This chapter overviews broad issues related to language acquisition research and answers fundamental questions related to first language acquisition, such as What is language? and How do children learn their first language? It begins by introducing some components of language, such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, pragmatics, and discourse. It also discusses language varieties (e.g., American English vs. Indian English) and explains their legitimacy. Then, the chapter addresses language learning during the first years of a child’s life. It also discusses bilingualism, especially of those who start learning multiple languages in their early years (simultaneous bilingualism). In order to understand second language acquisition for the rest of the textbook, the chapter focuses on a question: How are children able to learn a language without formal instruction? In order to answer this question, multiple language acquisition theories will be discussed.

The primary goal of Chapter 3 is to introduce some of the important themes that have come up when philosophers think about the (human) mind, where it comes from and how it relates to the body and to the surrounding world. To this end, we visit a division of philosophy called the philosophy of mind, which will involve a review of a variety of “-isms” (such as rationalism, empiricism, mind–body dualism, monism, materialism, idealism, behaviorism, physicalism, associationism, and so on). We also meet a number of important philosophers who have developed various and often opposing views on the nature–nurture issue. We conclude with a discussion of what philosophers of mind call “the hard problem,” how to explain the notion of consciousness.

Innovative conceptions of the soul flourished in the past century. Worcester and McComb discussed the subconscious as the soul, that unknown aspect of ourselves. The subconscious was the source of religious experience. Myers’ “subliminal self” produced automata that upsurged across the threshold of consciousness; while automata could be pathological, they could also be indicative of the future evolution of the personality. James speculated about souls beyond the individual, even of the earth itself. Jung articulated an understanding of the soul and of psychical reality. Holt recognized soul in the form of consciousness as the “cross-section.” Holt recognized form in “the wish,” as organizing consciousness and behavior. These innovations represented a shift in emphasis from the figural of mental life—consciousness—to its ground. They shifted the conversation about the soul from it being an efficient cause of mental life to it being the formal cause of mental life.

This chapter addresses the rise of psychology without a soul. There were scientific conceptions of psychology with a soul in the eighteenth century. Psychologies without soul followed from David Hume’s treatment of mental life. Lange coined the phrase, “psychology without a soul,” promoting a scientific psychology free of metaphysics. Soulless psychology emerged with psychology as a natural science in Newtonian terms. It also reflected debates over the distinction between the mental and the physical and the status of the “knower” in consciousness. The chapter includes debates over “psychology without a soul," and the development of an objective psychology in behaviorism. The new psychology without a soul triumphed by 1910, when Angell declared that the funeral for the soul had been held.

Behavioral psychology was immediately preceded by the reflexology of Russian physiology and the associationism of Thorndike. Physiological reflexology received a sound foundation with the works of Sechenov and Bekhterev, but it was Pavlov who proposed a comprehensive theory of conditioning. Watson’s behavioral formulation defined stimulus and response elements as the substitute to rid psychology of residual mentalistic constructs. Watson’s contemporaries, Holt, Weiss, Hunter, and Lashley, soon restored to behaviorism critical psychological activities. The logical positivist movement expressed an operational spirit and insured the initial success of the behaviorist model. Behavioral psychology expanded beyond the original formulations of Pavlov and Watson. Contemporary reflexology in Russia and in nearby countries expanded to include a wide range of psychological and physiological problems, led by such eminent scientists as Vygotsky, Luria, Konorski, Asratyan, and Beritashvili. In the United States, behaviorism moved through several intellectual stages, through the contributions of Guthrie, Tolman, Hull, and Skinner. A major application of behaviorism was the behavior modification model in clinical settings. Contemporary behaviorism remains a dominant but diffused force in psychology.

