Where did the word "cognitive" come from anyway?

Abstract

Cognitivism is the ascendant movement in psychology these days. It reaches from psychology into social psychology, personality, psychotherapy, development, and beyond. Few psychologists know the philosophical history of the term, cognitive, and often use it as though it were completely synonymous with or mental. In this paper, I trace the origins of the term cognitive in the ethical theories of the early 20th century, and through the logical positivistic philosophy of science of this century's middle part. In both of these settings, cognitive referred not primarily to the psychological but, rather, to the truth-evaluable (i.e., those propositions about which one can say that they are either true or false). I argue that, strictly speaking, cognitivism differs from traditional mentalism in being the study of only those aspects of the mental that can be subjected to truth conditional analysis (or sufficiently similar conditions of satisfaction). This excludes traditionally troublesome aspects of the mental such as consciousness, qualia, and (the subjective aspects of) emotion. Although science has since grown to include the study of some of these phenomena, it is important to recognize that one of the original aims of the cognitivist movement was to re-introduce belief and desire into psychology, while still protecting it from the kinds of criticism that behaviorists had used to bring down full-blown mentalism at the beginning of the century.