Some Reflections on Microworld Research

Science may be the father of technology, but the reverse is also true: the available technology decides what scientists can and cannot do, and therefore what they can learn. This is as true of psychology as it is of other sciences. Until the 1970s psychology was limited by then available laboratory technology to rather simple experiments where a stimulus was presented to the subject (as participants were then called) and the response to that stimulus was then recorded. It is not surprising that the theories emerging from this enterprise were S-R theories, or, at best, S-O-R theories, formulating laws that allowed the researcher to predict a response from a stimulus, or a stimulus plus some organismic variable, such as motivation. The ‘cognitive revolution’ in the late 1960s did not materially change this because it was not accompanied by any new research technology. As Neisser (1976) put it, the new cognitive psychology employed a ‘translation paradigm’, where the stimulus was translated into a response by means of a series of translation steps, but this did not change its fundamental character of being an S-R psychology

Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Computer Science · Engineering · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Philosophy

• An introduction to cybernetics

  William Ross Ashby•An Introduction to Cybernetics•1956

  Add to list