Despite advances in technology, computers still can’t come close to the power of the world’s most remarkable computer – the human brain.

Computing machines have seen three phases: the tabulating phase, the programmable phase, and now the new era of computing, the cognitive phase [1]. Tabulating machines performed a fixed task, whereas programmable machines could be reprogrammed to execute different tasks without any change in the hardware. Cognitive machines, however, promise learning and reasoning capabilities.

The possibility of such machines raises the question: is cognition the ultimate test for conscious existence? What do we know about cognition? How do we define intelligence? The questions go on and on. One thing, however, everyone seems to agree with is the fact that understanding the mechanism of human cognition is the key to developing advanced artificial intelligence, and cognitive machines.

Cognitive machines have the ability to learn, and they employ artificial intelligence to “reason.” Artificial intelligence is defined as, “The science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men” [2]. The good news is that cognitive computing is no longer an esoteric pursuit of some futurists. It is, and has been, essential for the operation of many big-data driven processes. The 21st century has been flooded with data coming from almost every aspect of our lives. Technology has made it possible to generate data at an exponential rate. Temperature distribution throughout our buildings, the number of people diagnosed with cancer in the last six months, real-time changes in customer preferences, ethnic profiles of college applicants, and the top three words trending in online conversations at this very moment, are some examples of the kind of data available today.

As the amount of data generated increases, it also becomes harder and harder to process and make sense of the data collected. Our “greedy and ambitious” human nature does not want to waste, and it wants to use every bit of available data. This is where it becomes imperative to have a computing machine that goes beyond performing pre-programmed tasks and learns as it goes, without human interference. For this kind of computing, we need cognition.

The biggest challenge in imitating human cognition is to understand how cognition happens in the brain. It is obviously beyond our ability to monitor such activity that is constantly taking place in our brains, let alone recreating such marvels in the first place. Nevertheless, it will be a great achievement if we can manage to somewhat imitate human cognition, even partially. It would open a whole new era in terms of what can be achieved from a computing standpoint. For instance, the entire curriculum of a college degree can be processed by a cognitive machine in a fraction of a second; such machine can digest the whole of medical literature in a short period of time, provide human doctors with second opinions on their diagnoses [3].

Despite the fact that there have been substantial improvements in designing “intelligent” computing machines, mimicking the hardware of the human brain and simulating its decision-making processes, have posed three fundamental challenges: a hardware with comparable processing power and memory, a software algorithm to implement intelligent behavior, and the necessity of both being self-adapting and self-improving.

First of all, human intelligence has not been fully characterized – its capabilities and limitations are still unknown. This lack of knowledge makes it difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to reduce such intelligence to smaller, or simpler, modules. Therefore, we don’t have a good handle on how to mimic the human brain in a behavioral sense.

The second major problem is that we are still far away from having the hardware on which our “intelligence” software could run. Implementing intelligence in conventional computing machines, evidently, seems to be a futile undertaking. Programmable machines are no match for human brains; even the fastest supercomputers, taking advantage of thousands of processors, is able to mimic just one percent of one second worth of human brain activity-and even that takes 40 minutes [4]. Therefore, cognitive computing machines must incorporate different hardware architecture from conventional computers to achieve cognition comparable to humans. IBM’s SyNAPSE chip is one example of hardware inspired by the brain, and it has the potential to carry out the required, intense computations.

Lastly, the human brain and its cognitive power are constantly changing. Depending on various factors and experiences, our brains can improve or deteriorate; this is also true of our cognitive power. However, such improvement or deterioration could be in the form of a change in the physical structure or the amount of capacity utilized [5]. Such dynamic flexibility, also called Brain Plasticity [6], is essential to our intelligence. At this time, no self-evolving computing hardware has been worked out. However, promising developments have been reported with respect to cognitive computing machines that can learn – that is, they can make deductions and reach conclusions that are not preprogrammed.

Along the way, human supervision will be the ultimate guide in perfecting such imitation. Therefore, human cognition, taken for granted in our daily lives, remains to be the final frontier for our thousands-years long technological journey. Once again, the creation set the boundaries for human development.

