In and Out of the Black Box

David Hamlyn's thesis is that cognitive psychology, like behaviourism before it, suffers from the very impulse which allowed it to be born: the impulse to delimit the scope of psychology to a particular field of enquiry. With the emphasis which this science puts on what goes into the black box of the mind and on what processes occur there, cognition has become delimited by input and function. The family of cognitive psychology, physiology, computational theory and artifical intelligence limit the scope of their enquiry and stop short of a full conception of psychology itself. This bok proposes to examine input and output in an attempt to answer the question of what the complete process of cognition may be said to be. It asks also what an adequate description of input and output might be and how that description could be refined if it is to have psychological reality.