Reading focus
Syllabus: How Can We Study the Mind?
Use this historical argument to distinguish naming a mental process from explaining how it works. Notice both the promise of representations and the need to make their proposed operations specific.
A question to consider. Someone says that a person navigates by consulting a mental map. What prediction would make this account more informative than saying that the person remembers the route?
Why this reading
Miller asks how mental processes became objects of scientific explanation and why that project drew on several disciplines. His account introduces representation, information, and computation through the problems they were meant to solve.
Before you read
A representation carries information about something; a process operates on information. A computational explanation specifies operations and their organization, rather than simply comparing a person to a computer. Behaviorism includes differing approaches to explaining behavior, so Miller’s account should not be treated as a description of every behaviorist position.
Read for
- Identify the limits Miller encountered in information theory and the alternative explanatory tools he describes.
- Distinguish a new vocabulary for describing a problem from evidence that an explanation solves it.
- Ask what psychology, linguistics, computer science, and the other disciplines contribute to the account, and where their aims differ.
Consider afterwards
- A researcher says that someone remembers a route by storing a representation. What must be specified before this becomes an explanation that could be tested?
Editorial context
This is a participant’s retrospective account, written in 2003, rather than a neutral or comprehensive history. Its selection of people and events reflects Miller’s perspective. The rise of cognitive research did not end behavioral research, and historical influence does not establish that a particular model is correct.