Adem G. Aydin holds a Phd degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He works as an engineer scientist at IBM.

References

[1] Virginia Rometty, 2013, http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com/post/32816006311/i-b-m-chief-on-watson-cognitive-computing-and-her

[2] Marvin Minsky, 1968, http://www.akri.org/ai/defs.htm

[3] “WellPoint and IBM Announce Agreement to Put Watson to Work in Health Care”, http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35402.wss

[4] “Largest neuronal network simulation achieved using K computer” http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/

[5] William James, The Principles of Psychology

[6] Bryan Kolb and Ian Q. Whishaw, Brain Plasticity and Behavior, Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 49: 43-64

In a study conducted by social psychologists Tversky and Kahneman, people were asked to guess the percentage of African nations that were members of the United Nations. Two groups were first asked to estimate whether this number was lower or higher than a threshold: the first group was asked whether it is more or less than 45 percent and the second group was asked whether it is more or less than 65 percent. Then both groups were asked to give their estimates of the actual percentage. The researchers demonstrated that the group that was given the lower threshold estimated a lower value for the actual percentage of African nations that are members of the United Nations. The group that was given the higher threshold estimated a higher percentage. The pattern has held in other experiments for a wide variety of different subjects of estimation. A bias in the estimation of African members of the United Nations may not sound like a big deal, but how about decisions that affect people’s lives seriously?

Consider sentencing in court trials. Social psychologist Mussweiler and colleagues asked trial judges with more than 15 years of experience to consider sentencing demands made by non-experts in a legal crime case before issuing a final sentence. The two sentencing demands were 34 months and 12 months. The judges, despite their experience and despite the fact that the crime was the same, were influenced by the demands. Judges who considered the high demand of 34 months prior to their decision gave final sentences that were almost 8 months longer than judges who considered a low demand of 12 months initially. If prior exposure to a piece of information can make a difference as much as 8 more months in prison, then we ought to know what is going on. The examples above illustrate a psychological heuristic known as “anchoring and adjustment.” The heuristic suggests that when faced with a decision-making or estimation situation, people start with an anchor, or a reference point, and make adjustments to it to reach their final estimate. The anchor serves as a first approximation and then the person makes adjustments to it to reach a final estimate or decision. Why does the human mind utilize this heuristic? The answer is simple—we do not always have a whole lot of information to reach an accurate estimate or best decision.

Therefore, the mind sometimes needs shortcuts, especially under pressing circumstances. To understand this process, let’s have a look at the limitations of human cognition. Models of human cognition Cognitive psychologists and sociologists have worked to develop models of human social cognition. These models emphasize four aspects of our social cognition, which is the way we perceive others. The first is the role of prior knowledge versus information immediately available. For example, when we see a policeman directing the traffic, we use our prior knowledge in our perception. We may assume that he is carrying a gun and he has communications equipment to talk with his station. We deduce these features from our prior knowledge about the traffic police, even if we may not be in a position to observe that particular policeman’s gun or communications device. Relying on prior information in our judgments is called “top-down” processing as opposed to “bottom-up” or data-driven processing. Typically, relying on top-down processing, such as relying on stereotypes, requires fewer processing resources.

The second aspect is the limitation of our cognitive processing capacity. The human cognitive system is modeled to consist of our sensory organs, a sensory register (memory) that temporarily stores our perceptions of external stimuli, a short-term memory, a long-term memory, attention resources and executive control processes. When we receive information in the form of audio-visual or other sensory stimuli, they are processed by our cognitive system and transferred to our short-term memory. Through a process of encoding and categorization, the information is organized and stored in the long-term memory. A part of the long-term memory is “active” or readily accessible. Our further use of information in our long-term memory activates the information, and the lack of use deactivates it, making it less readily accessible. Our behavioral response results from our processing of information. According to this information-processing model of human cognition, the amount of information that can be processed by our cognitive system is restricted in terms of storage, flow and inference (Huitt, 2003).

