THE COGNITIVE TURN IN PSYCHOLOGY

We have seen that an adequate scientific account of moral agency must include reference to our cognitive capacities. The questions of how we acquire and put into action our moral capacities cannot be answered satisfactorily by appealing only to evolutionarily based and learned, but noncognitive, moral capacities. In particular, we saw in Chapter 5 that the Skinnerian claim that the science of operant behavior is the science of values fails because it does not take account of the cognitive features of human agency. Our conclusion rested in large part on the findings of psychologists who have shown that cognitive factors play a role in the explanation of human behavior. This turn to the cognitive in psychology is not reserved for critics of behaviorist theory; it is part of what has come to be called the cognitive revolution in psychology, which has taken two forms. For want of better descriptions, I shall call one cognitive revolution the representational revolution and the other the agential revolution. The representational revolution focuses on human knowledge-gaining capacities and achievements. It has developed in the areas of perception, memory, imagery, language, thought, and problem solving. The agential revolution is concerned with issues of human action. It has emerged in the areas of learning, motivation, personality, social psychology, and abnormal psychology.