A genealogical critique
of the computational model of mind
by Fred J. Evans
Albany: SUNY Press, 1993
ISBN 0-7914-1249-0 $49.95 hardcover
ISBN 0-7914-1250-4 $16.95 softcover
Critiques of psychology are and have been legion throughout its relatively
short life as an institutionalized discipline. In fact, it has been frequently
noted in recent years that psychology is in a "crisis" even though
such claims go back to Karl Bühler's (1929) well known book or even
to the very founding of the discipline in the closing decades of the nineteenth-century.
Typically the crisis is purported to be one of unity, the self-proclaimed
science of psychology was and remains a plethora of positions which rarely,
if ever, lend themselves to a single scientific view on the terms of the
logical empiricist notion of the unity of science. For many who, like me,
are not self-proclaimed "scientists" on this view, this cacophony
is exactly as it should be and, if Fred Evans has his way, that is how it
will remain.
Evans takes on the current core of psychology - cognitivism - by adopting
what he calls a "genealogical psychology." This is the "evaluative
interpretation of discursive positions " that includes the identification
and evaluation of the "voice" of that discourse (p. 207). A voice
is akin to Bakhtin's notion of utterance, the central element of language.
"Utterances are the basic elements of the discursive positions or voices
that make up a dialogue" (p. 191). One immediate consequence is that
meaning is always constituted in a dialogue or in an interplay of voices.
There is no univocal identity to discover since utterances point endlessly
to new revisions of themselves. On this dialogical view, linguistic agency
belongs to "voices, which are always more than their enunciators and
less than social discourse" (p. 195). The voices exist as discursive
positions which also identify the enunciators. Simultaneously, as enunciators
we are always capable of maintaining or resisting discursive positions in
the fabric of social life.
Evans, however, only presents his conceptions of genealogical psychology
and the interplay of voices in the closing chapters of his book. The bulk
of the book works its way towards this position by a powerful and sustained
critique of cognitive psychology. In fact, the first eight chapters develop
a genealogical psychology of cognitivism, a psychology that seeks not consensus
but the continuation of a dialogue that was in danger of hardening into
a single, oracular voice. In all of the critical literature in psychology
there has rarely been such a damning statement of the technocratic rationality
that lies behind the enterprises of cognitive psychology and cognitive science
and serves as the "operative goal of the society and individuals that
they presumably serve" (p. 213). If the book consisted only of the
critique it would already have served the community of critical psychologists
well.
Unlike more conventional critiques of cognitive psychology from within the
discipline or without (typically from philosophy), Evans is concerned to
show how the enterprise is not only incoherent and circular from within
but that it stands as the culmination of Western nihilism. For Evans, the
computational model of mind is "the culmination of immaculate perception
and domination-observation, of what we shall refer to as the analytic
observer or analytic perspective. . . we shall show that the
self constructed by cognitive psychology is a 'proto-technocrat' and the
formalization and universalization of the 'last man'" (p. 49-50).
Evans's genealogical critique, is a Nietzschian and Foucaultian reading
of the development of the computational model of mind, equating the emergence
of technologies of mind with the transformation of the Enlightenment ideals
into an administrative, technocratic passive nihilism. Although supplanting
behaviorism, cognitive psychology formalized and mechanized reason. Technocratic
rationality was defined precisely around Turing's notion of an "effective
procedure" and the eventual mechanization and instantiation of these
procedures in the computer. On Turing's account any rational behavior is
an effective procedure or capable of being characterized by an algorithm
and such procedures can be imitated by a Turing machine of which the computer
is an example. On these grounds Evans argues that cognitive psychology is
an advance over behaviorism in a "perverse manner." Behaviorism
left us with a mind which it did not acknowledge but could also not encapsulate
within its theories and programs. Cognitivism is formulated on computational
rules and legislates "in advance what features of the world can count
as inputs to the system and what objectives can count as the goals of such
a system" (p. 70-71). The system is strictly administrative and removed
from the world, however, making "cognitive psychology's humanism"
a "ruse or strategy for completing the implicit program of behaviorism,
that is, for establishing the hegemony of technocratic rationality"
(p. 71).
Evans is not content however to critique the technocratic rationality of
cognitive psychology but demonstrates that the philosophy of science which
supports this enterprise is itself a variant of the received view of logical
empiricism. Moreover, this methodology, while providing cognitive psychology
with a "neutral" and "objective" basis, already presupposes
what cognitive psychology has purportedly discovered, namely the "privileged
status of the analytic observer." On Evans's account there are two
circularities in cognitive psychology: "the greater circularity of
first defining science in terms of one's psychological theory and then claiming
that this science is an independent source of verification for one's
theory; and the 'lesser circle' of designing experiments that artifactually
produce the behavior they are supposed to discover" (p. 99).
Evans's critique proceeds from an internal and methodological analysis of
particular programs in cognitive psychology to the broader social, historical
problems inherent in the attempts to discipline the body and make it adaptable
to a world in which it is required to become part of an administrative society
and live within the real of new information technologies. What makes this
analysis so compelling is its completeness. While there have been multiple
critiques of cognitive psychology and cognitive science more generally that
argue against its inherent disciplinary functions, few critics have tackled
the literature from inside as well. It is these sections of the book that
are most dense and perhaps less interesting for the non-psychologist. Evans
chose several theorists from cognitive psychology, most notably Johnson-Laird,
and shows how, on their own arguments, their cognitive systems simply do
not allow one to understand the simplest of sentences nor the operations
of metaphors in everyday discursive practices.
