Encyclopedia of Psychology Alan E. Kazdin, PhD, Editor-in-Chief
PSYCHOLOGY: Post-World War II
...Gestalt theory draws on continental philosophy, which emphasizes organization, totality, and the essential quality of things. The British followed a Lockean, bottom-up strategy of explanation, while the gestaltists pursued a more Kantian, top-down phenomenological approach. British empiricism called for observing reality, which was presumably “there” to be concretely measured. Phenomenologists believed that the observer contributed to what was under observation, that there was no completely free-standing reality “there” to measure in the first place.
...Returning to the matter of how cognition is to be understood, a Kantian (phenomenological) formulation is framed in the first-person or introspective terms, considering things from the perspective of “I, me, us, we” and so on. A Lockean (empiricistic) understanding of cognition is framed in a third-person or extraspective perspective. referring to “that, it, they, them” and so on. Purposive explanation is introspective for it assigns responsibility to an identity or identities whose actions can only be understood from their own point(s) of view. Mechanistic accounts are extraspective, understanding behavior as taking place according to impersonal forces “over there.” This shift in meaning of cognition was the result of a “Cognitive Revolution” that descended upon psychology. The impetus for this revolution in psychological theorizing was the perfection of electronic computer technology. The term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined to typify this approach. The general consensus is that AI as a field of study was born at an institute sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, held at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956 (Newel1 & Simon, 1972. pp. 873-889).