differences between the behavioral and cognitive orientations. According to Malone (1990) the goal of psychology from the behavioral perspective has been clear since Watson:

We want to predict with reasonable certainty what people will do in specific situations. Given a stimulus, defined as an object of inner or outer experience, what response may be expected? A stimulus could be a blow to the knee or an architect's education; a response could be a knee jerk or the building of a bridge. Similarly, we want to know, given a response, what situation produced it.... In all such situations the discovery of the stimuli that call out one or another behavior should allow us to influence the occurrence of behaviors; prediction, which comes from such discoveries, allows control. What does the analysis of conscious experience give us (p. 97).

Such notions caused Bertrand Russell, to claim that Watson made "the greatest contribution to scientific psychology since Aristotle," (as cited in Malone, 1990, p. 96) and others to call him the "...simpleton or archfiend... who denied the very existence of mind and consciousness (and) reduced us to the status of robots" (p. 96). Related to the issue of mind/body dualism are the emphases on structure versus function and/or evolution and/or selection.

2.1.1 Structuralism, Functionalism, and Evolution

The battle cry of the cognitive revolution is "mind is back!" A great new science of mind is born. Behaviorism nearly destroyed our concern for it but behaviorism has been overthrown, and we can take up again where the philosophers and early psychologists left off (Skinner, 1989, p. 22).

Structuralism(see 5.3.1)also can be traced through the development of philosophy at least to Democritus' "heated psychic atoms" (Needham, 1978). Plato divided the soul/mind into three distinct components in three different locations: the impulsive/instinctive component in the abdomen and loins, the emotional/spiritual component in the heart and the intellectual/reasoning component in the brain. In modern times, Wundt at Leipzig and Titchner (his student) at Cornell espoused structuralism as a way of investigating consciousness. Wundt proposed ideas, affect and impulse and, Titchner proposed sensations, images, and affect as the primary elements of consciousness. Titchner eventually identified over 50,000 mental elements (Malone, 1990). Both relied heavily on the method of introspection (to be discussed later) for data. Cognitive notions such as schema, knowledge structures, duplex memory, etc. are structural explanations. There are no behavioral equivalents to structuralism because it is an aspect of mind/consciousness.

Functionalism, however, is a philosophy shared by both cognitive and behavioral theories. Functionalism is associated with John Dewey and William James who stressed the adaptive nature of activity (mental or behavioral) as opposed to structuralism's attempts to separate consciousness into elements. In fact, functionalism allows for an infinite number of physical and mind structures to serve the same functions. Functionalism has its roots in Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859) and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Malcolm, 1954). The question of course is the focus of adaptation: mind or behavior. The behavioral view is, of course, that evolutionary forces and adaptations are no different for humans than for the first one-celled organisms; that organisms since the beginning of time have been vulnerable and, therefore, had to learn to discriminate and avoid those things which were harmful and discriminate and approach those things necessary to sustain themselves (Goodson, 1973). This, of course, is the heart of the selectionist position long advocated by B.F. Skinner (1969, 1978, 1981, 1987a, 1987b, 1990).

The selectionist (Chiesa, 1992; Pennypacker, 1992, 1994; and Vargas, 1993) approach "emphasizes investigating changes in behavioral repertoires overtime" (Johnson & Layng, 1992, p. 1475). Selectionism is related to evolutionary theory in that it views the complexity of behavior to be a function of selection contingencies found in nature (Donahoe, 1991; Donahoe & Palmer, 1989; Layng, 1991; Skinner, 1969, 1981, 1990). As Johnson & Layng (1992) point out, this "perspective is beginning to spread beyond the studies of behavior and evolution to the once structionalist-dominated field of computer science, as evidenced by the emergence of parallel distributed processing theory (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986) and adaptive networks research (Donahoe, 1991; Donahoe & Palmer, 1989)" (p. 1475).

2.1.2 Introspection & Constructivism

Constructivism(see 7.3.1, 12.3.1.1) the notion that meaning (reality) is made, is currently touted as a new way of looking at the world. In fact, there is nothing in any form of behaviorism that requires realism, naive or otherwise. The constructive nature of perception(see 16.2.1)has been accepted at least since von Helmholtz (1866) and his notion of "unconscious inference." Basically, von Helmholtz(see 26.2) believed that much of our experience depends upon inferences drawn on the basis of a little stimulation and a lot of past experience. Most, if not all, current theories of perception rely on von Helmholtz's ideas as a base (Malone, 1990). The question is not whether perception is constructive, but what to make of these constructions and where do they come from. Cognitive psychology draws heavily on introspection to "see" the "stuff" of construction.

