Cognitive Revolution

The cognitive revolution is the mid-20th-century shift in psychology and adjacent disciplines from behaviorism — which restricted scientific psychology to observable stimulus-response relationships — toward the study of internal mental representations, processes, and structures. The revolution is typically dated 1956–1960, with landmark events including George Miller's 'The Magical Number Seven,' Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, and the founding of cognitive psychology as a research program at MIT and Harvard. The revolution represented not a refutation of behaviorism's empirical findings but a reconstitution of what psychology's proper explanatory target was: internal computational process, not external behavior.

The cognitive revolution exhibits the structural features of an epistemic phase transition: decades of accumulating anomalies (language acquisition, complex problem solving, memory encoding) that behaviorism could not account for without ad hoc extension, followed by rapid paradigm restructuring when an alternative framework — the computational theory of mind — provided a more parsimonious explanatory scheme. The transition was rapid (a decade), discontinuous (cognitive psychology did not grow out of behaviorism — it replaced it in academic hiring, journal editorial control, and graduate training), and produced a new stable equilibrium that itself now faces pressure from embodied cognition and predictive processing frameworks.