Three sets of presuppositions: rationalism, empiricism, and constructivism

Compared with other species, it is common to characterize the human being as an intelligent, gifted of an extraordinary ability to think and solve problems based on his knowledge of the world. Questions about the nature and origin of knowledge have occupied thinkers since the ancient Greeks. Three are the traditionsepistemological most representative that have influenced the different psychological theories on evolutionary development and particularly on cognitive development: Rationalism, Empiricism and Constructivism.

Index

1. Rationalism
2. Innatists
3. Constructism

Origin Plato: The mind already has certain pure and immutable ideas about the objects that we experience in the ephemeral and variable sensory impressions. Everything we know is already in our mind at birth, and what we call learning would be nothing more than the updating of that knowledge. Inside of Evolutionary Psychology Rationalist ideas have had a particularly significant expression, since they constitute the foundation that underlies all approaches

From this perspective, both physical development and psychological development are essentially processes of growth or maturation of innate structures. At the same time, rationalist ideas have found their best seat in the area of ​​language and language. language development, then spreading to other aspects and skills of functioning cognitive. Noam chomsky father of the so-called "generative grammar": Human linguistic competence, given its nature essentially must come from essentially innate knowledge; according to his thesis, this knowledge would capture the common structure of potential human languages, from which the child is able to recognize any particular language that is seen exposed.

Innate theses are radicalized with Fodor and his proposal of a modular mind: each mental content has the relevant information collected and processed by specific devices independent of each other and neurologically differentiated on an innate basis. The nativist perspective has found resistance within developmental psychology as it defends an anti-evolutionist vision development since change is based solely on maturation processes in which the environment would have a simple triggering role. It assumes that nothing can be learned beyond what is imprinted on innate structures.

EMPIRICISM. Movement antagonistic to rationalism, initiated by Aristotle. Empiricism takes sensory experience as the basis of all possible knowledge. Aristotle admits reason as a necessary and even innate faculty. From the psychological point of view, empiricism has been translated into what we know as associationism, a notion that already introduced the philosopher to designate the mechanism by which reason imposes shape on the data of the senses in order to create knowledge. With the English empiricists, associationism will be extended to practically all mental phenomena, mentalist associationism- Locke compares the mind of the child at birth with a clean sheet to indicate that everything comes from experience. Behavioral associationism; ignores the mind, rejecting it as a scientific objective, focusing exclusively on the objective (observable) bases of behavioral learning. Behaviorism was generating a growing discontent that would lead to a new movement:

• The Cognitivism it assumes a more open associationism, it supposes for psychology the recovery of the mental as a scientific object. This new point of view has developed in recent decades closely linked to the advancement of information and communications technology. The computer is taken as a valid analogy to understand and analyze human cognitive functioning, even accepting the possibility of simulating it.

As the most current manifestation of this neo-associationism, we must highlight the parallel distributed processing models that replace the metaphor of the computer with the metaphor of the brain and that, inspired by the wealth of neural connections, inaugurate a new connectionism in the realm of the mental. The models that are developed are located at an intermediate level between the rationalist and empiricist poles, which places him in contact with the wide space generated by the synthesis.

It is partly part of the new wave cognitivist that arises as a reaction to behaviorismradical. It also emerges as a deliberate search for equanimity and balance within the customary game of extremes. The philosophical origin must be found in Kant. He admits the two sources of knowledge: the innate that shapes it and the experience that provides the content. Kantian philosophy underlies many approaches to scientific psychology but perhaps where the new constructivist perspective has been in development theories, from the attribution of an active role to the subject. We highlight Piaget from a predominantly individual approach and Vygotsky from a markedly social and contextual perspective. Both have provided the most influential classical models of development in contemporary theories.

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