The third aspect is the amount of cognitive processing that is determined by capacity (amount of free resources) and motivation. Factors such as interest, importance, and relevance determine the motivation to allocate more cognitive resources. We are more likely to devote more cognitive processing resources to subjects that are more interesting, important or relevant in our judgment. The fourth aspect is the interplay between automatic and controlled processing. Automatic processes require fewer resources. Given our limited processing capacity, time and other types of constraints have consequences for our cognitive processing. Under constraints, most individuals tend to simplify their processing by relying on less information, relying on automatic cognitive processes as opposed to conscious ones, or relying on prior information as opposed to information available in the circumstances. Anchoring is one such a simplification. The nature of the situation we are facing will determine which of these mechanisms will be selected. They will be reused or abandoned depending on whether they provide a sound basis for our responses to the social environment. If the simplifications lead to interpretations that harm us, we are likely to abandon them. If, on the other hand, there is no harm or there is a benefit, then we are likely to reuse those simplifications.

Anchoring effect Anchoring is defined as the effect of a prior judgment of an object, the anchor, on our future judgments regarding another object. These judgments may be about a numerical value, a probability, or even a moral or legal judgment. As an example, consider the situation where people are asked whether the population of a city is greater than or smaller than a value. Let’s say two groups of people are asked the same question with two anchors: Group A is asked whether the population of Houston is more than or less than 500,000. Group B is asked whether the population of Houston more than or less than 2,000,000. In this example, the values of 500,000 and 2,000,000 serve as anchors. Both groups are then asked: What is your estimate of the population of Houston? Experiments indicate that the people who were given the lower anchor on average give a lower estimate for the population and vice versa. How does anchoring happen? Cognitive psychologists tell us that human judgment is essentially relative or comparison based, even if we are not asked to make a comparison explicitly. So, in evaluating the present object or person, our minds search for an anchor. A particular anchor may be selected because it is readily accessible, because it is suggested to us, or “self-generated via an insufficient adjustment process” (Mussweiler et al). Our prior cognitive processing of the anchor increases the accessibility of anchor-consistent knowledge, which influences our subsequent judgments. For example, when we meet a person from a country, the first person we met from that country may become our anchor. If we had a positive experience with the first person, we are likely to interpret the actions of this new person with a positive light. While cognitive heuristics such as anchoring help us make quick decisions under constraints, they may also lead to errors. The price we pay for the economy provided by the heuristics is “systematically biased judgments under certain conditions.” (Bless et al., p. 24). For instance, a car dealer may offer you a very high price as an anchor and ask you to make a counter offer. Experiments have demonstrated that under such circumstances, the value of the initial offer has a significant effect on what people will be willing to pay for the final price of the car. If the initial offer is very high, the customer is likely to accept a higher negotiated price and vice versa. The anchoring effect can also be observed when we take a few characteristics of a person and consciously or subconsciously fit them to a stereotype.

In such cases, we may misperceive their motivations or misunderstand their circumstances. Sometimes the anchor can be manipulated by some person other than ourselves, as in the case of the car dealer. Sometimes, we may pick the anchor unintentionally based on information obtained from the mass media. As the mass media tend to focus on rare events that tend to be negative, the stereotypes formed based on information solely derived from the mass media may be misleading (Said, 1997). What are some of the lessons we can derive from our discussion of the anchoring effect? For one, we need to point the mirror at ourselves and ask: Are we forming stereotypes of others that may be inaccurate? Are we influenced by the anchoring effect in our judgment of other people? To see whether we may have anchors for evaluating people of different backgrounds consider your initial thoughts about Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Americans, Russians, Asians, Africans, Mexicans, etc. Are these anchors based on scientific data or news media coverage of events or personal encounters with one or more individuals? It may be infeasible to try to collect encyclopedic information about every nationality, religion, or culture that we encounter. But in matters that impact our society we ought to do a better job of researching a diversity of resources. But perhaps a more important lesson is this—the anchoring effect is here to stay as part of the reality of human cognition. If we would like to provide accurate, reliable information to people about ourselves, our culture and values, we should reach them before they form a negative anchor or stereotype. If we would like our cultural background, religion, or values to be understood without distortion, we need to reach out to as many people as possible around us and interact with them. We need to hold conversations, and share meaningful experiences with them to anchor their future judgments in an accurate reference point. The anchoring effect is demonstrated to be pervasive and robust in psychology. It is not likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. However, we do have the opportunity to reach out and help form positive anchors for better human relationships.