In short, Evans argues that the widespread acceptance of the computer model
of mind is due to three factors: the prevalence of analytic discourse, the
hegemony of a technocratic rationality fostered by a technocratic elite,
and cognitivism's intrinsic Nietzschian notion of the passive nihilism of
the "last man."
Cognitive psychologists should read this book, if only to understand their
own failures. Nevertheless cognitive psychology is not a monolithic enterprise
- it too consists of competing voices attempting to scramble to the top
of the pyramid that is scientific prestige. Evans is aware of this of course
but his choice of examples are already severely dated. This in no way diminishes
the power of his argument for by simple extrapolation, much of what he says
about Johnson-Laird is still relevant and true for present-day cognitivists.
Nevertheless, because of the fluidity of key notions in cognitive psychology
(e.g., representation, cognition, consciousness) what is accepted one year
has been turned over the next. For example, in response to various critiques
of what John Haugeland has now termed "Good Old Fashioned Artificial
Intelligence," psychologists have not only turned to connectionism
(or parallel distributed processing models) but have argued that perhaps
the mind is not encapsulated and disembodied after all. Instead mind is
seen as a form of activity and meaning is a form of "situated action"
(Bem & Keijzer, in press; special issue of Cognitive Science, 17,
1993, no. 1). Apparently, recognizing body and world simultaneously have
led some to believe that cognitive psychology can be given a new lease on
life, even if that lease comes with the attempt to import into cognitivism
what it cannot, on a strict computational account, support. In this sense
then, Evans's book is both dated yet at the same time it will no doubt be
a crucial work in the literature which has been critical of the cognitive
enterprise and to which a few cognitivists have responded.
Whereas the timeliness of the examples do not detract from the argument,
what does is Evans's conflation of the pretense of cognitive psychology
to be a technocratic rationality with its limited achievements. What has
and will change us is our immersion in an information society, driven by
rapid changes in knowledge networks and the continual eradication of boundaries
between the academy and the world of the corporation. Cognitivism champions
this movement and on this count Evans is correct to argue that it adheres
to a technocratic rationality. But when cognitivism fails in, for instance,
capturing accurately the cognitive processes of workers, administrators,
the public, and so on, the world's technocrats do not stand by and admire
the marvels of cognitive models of mind. Indeed, cognitive psychology must
continually adapt to the world of informatics in order to succeed. Evans
is too quick to identify cognitive psychology with this technocratic landscape
rather than understanding it as a response. He might have been more nuanced
or perhaps asked a more reflexive question. Cognitive psychologists, like
many social scientists attempting to make it in the marketplace of ideas,
must continually fight a rearguard as well as a promotional battle. With
critics like Evans and Dreyfus (1993) nipping at their heels, the cognitivists
are forever adjusting their theories to counter the worst of their academic
enemies. At the same time they must gloss over their worst problems to sell
their wares. When they face the world (and their world can include non-cognitivist
colleagues in the academy, granting agencies, publishers, and so on) as
spokespersons they present a unified and powerful science. This is the one
Evans saw and has rightly critiqued. On his own account of genealogical
psychology, the wave of discourse (cognitivism) "carries the risk of
dissolution into 'Babel'" but is also "part of the community's
diachronic movement toward unity" and "embodies nihilistic or
oracular tendencies" (p. 209). This much, at least, counts for cognitive
psychology as well as his own genealogical psychology. By crediting cognitive
psychology with more influence than it might possibly have, Evans was able
to motivate a powerful critique. The critique itself however dictates that
he be less impressed with the status of this self-proclaimed science.
Finally, not all cognitive models have been solely or simply influenced
by the analogy of the computer or the impressive logic of the Turing machine.
As Gigerenzer has noted, psychology in the US has frequently relied on an
implicit "tools-to-theories heuristic" (e.g., Gigerenzer et al.,
1989). By this he means that the development of some new techniques and
tools which have their origins outside psychology are converted into theories
of cognition once they have become familiar objects or analytic strategies.
Although the computer is one familiar case of this heuristic, other cognitive
models in psychology have been cobbled together out of modern developments
in statistics. Once these statistics became familiar as a tool for analyzing
experimental results they were institutionalized and became, after a time,
a model for rationality itself in, for example, various theories of perception,
judgment and decision-making. Although Evans would be correct if he were
to claim (as I am assuming he would) that these theories too adhere to a
technocratic rationality, their attraction for psychologists is not a function
of any computational logic they might have but is the outcome precisely
of the already familiar statistical models which support these theories.
Like other critics who hail from the discipline itself and have adopted
a Bakhtinian alternative (e.g., Shotter, 1993), Evans reminds us that entire
traditions for understanding people in their everyday worlds (as opposed
to predicting their activities in special institutional circumstances) have
been neglected in our psychologies. In reminding us, he revives the possibility
of recovering these traditions for our own discursive positions, for entering
into conversations with those who have tried to find a place for psychology
outside the realm of a strictly natural science model. By showing us how
such a psychology might be conducted, Evans breaks through the nihilism
which still holds the mainstream of psychology in thrall. Such a careful
work deserves a careful reading.
References