INFORMATION, COGNITION AND BEHAVIOR: TELLING WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR Book Review of Giere on Scientific Cognition

Abstract

My review of Giere's Cognitive Models of Science (1992) is written from the standpoint of contemporary behavior analysis. Science is an activity, so what we know about behavior should be relevant to it. Yet cognitive approaches do not take facts about behavior into account. The themes I consider include the limitations of language, the ambiguity of knowledge structures, and some implications of information processing. For example, cognitive theories of information processing fail to deal with the finding that organisms do not work to produce information per se; they only work to produce information correlated with reinforcing events. Cognitive models of science have little to say about those major scientific innovations, obvious in retrospect, that were slow to be accepted because their content was not what people wanted to hear.