History of Learning (1)

Question 1

What was Plato’s stance on learning?

Answer 1

That all learning consists of the recollection of already known, innate ideas.

Question 2

What was Aristotle’s stance on learning?

Answer 2

That learning and the acquisition of knowledge depends on information flowing into the mind from the outside world.

Question 3

What concept is associated with Aristotle’s stance on learning?

Answer 3

Associationism (that associations drive thought).

Question 4

Which three kind of associations are linked to the concept of associationism?

Answer 4

• Similarity
• Dissimilarity (including opposites)
• Contiguity in space or time.

Question 5

Which ten philosophers believed in the concept of empiricism?

Answer 5

• Locke (1689)
• Hume (1777)
• Kant (1781)
• Darwin (1872)
• Pavlov (1890)
• Thorndike (1890)
• Watson (1914)
• Skinner (1938)
• Hull (1943)
• Tolman (1948)

Question 6

What were two ideas integral to Locke’s empiricist view?

Answer 6

• That we are born ‘tabula rasa’, and we therefore learn via experience.
• He believed that humans respected the laws of nature (attraction, polarity, rhythm, relativity, cause and effect, gender/ gustation, and the perpetual transmutation of energy).

Question 7

What were three ideas integral to Hume’s empiricist view?

Answer 7

• He believed that “causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason, but by experience”.
• That the idea of the supernatural ought not to be denied.
• That learning from experience is an instinct.

Question 8

What were three ideas integral to Kant’s empiricist view?

Answer 8

• That all knowledge begins with experience, but some innate categories are keys to potential experiences.
• That the idea of time cannot arise from experiences of simultaneity or succession, since we need to presuppose time in order to make sense of this particular order through which we experience the world.
• Reason is the seat of concepts that precede experience and make it possible, but we are not entitled to draw conclusions about the natural world from these concepts.

Question 9

What was Darwin’s revolutionary theory?

Answer 9

The theory of evolution by natural selection.

Question 10

What did Pavlov and Thorndike discover?

Answer 10

That animal learning could be a proxy for human learning.

Question 11

Which concept was introduced by Watson?

Answer 11

Behaviourism (and all its principles)

Question 12

Which theory was developed by Skinner?

Answer 12

Reinforcement theory

Question 13

On what was Hull’s research based?

Answer 13

The mathematical underpinnings of psychology.

Question 14

Which concept was introduced by Tolman?

Answer 14

Purposive behaviourism

Question 15

What are the four schools of behaviourism?

Answer 15

• Watson’s methodological behaviourism (based on the belief that only observable behaviour should be studied)
• Hull’s neobehaviourism
• Tolman’s cognitive behaviourism (Tolman wanted to explore the cognitive processes that drive behaviour)
• Skinner’s radical behaviourism (everything everyone does is a behaviour)

Question 16

Which school of behaviourism is the most extreme?

Answer 16

Watson’s methodological behaviourism

Question 17

What was the focus of Watson’s concept of methodological behaviourism?

Answer 17

“The observables”

Question 18

According to Watson’s concept of methodological behaviourism, what needed to stop in order for psychology to ‘survive’?

Answer 18

Psychology’s focus on the theory of mentalism (that physical and psychological phenomena are ultimately explicable only in terms of a creative and interpretative mind).