Addiction

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Abstract

Part of the problem with current debates over the nature of ‘addiction’ is that, despite the fact that much of the debate is carried on by psychologists, underlying assumptions of current psychological theory are rarely discussed. For example, most psychologists even nowadays tend to use the framework of ‘cognitivism’, or (occasionally) behaviourism as an approach to the subject, as though these were the only two possible approaches available. But in the last ten years, new schools of psychology have thrown new light on the increasingly sterile ‘cognitivism’ versus ‘behaviourism’ debate. Embodied Cognition (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Richardson, 2000) Distributed Cognition (Hutchins, 2000) Situated Cognition (Clancey, 1997), and Discursive Psychology (Edwards and Potter, 1992) have challenged views of language, cognition and behaviour that were once ubiquitous in the field and have led to a revolution in the philosophical foundations of psychology. It will be argued here that this ‘New Psychology’ has much to offer in terms of throwing new light on old questions. However, to show why this is the case, first we must sketch in the background. Behaviourism, as is rather well known, was first propounded by Watson in 1914, although it was not until some years later, with the aggressive propagandising of Skinner that the school became the dominant one in American psychology. Despite later demonisation of behaviouristic psychology by writers of the ‘cognitivist’ school, it could be argued that there was nothing terribly unreasonable about their attempt to put psychology on a scientific footing. On the contrary, behaviourism could be seen as an inevitable reaction to the absurdities of the previous orthodoxy of ‘intuitionism’ (which had claimed that ‘self-observing’ one’s own thoughts should be the basic methodology of psychology). Moreover, behaviourism is best seen, not as a single unified ‘movement’, but as a number of competing methodologies used by a large number of psychologists in a variety of different contexts (therefore, there was no behaviourism: there were behaviourisms). Not all behaviourists denied ‘inner states’, and many, far from being 19th century ‘mechanists’, now seem to have been ahead of their time. It was Hebb (1949), for example, who was one of the first proponents of what we would now call ‘neural nets’ or ‘connectionism’. Woodworth (1958) argued in favour of a theory very close to what we would now call ‘situated cognition’. And so on. However, it was Skinner who, for better or for worse, became the public face of the behaviourisms, and who enunciated what came to be understood as the three basic ‘ground rules’ for the new approach.