Further reading

• Bless, H., Fiedler, K., Strack, F. 2004. Social Cognition, New York: Taylor and Francis.
• Huitt, W. 2003. The Information Processing Approach to Cognition. Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University.
• Mussweiler, T., & Strack, F. 2001. The Semantics of Anchoring. Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 86, 234–255.
• Said, E. 1997. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, New York: Random House.

The example given above-not stealing customers’ money versus not being a rich person-is just one possible case among others which human beings feel tension because of conflicting cognitions. Most people have personal beliefs, principles, and values shaping their lives fundamentally. Psychologists use the concept of cognition to imply all of these factors that guide our choices. Cognitions regulate our lives at any moment regardless of our consciousness of them. For instance, some people could venture everything to have more money because they have a cognition whispering “money, money, money,” or others can sacrifice everything for the sake of beliefs because of their cognition, “I believe therefore I am.” Even though human beings feel good when these cognitions drive us to success, good decisions, and a satisfying life, they turn out to be a source of frustration when a certain cognition conflicts with another one. In such cases, what we usually do is to find a way to resolve the conflict because we do not like to live with this tension. How then can we cope with this conflict?

The most common attitude under such circumstances is “self-justification.” If we turn to our example, Peter chose one of the two alternatives: continue to steal his customers’ money in order to become a rich person. Now he must find a good reason to justify himself and reduce his inner conflict:

“Not stealing is not the only way of being an honest person. You cannot be a bad guy just because of one unique behavior in your life, given that other people are also committing such sins, even worse sometimes.”

“My customers are the richest people in the State; it is not greed if I want them to share some of their money. Actually, they do not deserve it at all.”

“I did that to ensure the future happiness of my family; I know that making your family happy is more important than being honest.”

There can be many other reasons or justifications for such a behavior. The truth is that, Peter is trying to convince himself about his behavior. Although people’s attempts to convince themselves are not necessarily rational, they try to rationalize their behaviors by changing their cognitions or adding new ones.

All of the above are in the simple processes of Leon Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. He contends that when an individual has two or more cognitions (beliefs, opinions, ideas etc.) which are inconsistent with each other, then tension emerges and people attempt to reduce this tension. How can the tension be reduced? The answer is through changing one or both cognitions or by adding new cognitions to alleviate discrepancies between cognitions. Our behaviors in such situations will determine the way we behave the next time we encounter a similar situation. Our ultimate behavior will depend on the strength of one’s cognitions (Aronson, 2004). If being a rich person is more important than not being greedy, a person is more likely to choose to steal money.

It is critical that the choice does not have to be right or rational. Let’s remember Peter’s excuses for stealing. He tended to believe that stealing was not as bad as he thought before because he found some justifications. Now he seems to feel better, but what about the next step? Most probably, he will continue to steal. As one can easily see, dissonance reduction is mostly an irrational behavior. Apparently, these irrational behaviors help people to defend their “self” or “ego.” Through the help of these irrational beliefs, people continue to define themselves as if they are good, smart, decent, or generous people. The underlying motive is the need for self-justification.

Cognitive dissonance from the perspective of religion

There are many musts and must-nots in a believer’s mind. One common practice of dissonance reduction appears at a point where one must choose between committing a sin or making a righteous decision. While preaching or reading holy books nurtures spiritual “cognitions” in a religious mind, obeying concupiscence and chasing essentially worldly goals will weaken this. After every sin that a believer committed, the battle of the cognitions starts between “I am a religious guy” and “I committed a sin, therefore I am not a decent person.” Since these cognitions cannot live peacefully together in a religious mind, one of the conflicting cognitions will grow out of this battle.

