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The past twenty years has witnessed a revolution in psychology, one that may come to be regarded as comparable in scope to the one accomplished by Freud at the turn of the century. This revolution consists of the reemergence of the concept of mind, understood as a functional system responsible for the construction of the behavioral environment within which an organism's behavior takes place, within the explanatory framework of psychology. In contrast to behaviorism, with its insistence that psychological explanations of behavior be based upon laws connecting behavioral responses to specific variables in the stimulus array, psychologists are once again permitted to "look beneath the skin," to posit functions responsible for the transformation of the stimulus array into a behavioral environment, the environment experienced by the organism, in order to explain behavior. Mind, thus, is viewed as an information processor, a functional system that operates on physical stimuli and transforms them into objects that are meaningful for the organism.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-5081-8_3

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