Reflections and Thoughts on Cognitivism

Man is an animal. So what makes Homo sapiens different from other animals? The answer lies in the very taxonomy: Homo sapiens. Man is an animal who knows. More to the point, man is an animal who can use the capabilities of logic and reason to synthesize existing knowledge and new data acquired into new knowledge. Man can explain why things happen and why he does what he does, utilizing what he has learned from not only external experiences but also the internal thought processes unique to the human brain. Man is constantly asking, what would happen if...? and choosing to behave in certain ways as a result of reasoning what would happen if he did behave that way. Most lower animals can't do that; they behave largely by simply reacting to external stimuli. Try getting your dog to explain why he thought it was a good idea to grab a loaf of bread off the counter and eat the whole thing, plastic bag and all!

I see there's a lot of overlap between cognitivism and social learning. After all, if every human on the planet is taking in info with all five senses, cataloging that info in the mind, but not sharing what they've intuited, what good does it do? Humans are naturally social beings and want to share stuff, or at least demonstrate to others that they have stuff. That includes knowledge. Without the desire to acquire knowledge from each other, and the means to share it, we would not have universities, guilds, literature, music, and so forth. For this reason, the cognitivist approach to learning made the most sense to me as an explanatory theory. Behaviorism works up to a point, but has its limits: a simple stimulus-response relationship to man's environment doesn't quite inform us how to create new things and new experiences.

I've been pondering lately how logic and reason affect how soapmakers decide on a recipe to execute. I participate in various social media revolving around soap, one of which is the r/soapmaking group on Reddit. (Groups on Reddit are commonly referred to as subreddits, or just subs. Users must agree to the terms and conditions of using the site, one of which is they affirm they are at least 13 years of age. So, by Piaget's four stages of cognitive development, they theoretically should all have reached the formal operational stage of cognition.) Occasionally, a new soapmaker will ask the participants on the sub if it's a good idea to try making soap with mineral oil. We even got one newbie recently who wanted to try making soap with motor oil! Apparently the user had a surplus of motor oil they wanted to use up, and thought making soap would be a good way to do it. I believe they are trying to leverage their prior knowledge, which is "lye + oil = soap," and extrapolating that to types of oils other than those commonly used, such as olive, coconut, and palm oils. From a cognitivist perspective, they are trying to fit new knowledge into their existing schema of how soap is created. Spoiler alert, though: it will not work in both cases. There's a missing piece of data they need to have—it's not oil, per se, the lye is reacting with, but a fatty acid. (It's a simple acid + base = salt reaction. One needs a fatty acid ion to reach with the OH- ion to create the salt molecule, sodium cocoate or whatever, and water.) If the new soaper has that info, and one additional piece of data, namely that both mineral oil and motor oil have no fatty acids in them, and therefore nothing to react with the OH- ion, they (I hope) can use the logical/abstract reasoning skills they acquired when they reached Piaget's formal operational stage to deduce that no saponification will take place, and in fact they'll be left with a sludgy mess of long-chain hydrocarbons and unreacted lye solution, which can burn unprotected skin and corneas. This is a great example of accommodation in cognitive processing.

Human beings having personal agency (another feature unique to Homo sapiens), I hope they will then choose not to try this, and find something else to do with all that surplus mineral or motor oil.