This process meshes with a religious idea that “Within each sin is a path leading to unbelief” (Nursi, The Second Gleam). If a person insists on performing a sinful act, he starts to disdain his sin. After a while, as he keeps behaving in the same manner, he becomes addicted to the sin and tends to see it as a normal act. Instead of acknowledging that the sins are witnessed by the angels and seen by God, an unrighteous man may like the idea that they may not exist at all, which is again comforting. With that idea, the cognition of “I am a religious person” is surpassed by a new cognition, “Maybe the religion that I accepted has some flaws” or “is questionable” which were added to relieve the pain arising from the cognition “I am not a good person.” From this point of view, people’s preferences about their beliefs are not independent of their behaviors which foster or challenge their religious cognitions.

One’s tendency to justify himself is usual but may not be what ought-to-be from the moral point of view. As people justify themselves, they will ignore whatever is wrong with their behaviors or cognitions, which will make them insensitive. Going beyond psychology’s objective description of human beings as rationalizing or justifying beings, religious sources suggest rejecting self-justification in most of cases. The Qur’an quotes the Prophet Joseph: “Yet I do not claim my self free of error, for assuredly the human carnal soul always commands evil, except that my Lord has mercy. Surely my Lord is All-Forgiving, All-Compassionate” (Yusuf 12:53). This means, self-awareness about the conflicting cognitions is critical for human beings. When the person has inconsistent cognitions, choosing the option that does not solely serve to justify himself will prevent the person from going toward unbelief. Christianity also pointed to the importance of facing up to our sins: “I acknowledged my sin to You, and in my iniquity I have not hidden. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and You forgave the iniquity of my sin” (Psalms 32:5).

Between the good and bad

Human cognitions determine their choices and actions, which in turn nurture, shape or weaken our cognitions. Repeating a sin a second time is easier than the first time, and we feel less dissonance because cognitions creating dissonance are replaced by those that bring inner comfort. People who exhibit extremely deviant and sociopathic behaviors should be reconsidered from this point of view. Extremely deviant behaviors should be considered a series of earlier choices which gradually led to the ultimate misconduct rather than the consequence of a unique decision made at a specific time.

Another possible implication of the theory of cognitive dissonance is the difficulty with judging absolute good or bad. Given the fact that cognitions may become weaker or stronger, personal views on the appropriateness of behaviors are subject to change. Human cognitions are potential mechanisms that lead one to behave in a certain way. Therefore, deviant behaviors might have a long history fed by the cognitions which turn out to be one’s rationale for inappropriate behaviors. As a result, cognitive dissonance uncovers the gray area between the continuum of good and bad through which human beings swing all the time.

Conclusion

Cognitive dissonance theory provides convincing explanations about how human beings make their decisions and behave in a moral or immoral manner. Also, it brings a resourceful perspective to illuminate spiritual experiences. It successfully explains how people swing on the path from good to bad and vice versa instead of considering them as dwelling on two discrete entities. Awareness of the above-mentioned processes is critical to increase self-awareness.

One last comment should be made about the role of conscience in cognitive dissonance. Although cognitive dissonance theory successfully explains many cognitive processes, a mental faculty that is responsible for recognizing the discrepancy in our cognitions and regulating the balance between them is conscience. However, psychology’s account of conscience is rather limited and inconclusive. Psychology offers evidence of the way human beings behave in dissonant situations. Religious resources, however, provide prescriptive guidelines to remain on the right track. As in the case of this unique theory, understanding the theories of psychology as well as making sense of them in the light of religious texts provides individuals with a heightened self-awareness.

References

• Aronson, E. 2004. The Social Animal, 9th edition, Worth Publishers: New York, NY
• Festinger, L. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

A more systematic approach to language and cognition began in the 1920s. During the 20s and 30s Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf separately claimed that language is the main factor in the constructive process, that, in effect, language determines thought. Whorf claimed in his Collected Papers on Metalinguitics that language is the prime factor in objectification of reality. Language determines thought and certain aspects of it restrict our view of the world. A weaker form of the ‘language hypothesis’ does not insist that language determines thought, but that language predisposes the way people think.