This chapter looks back to the pioneering studies that prefigured the emergence of cognitive science, subsequently converging into this new interdisciplinary field in the late 1970s. The first section addresses a key turning point in psychology. Whereas behaviorism holds that all explicit behaviors are the product of conditioning, it became clear that animals can manipulate representations of the environment to solve complex problems without reinforcement. The second section introduces the Turing machine developed by Turing in the 1930s, illustrating that purely mechanical procedures can process information algorithmically. The idea of a computable machine contributed to the birth of computer science and provided a model for thinking about how the mind processes information. Chomsky's transformational grammar offers a classic example of a computable model of how complex sentences convey information as a function of basic syntax rules. Finally, Miller and Broadbent's findings on attention support applying the information-processing model in psychology. These pioneering researchers were the first to lay out some of what were to be the basic concepts of cognitive science.

Chapter 15 concludes by describe two radically different future visions of the intelligent society. On one hand, instrumentarian intelligence assumes that algorithms tracking human behavior can predict human behavior more accurately than ever before. In western countries, this intelligence manifests itself in a new surveillance capitalism with companies like Google and Facebook constantly searching for behavioral surplus in both online and offline settings. In the political domain, instrumentarian intelligence seeks a reputation state built on a neobehavioristic governing model. The most prominent example is the nationwide social credit system in China that makes it possible to grade citizens on different behavioral indicators. In stark contrast, civic intelligence highlights a use of technology still controlled by the community and citizens in contrast to the dehumanizing aspects of instrumentarian intelligence. While machine intelligence also craves for informational diversity in its hunt for behavioral surplus, civic intelligence seeks a broader diversity that includes not only information, but also multicultural, cognitive, biological, and participatory diversity. The “fuel” of CI is people who are different from each other, with different interests and unique perspectives. Civic intelligence also builds on a strong knowledge commons and an open shared collective memory. It does not hide information to produce the best predictions, but it promotes complete transparency and individual empowerment. In contrast to instrumentarian intelligence, CI still lets human-to-human intelligence, and not the algorithms, be at the core of the human collective problem solving.

Chapter 1 looks at how historically the concept of economic agent developed within mainstream economics, and how the concept of artificial agent emerged while cognitive science became the successor of behaviorism. Then, considering that artificial economics tries to build realistic models of artificial agents, it introduces the main models of mental architectures that derive from cognitive science, and some recent advances in neuroscience (specially within neuroeconomics, social neuroscience, and neurosociology) that relate directly to the economic and social behavior of individuals. Finally, it reviews some models and approaches that try to capture the cognitive, neurological, emotional, and social aspects of agents in an integrated way.

The nature of the linguistic knowledge that ensues is the sine qua non of theoretical controversies surrounding corrective feedback. This chapter effectively brings that to light through an in-depth discussion of two polarized theoretical perspectives: the behaviorist and the innatist. The chapter provides a pathway to understanding the epistemological differences underlying the ebbs and flows of interest in corrective feedback that the field of applied linguistics has witnessed over the past five decades, arguing that heeding the eclectic insights from both perspectives would greatly benefit future research and practice.

This chapter aims to set the record straight about a special sort of intelligence exhibited by habitual doings. It defends an enactivist account of habitual doings which, at its core, depicts habits as flexible and adjustable modes of response that are world directed and context sensitive. So understood, habits are wholly unlike the exercise of blind mechanisms or mindless reflexes. Nevertheless, we resist the familiar forced choice of thereby understanding habits in standard cognitivist terms. Our proposal aims to avoid the twin mistakes of either underintellectualizing or overintellectualizing habits. In tune with our enactivist elucidation of the core character of habits, the chapter also explicates how habits, so conceived, can support and thwart our larger projects.

One assumption underlying research on learning and memory is that behavior is lawful, determined by our environment and heredity. Examples of powerful influence include child abuse, aggression, advertising, and sexual attraction. These examples reveal how powerfully our behavior can be determined, sometimes without our knowledge, but they do not rule out the possiblity that we also possess some free will. A second assumption is that the best way to discover laws is through experiments. Experiments allow us to separate possible causes of behavior, but finding appropriate control groups can be tricky, slowing progress. Two contrasting approaches have dominated psychology, influencing what topics researchers choose to study: behaviorism and cognitive psychology. A third assumption is that studying animals can be helpful in analyzing behavior, because animal research allows greater control of environmental and genetic variables, and animal and human behavior is far more similar than once believed—as shown, for example, in the ability of chimpanzees and even birds to acquire English vocabulary. However, animal research can also raise difficult ethical issues. The chapter concludes with an introduction to some of the key forms of learning and memory that will be discussed.

