The Cognitive Movement

The Graumann and Sommer chapter is a fascinating one, conceived as it is by scholars with an acute sense of the history of psychological thought and with a full appreciation of the many infirmities responsible for the languishing of behaviorism. The authors are thus eager to furnish approbation to the cognitive turn in psychology and to locate ways in which current theory has advanced beyond that of the nineteenth-century mentalists. Yet, in spite of their nurturant attitude, one consistently finds the authors reserved in posture. Pungent and persistent questions are raised concerning the solidity of ostensible advances, the ambiguity surrounding critical concepts, the lack of specifiable origins and effects of posited mechanisms and processes, and the seeming impossibility of integrating the vast array of existing concepts. Most cogently, Graumann and Sommer raise the significant question as to whether the cognitive movement is not in grave danger of losing reality—that is, of abandoning concern with history, society, environment, and other aspects of the external world that seem to furnish the very grounds for cognitive activity itself.