During the 50s, when behaviourism was the intellectual fashion, there were not many studies on language and cognition. The stimulus-response-reinforcement model favoured by the behaviourists was applied to language acquisition by Skinner in his book Verbal Behaviour. According to Skinner, verbal behaviour can be acquired if the set of appropriate responses is frequently followed by reinforcement. Reinforcement, he claimed, is equally important after language has been acquired. The purpose and function of reinforcement is to maintain the strength of the response. Language acquisition and verbal behaviour are regarded as mechanical processes. Verbal behaviour can only develop in a social context, with the participation of another person or audience. The speaker learns to speak eventually only in the presence of a listener; the reinforcement that a speaker needs is absent or present when a listener is absent or present. This view treats language as a learning behaviour that can be changed or manipulated with the help of reinforcement, or deprivation, in other words ‘a specific controlling condition … control of verbal stimuli.’

Skinner presents three different types of behaviour which control the verbal stimuli: the echoic, the textual and the intraverbal. ‘Echoic’ behaviour is when the response consists of a sound pattern reproducing something very similar to the stimulus. It is established in the child through the special reinforcement that Skinner calls ‘educational’. Educational reinforcement is provided by institutions whose behaviour is influenced by economic reinforcement: for example, when a teacher gets some financial (or other) rewards for teaching the child how to acquire language effectively. ‘Textual’ behaviour relates to learning how to read. It too is established through educational reinforcement. The stimulus in this case is a text which may be in the form of pictures, formalised pictographs, characters or (more commonly) letters or symbols of an alphabet. ‘Textual’ behaviour describes the way people acquire the skill of writing. Writing behaviour has all the characteristics of ‘echoic’ behaviour, but expressed in visual rather than auditory terms. Three stages are distinguished: the stage of producing the necessary materials, the stage of making differentiated marks, and the stage of transmitting these marks to the reader.

In the case of intraverbal behaviour there is no correspondence between stimulus and response-produced, as in echoic behaviour or as in the correspondence between different dimensional systems as in the textual behaviour. This allows the consideration of all types of vocal and textual stimuli and responses in all combinations at the same time. Interestingly, Skinner regards translation as a ‘special case of intraverbal behaviour’.

Skinner’s approach to thought was abstract, not empirically based. His view was that the results of human thought can be most unpredictable and are therefore severely difficult to explain. So, the simplest and most satisfactory way of explaining thought is to consider it as a behaviour. Thought is not a secretive way of influencing the behaviour, but it is behaviour itself, the ‘sum total’ of the responses to the world and the environment the behaviour ‘lives’ in. He concludes: ‘When we study human thought we study behaviour.’

In the 60s the debate about language was between two conflicting positions. The behaviourist accounts of language and language-acquisition in terms of association, and the approach of Chomsky and his colleagues who presented a linguistic analysis strongly linked with psychology. Their basic argument was that the stimuli-response theory was highly irrelevant with respect to language acquisition. Being mainly interested in the syntactic forms of language they believed that the deep structures of sentences are abstract and inexplicable by the simplistic arguments put forward by the behaviourists. Their debate with the behaviourists, and the theoretical papers in which they criticized and cast doubt on their views, did not leave much room for attention to childhood development and how the processes of that development affect their language acquisition.

Piaget, although not a psychologist by profession (he started out as a biologist), showed a great interest in the way children think. He believed, in contradistinction to Sapir-Whorf, that thought determines language, a position since known as the ‘cognition hypothesis’. The basic difference between language studies in the 60s and Piaget’s approach was that Piaget’s interest was in children aged six and above, and investigated the first structured language during and shortly after the stage of two-word utterance. He discussed language and the thinking of the child, the language function, the questions that children put, and understanding between children.

