Arguments for philosophical realism in library and information science

Library Trends, Wntr, 2004 by Birger Hjorland

Many people think that cognitivism is not better founded, that if you change a few words the same criticism applies to what is often seen as the successor of behaviorism. Hamlyn (1995, p. 388) writes that a representationist view of perception has become the vogue today, particularly among cognitive scientists (and information scientists), who hold that the mind's workings have to do with mental representations. Many philosophers and scientists have adopted the representationalist view of perception because it seems obvious. "In the end, the only positive argument for idealism of any form is to be found in the representative theory of perception, and that theory is false" (Hamlyn, 1995, p. 388).

From a social semiotic point of view, Paul Thibault criticizes the antirealism of cognitivism:

   Cognitive science retains the traditional model of the individual
   at the same time that it relocates essentially social semiotic
   patterns in the "mind" of the individual, so conceived. Cognitive
   science started out as a reaction against behaviourism. The
   metalanguage of cognitive scientists is founded on notions such as
   "internal mental representations," "mental models," and "mind as
   symbolic system." In actual fact, these notions really only amount
   to redescriptions of semantic patterns which are located in the
   domain of social meaning-making. Cognitive science posits an
   unnecessary level of "individual mind" between the biological and
   social semiotic levels of organization. In so doing, it effectively
   de-locates semantic patterns from the texts and social
   activity-structures in which these are made and re-locates them in
   the "mind" of the individual. More recently, cognitive scientists
   have increased their appeals to the neurophysiological processes in
   the brain, yet there is no convincing evidence that semantics is
   directly tied to or caused by such processes [see Maze, 1991, pp.
   171-172, for a critique]. Neurophysiological and other bodily
   processes participate directly in social semiosis; they do not cause
   it,just as the latter is not explanatorily reducible to the former
   [Bhaskar, 1979, pp. 124-128; Prodi, 1977]. (Thibault, 1993)

While the cognitive view assumes that "in the beginning there is the individual" and focuses on individuals' cognitions, the sociocognitive and domain analytic view assumes that "in the beginning there is a community" as well as a body of more or less substantiated knowledge claims; its distinguishing charge is to locate interactional processes in their social structural context as well as in their theoretical-substantial context. The relationship with realism is that unless the rootedness of cognition (the mind) in social structure and specific content is recognized, causal power is falsely accorded to cognition or mind. Cognitive scientists may recognize that cognition reflects experience, but experience does not enter theoretical formulations or research designs; for sociocognitivism, on the other hand, the sociological and philosophical perspectives are central: how experience is organized is central to both theory and research. The implication for cognitive views both in psychology and in information science may well be that they represent