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EN - The audiolingual method - A review of historical language teaching methods, Part 1

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Sin versión en español disponible.   Introduction      Celce -Murcia et al.  (2014) argues that some historians o f language teaching believe that the earlier reform movement played a role in the simultaneous development of both the audiolingual approach in the United States and the oral-situational approach in Britain.  Celce -Murcia et al. go on, explaining that when World War II broke out and made it imperative for the U.S. military to quickly and efficiently teach members of the armed forces how to speak foreign languages and to understand them when spoken by native speakers, the U.S. government hired linguists to help teach languages and develop materials, hence, the audiolingual method was born (which is also, actually, called the army method).      These authors state that the audiolingual method drew on both the reform movement and the direct method, but it also added features from structural linguistics by de Saussure, and behavioral...
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EN, ES - The formal analysis of language - Chomsky's perspectives on the structure of language / El análisis formal del lenguaje - La perspectiva de Chomsky en la estructura del lenguaje

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English version:   Versión en español debajo.   Introduction      Chomsky’s influence on the rise of cognitive science was not as great as some people think. Research on cognition can be traced back to Gestalt psychology, and authors such as Edward C. Tolman (behaviorist themselves) worked on cognitive research although they were part of the behaviorist movement in psychology. We also have Alan Turing’s contribution to the computational theory of mind in cognitive science thanks to his contributions to mathematics (see the Turing machine). On the other hand, we also have Karl Lashley, a psychologist who studied the functional neuroanatomy of memory with rats in mazes. Not only he studied the engram, but he also did his own hypotheses on complex behavior, which we have already discussed in past articles: the subconscious information processing hypothesis and the task analysis hypothesis.      Nonetheless, this article won’t be...
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EN, ES - The beginnings of cognitive science - The reaction against behaviorism in psychology, Part 3

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English version:   Versión en español debajo.   Introduction      After reading about Tolman’s experiments on rats and latent learning, we discovered what Tolman called cognitive behaviorism. Moreover, Tolman also discovered that we use cognitive maps instead of response learning. In this article, we will be studying Karl Lashley’s contribution to the rise of cognitive science. First, we will discuss Lashley’s search of the engram, and then we will go with the problem of plans and complex behavior and Lashley’s hypotheses of subconscious information processing, and task analysis.      Back in the days, according to Plavov and other behaviorists, conditioning causes chemical or electrical changes in the brain, so Lashley, a physiologist, wanted to pinpoint exactly what these were (Collin et al., 2012). What Lashley wanted to locate, states Collin et al., was the memory trace, or “engram,” which is the specific place in the bra...
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23 - MTMPCS, Part. 4 - EN, ES - Functionalism and the principle of multiple realizability / El funcionalismo y el principio de realización múltiple

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Hilary Putnam, pioneer of functionalism.   English version:   Versión en español debajo.   Introduction      After discussing substance dualism (more specifically, Cartesian interactionism), analytical behaviorism, and the identity theory of mind, this day’s introduction will be regarding functionalism . As substance dualism, analytical behaviorism, and the identity theory, functionalism is a theory of mind in philosophy.      George Rey, in Houdé’s (2004) dictionary of cognitive science, describes functionalism as “the name of a popular philosophical strategy with regard to the proper analysis (or definition) of mental phenomena (mental terms, concepts, properties).” Rey continues, stating that functionalism is based upon a simple idea: the fact that many things in the world are what they are, not particularly by virtue of what they are made of, but by virtue of what function, or role, they serve in a system. ...
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