Piaget and Chomsky came to be the most recognised and respected representatives of the cognitive movement; their work has inspired and influenced so many and to such an extent, that one can rightly speak of a school of thought within the field of cognitive studies. Chomsky had revolutionary and controversial views about language and thought sharply contrasted with anything that had come before. He claimed that every child has an innate knowledge system that contains abstract linguistic structures that are not taught rather, they are already part of the child’s system from birth. He hypothesized that under those circumstances, there must exist a set of grammatical rules that would produce syntactic descriptions for any sentence in any given language. Piaget on the other hand believed that a child must go through several stages to acquire an adult level of logical thought. The effect of the environment on a child’s thought and language is, for Piaget, crucial. Language is an extremely broad set of human capacities. Identical mental operations underlie one’s encounters with a wide range of materials and topics such as space, time, casualty and morality. So the later forms of thought can be located in earlier forms. Piaget examined the child and his mind as an active and constructive agent, that slowly gains knowledge and logic through developing cognitive processes. Chomsky’s view was different; he saw the mind as a set of pre-programmed units fully equipped, that need only a modest trigger from the environment to function. In other words Piaget considered human linguistic capacities as a product of a general ‘constructed’ intellectual development, whereas Chomsky insisted that they are a highly specialised part of the human genetic inheritance, largely separate from any other human faculty. They are, Chomsky said, a kind of an innate knowledge that has only to unfold. The Piagetian cognitive hypothesis claims that language derives from thought. Chomsky takes a radically different view, arguing that language is divorced from thinking. He claims that each human intellectual faculty is located in different areas of the brain, maturing at its own rate and through distinct processes. To make this statement more comprehensible, Chomsky used the analogy of bodily organs: he regarded the mind as a set of organs, like the liver or the lungs or the heart. A heart is not taught to beat, but matures according to its own genetic timetable. The same is true of ‘language’ as well as to other ‘organs of the mind’, that are programmed to function over time according to a genetic timetable.

Although both used and developed models provided by biology and logic, they showed interest in very different kinds of examples and explanations. Piaget tried to give a rich description of the stages that children pass through to achieve a higher level of knowledge. So he developed an elaborate technical vocabulary, rooted in biology, and he based his conclusions upon errors that children made when he gave them his famous challenging puzzles to solve. His ability to give convincing answers to the problems of the development of knowledge, and his hard work in collecting and synthesizing an enormous amount of data, are his big contribution to this field.

Chomsky’s contribution is no less important. His difference from Piaget is that he was not concerned to describe behavioural phenomena; his concern was the development of linguistic science and how its approach and methods could carry into the social sciences. His views of language as a part of an innate and universal system of knowledge and language are the same, had huge influence, although it is an hypothesis impossible to prove.

In October 1975, Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky were invited to express their ideas and present their theories in a meeting which took place at the Abbaye de Royaumont in France. The historical importance of this ‘rendezvous’ was noted by the psychology and linguistic community all over the world and even scientists from behavioural and empirical areas attended the occasion. Piaget and Chomsky exchanged views about language and cognition, but, as people who attended the Royaumont meeting commented, there was no agreed conclusion, only exploration of issues.

It is hardly surprising that no firm conclusions were reached at that meeting. The study of cognition is not an empirical study of given data or facts susceptible to quantitative measurement or experimentation. The subject-matter has to do with human psychology, where different views, theories, methods and experiments are used, different schools are created and several disciplines such as anthology, biology, philosophy etc. are involved together. Without ignoring the important contribution of schools such as behaviourism, psychoanalysis etc., only the further development of the cognitive movement appears likely to give satisfactory answers to issues that arise everyday about language and thought. The charm of uncertainty will draw the passion for further research that will lead from mere confusion to a new theory, a new argument for appraisal or debate.

Useful reading 

• Appel, M,H. (1977) Topics in Cognitive Development.
• Drorni, E. (1993) Language and Cognition: A Developmental Perspective.
• Massimo, P. (1979) Language and Learning.
• Skinner, B. (1957) Verbal Behaviour.
• Vasniadou, S. (1993) Language and Thought.
• Vhorf B.L. (1952) Collected Papers on Metalinguitics.