This chapter lays the foundation for how the field of second language acquisition arose. We briefly review the pioneering work in the late 1950s and 1960s in first language acquisition (e.g., Berko Gleason, Brown, Klima & Bellugi). We also review the generative revolution in linguistics and how it laid the groundwork for the idea of constrained language acquisition. We then review the seminal articles by S. Pit Corder (1967) and Larry Selinker (1972) that posited the major questions in second language acquisition, and end with the pioneering work that mirrored first language acquisition (e.g., Dulay & Burt, Krashen, Wode). We end the chapter with the major question that launched second language research in the early 1970s: Are first and second language acquisition similar or different?

This chapter traces the development of education in America from the end of Reconstruction to World War II. The industrialization that characterized this period gave rise to a system of “scientific” management which prized efficiency and competition above all other factors. This in turn influenced the philosophy of behaviorism, which remains a pillar of American education. The chapter exposes the faulty premises of behaviorism and its unfortunate effects when applied in schools. In addition, the chapter examines sources as varied as the Founders’ writings and the latest neuroscientific research to critique behaviorism and endorse social constructivist pedagogy. The chapter also features a brief discussion of the outer limits imposed by the Supreme Court on the government’s ability to regulate education. The discussion includes an examination of three seminal cases: Pierce, Meyer, and Yoder.

This chapter illuminates the many deficiencies of contemporary educational reform movements. Most notable among these movements are “accountability,” privatization, vouchers, and charter schools. All of these impulses prove, under closer examination, to be inimical to the tenets of social constructivism, the vision of the Founders, and the project of democracy. Many of these “reforms” have even tacitly adopted the language and principles of behaviorism. The chapter concludes by proposing social constructivist pedagogy and early childhood intervention as the best way to educate a democratic citizenry.

Psychology became an independent subject during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Competing approaches to psychology, called schools, arose during this period. Each school had different views concerning the proper subject matter and research methods for psychology. Introspectionism analyzed subjective experience using experimental methods. Behaviorism rejected the study of subjective experience and insisted on objective methods. Functionalism was inspired by Darwin’s evolutionary theory and was open to the use of a variety of methods. Gestalt psychology studied subjective experience but took a holistic approach rather than the analytic approach of introspectionism. Psychoanalysis was a theory of development and personality based largely on clinical experience. The differences between the schools were never completely resolved, and psychologists wondered if there would ever be a paradigm that provided a unified approach to the subject. Cognitive psychology, which appropriated information-theoretic and computational approaches, appeared to some to provide such a paradigm. However, no single approach to psychology emerged triumphant. Indeed, many psychologists are flexible enough to tailor their approach to the problem on which they are working rather than use the same approach regardless of the nature of the problem.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Darwinian interests in animal behavior converged with experimental psychology to give rise to systematic research on learning in animals. For the first half of the twentieth century, Ivan Pavlov’s study of conditioned reflexes was a major influence, but many American researchers maintained the behaviorist claim that all learning is based on stimulus–response (S–R) habits. A major critic of this dominant tradition emphasized spatial learning, suggesting that conditioning procedures produce expectancies rather than habits. Another kind of attack on S–R theory concentrated on its claim that learning processes were the same for all species. The comparative approach investigated ways in which, for example, the learning capacities of primates differed from those of rats or even goldfish. Other researchers investigated biological constraints on what animals can learn and the way that learning depends on a researcher’s choice of stimuli and responses, as in the study of conditioned taste aversions. Several key discoveries in the late 1960s laid the foundations for new associative theories of learning and a revival of interest in cognitive processes like attention. These approaches, together with breakthroughs in research on neural bases of behavior, have dominated research on animal learning ever since.