In modern times introspection was a methodological cornerstone of Wundt, Titchner, and the Gestaltist(see 5.1), Ku¨ lpe (Malone, 1990). Introspection generally assumes a notion espoused by John Mill (1829) that thoughts are linear; that ideas follow each other one after another. Although it can (and has) been argued that ideas do not flow in straight lines, a much more serious problem confronts introspection on its face. Introspection relies on direct experience; that our "mind's eye" or inner observation reveals things as they are. We know, however, that our other senses do not operate that way.

The red surface of an apple does not look like a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at a certain critical wavelength, but that what it is. The sound of a flute does not sound like a sinusoidal compression wave train in the atmosphere, but that is what it is. The warmth of the summer air does not feel like the mean kinetic energy of millions molecules, but that is what it is. If one's pains and hopes and beliefs do not introspectively seem like electrochemical states in a neural network, that may be only because our faculty of introspection, like our other senses, is not sufficiently penetrating to reveal such hidden details. Which is just what we would expect anyway ...unless we can somehow argue that the faculty of introspection is introspection is quite different from all other forms of observation (Churchland, 1990, p. 15).

Obviously, the problems with introspection became more problematic in retrospective paradigms; that is when the learner/performer is asked to work from a behavior to a thought. This poses a problem on two counts: accuracy and causality. In terms of accuracy, James Angell stated his belief in his 1907 APA presidential address:

No matter how much we may talk of the preservation of psychical dispositions, nor how many metaphors we may summon to characterize the storage of ideas in some hypothetical deposit chamber of memory, the obstinate fact remains that when we are not experiencing a sensation or an idea it is, strictly speaking, non-existent....[W]e have no guarantee that our second edition is really a replica of the first, we have a good bit of presumptive evidence that from the content point of view the original never is and never can be literally duplicated. (Herrnstein & Boring, 1965, p. 502)

The causality problem is perhaps more difficult to grasp at first but, in general, behaviorists have less trouble with "heated" data (self reports of mental activities at the moment of behaving) that reflect "doing in the head" and "doing in the world" at the same time than with going from behavior to descriptions of mental thought, ideas, or structures and then saying that the mental activity caused the behavioral. In such cases of course, it is arguably equally likely that the behavioral activities caused the mental activities.

A more current view of constructivism, social constructivism, focuses on the making of meaning through social interaction. In the words of Garrison (1994), meanings "are sociolinguistically constructed between two selves participating in a shared understanding" (p. 11). This, in fact, is perfectly consistent with the position of behaviorists (see e.g., Skinner, 1974) as long as this does not also imply the substitution of a group of rather than an individual "mind". Garrison, a Deweyian scholar, is, in fact, also a self proclaimed behaviorist.

2.1.2.1. Behavioral and cognitive differences that affect instructional design and research

In fact, Behavioral and Cognitive perspectives are not so far apart as it may appear (Slocum & Butterfield, 1994). Behaviorists have become more concerned with mental activities or "coverants" and cognitivists, although still interested in representations, are increasingly concerned with activities or behaviors in contexts as well as the role of social feedback. In a practical sense the differences are more a matter of emphases. Behaviorists like activities and dislike inferences (and inferential statistics, see, e.g., Michael, 1974) whereas cognitivists like representations and are willing to take bigger "leaps". Arguments such as cognitive psychology assumes more "active learners"(see 12.3.1.1) and behaviorists more "passive learners" or that behaviorism seeks to control behaviors while cognitivists seek to control thoughts or "thought structures," make little sense and contribute little. Similarly, the idea that anyone, from any orientation, can design any activity which prohibits "construction" based on prior experience is false. Finally, although it is perhaps a central assumption in the early works of "methodological" behaviorists, logical positivism is not an essential or even widespread foundation for behaviorism any more than for cognitivists or constructivists. Behaviorists have always resisted inferential statistics, for example, in favor of description (e.g., Michael, 1974). Indeed, one of the criticisms of behavioral psychology is that it is too reliant on description (Malone, 1990).