Cosmides L, Tooby J
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106-3210.
Cognition. 1994 Apr-Jun;50(1-3):41-77. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90020-5.
Cognitive psychology has an opportunity to turn itself into a theoretically rigorous discipline in which a powerful set of theories organize observations and suggest focused new hypotheses. This cannot happen, however, as long as intuition and folk psychology continue to set our research agenda. This is because intuition systematically blinds us to the full universe of problems our minds spontaneously solve, restricting our attention instead to a minute class of unrepresentative "high-level" problems. In contrast, evolutionarily rigorous theories of adaptive function are the logical foundation on which to build cognitive theories, because the architecture of the human mind acquired its functional organization through the evolutionary process. Theories of adaptive function specify what problems our cognitive mechanisms were designed by evolution to solve, thereby supplying critical information about what their design features are likely to be. This information can free cognitive scientists from the blinders of intuition and folk psychology, allowing them to construct experiments capable of detecting complex mechanisms they otherwise would not have thought to test for. The choice is not between no-nonsense empiricism and evolutionary theory; it is between folk theory and evolutionary theory.
认知心理学有机会将自身转变为一门理论严谨的学科，在这门学科中，一套强大的理论能够组织观察结果并提出有针对性的新假设。然而，只要直觉和民间心理学继续设定我们的研究议程，这一切就无法实现。这是因为直觉会系统性地使我们对大脑自发解决的全部问题视而不见，反而将我们的注意力限制在一小类缺乏代表性的“高层次”问题上。相比之下，关于适应性功能的具有进化严谨性的理论是构建认知理论的逻辑基础，因为人类心智的结构是通过进化过程获得其功能组织的。适应性功能理论明确了我们的认知机制在进化过程中被设计用来解决哪些问题，从而提供了关于它们可能具有哪些设计特征的关键信息。这些信息能够使认知科学家摆脱直觉和民间心理学的束缚，让他们能够构建实验，以检测那些他们原本不会想到去测试的复杂机制。选择并非在务实的经验主义和进化理论之间；而是在民间理论和进化理论之间。
