What´s Cognitive Psychology?

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Cognitive psychology is a very complex study of the mind, brain and the structures that make up the mental processes in individuals. A common question that psychologists attempt to answer in depth is the question that asks how individuals account for the basic events that have occurred and the fundamental capacities humans have. With that said, the fundamental assumption of cognitivism is that psychology needs to appeal to internal cognitive processes to understand intelligent behavior. However, individuals such as eliminative materialist’s and sociobiologist’s arguments continue to debate reasoning that understanding intelligent behaviors doesn’t need to appeal to these processes.
Throughout time, many cognitive scientists have developed arguments supporting the common assumption that psychology needs to appeal to internal cognitive processes to understand intelligent behavior. For example, Tolman first said that the mind is a system made up of representational systems (Flanagan, 1991, p.178). Think about an object such as a water bottle. You have beliefs and ideas about water bottles in general that are specific to the meaning of this object. Because our mind creates representations for things in the world it can be concluded that the mind is also an intentional system (Flanagan, 1991, p. 178).
The idea of intentionality within the mind leads us to believe that the assumption stating psychology needs to appeal to internal processes to understand complex behaviors could be supported. Intentionality has been reinforced by psychologists in their explanations of cognitive processes for many years now. The assumption that psychology needs to be attractive to internal processes to understand intelligent behavior seems plausible b...

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...on processors Therefore, it is not plausible to support sociobiologists arguments solely.
To conclude, it can be said that the understanding of cognitive processes and intelligent behaviors will continue to grow. It can be observed that no single assumption is correct without consideration of the others. For example, though the idea that psychology needs to appeal to internal cognitive processes to understand intelligent behavior seems undoubtedly true, without the understanding of all of the functional styles of explanation and individuals such as eliminative materialists and sociobiologists a true explanation to the task is unable to be determined. It seems as though all of these assumptions should be considered together discarding a few aspects along the way.

Works Cited

Flanagan, O. (1991). The science of the mind. (2nd ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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