Learning 109of their appearance, as well as to their specific uses within these contexts.
On this basis, we ask how learning appeared in psychology and how it was
treated within certain historical contexts.
2.1. Empirical Psychology Seeking for Natural Laws
More remotely, within late eighteenth and nineteenth-century
philosophical understandings of fundamental mental faculties – which
privileged a conscious, agentic subject aiming at an ethical life – the
prospect of a purely empirical psychology uncovering naturalistic laws of
learning was disturbing. More proximately, however, the emergent field of
empirical psychology in the nineteenth century, with its somewhat
fragmented research programs (i.e., sensation, perception, memory,
industrial psychology, clinical psychology, etc.) would come to require a
unifying and suitably naturalistic construct that would link all of these
diverse pursuits. The initial response to this quandary would be the
foregrounding of behavior, and later learning as an inferred outcome
(Danziger, 1997). Along these lines, Danziger reconstructs the historical
emergence of behavior as an integrative possibility for empirical
psychological research and follows the vicissitudes and fluctuations of the
discourse of behavior across several fronts. In its earliest contexts, learning
as behavior is discursively situated within comparative psychology and
animal studies (Jennings, 1906) before making its way into general
psychology (Angell, 1913); within psychology, learning as behavior was
then part of several specific but related approaches: classical conditioning
(Pavlov, 1932; Watson, 1913), operant conditioning (Thorndike, 1911;
Skinner, 1938), and social learning theory (Bandura, 1973). The cognitive
revolution of the late 1950’s and 1960’s (Neisser, 1967; Chomsky, 1965)
challenged the continuing ascendency of learning as the consequence of
discrete behavioral events and introduced the paradigm of the information
processing brain, hereby supported by quickly developing information
technologies which took the human brain and the computer as basically
explaining each other; however, methodologically behavioral technologies