Practice question · Multiple choice
The cognitive revolution borrowed the computer as a metaphor for the mind. What did that metaphor license that behaviourism had forbidden?
Hints
- Behaviourism's objection to internal states was that they were untestable. Ask what the metaphor supplied.
- You can describe a program's stages precisely without ever seeing the circuitry.
Show the answer
A. Talking about internal states as real and specifiable
Why
The metaphor made the black box discussable: a machine has encoding, storage and retrieval, all specifiable and testable without opening it. That is what returned internal processes to psychology, not the claim that brains are computers, which almost nobody held literally.
Practise Cognitive Psychology
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