COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY. PDF DOWNLOAD

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

About the Book

Historical Background

Plato, the great Greek philosopher, was the first person to present a coherent theory of how knowledge is acquired and retained. He proposed that ideas are created in the human mind and that these ideas are then projected out in the world. These projections serve as images that we see through our senses.

In other words, the outside world is an illusion made up of projections of ideas and the true reality lies inside of us. Therefore, Plato concluded that perception is an internal process and we can learn everything by looking inwards.

When psychology was first taught in European universities, it was subsumed under the title of mental philosophy. Philosophers throughout the history have been concerned with concepts of perception and knowledge, as to how these interact with reality.

Similarly the field of epistemology within philosophy has been concerned with the nature of knowledge. Thus cognitive psychology has been present as an undercurrent in the field of ontology and epistemology throughout the last two millennia.