Cognitive Psychology, or the Deconstruction of Subjectivity

Abstract

The present paper is drawing on information from various fields (cognitive psychology, philosophy, technology, literature) in its attempt to define cognitivism in the context of debates on posthumanism. Apparently the cognitive turn in the humanities, defined by Line Brandt in "The Cognitive Turn in Poetics", a chapter of her 2013 book, The Communicative Mind [1], as â€the discovery of the mind.†[1], does not contradict the Cartesian notion of man as a thinking, rational subject. The cognitivist approach however overturns the notion of reason in its early modern acceptation. Descartes had associated reasoning with identity, thinking with the self-consciousness of being or with the individual’s awareness of its separate existence from other human beings with whom he shared the rational faculties. Presentday cognitivism conceives of the mind as a sort of cybernetic machine whose main virtue is that of recognizing pre-existing codes. We will further discuss pattern recognition as a cognitive science principle and as a key concept in the understanding of the way the mind functions and which ultimately affects the behavioural pattern.

Keywords: Cognitive psychology, Deconstruction of subjectivity, Pattern recognition, Fairy tales.