symbolicism - An approach to understanding human cognition that is committed to language like symbolic processing as the best method of explanation. See also representation, distributed, connectionism, dynamical systems theory.
The Physical Systems Symbol Hypothesis of Newell and Simon (1976) formalized the commitments of this sort of approach to modeling cognition:
Natural cognitive systems are intelligent in virtue of being physical symbol systems of the right kind.
This approach was the first computational cognitivist approach to understanding human behavior. Exemplar models of symbolicism include Newell's SOAR model and Anderson's ACT and ACT* models. This stance is also well exemplified by the work of Chomsky, Minsky, Fodor and Pylyshyn.
The commitments of symbolicism have been challenged by connectionist research and most recently the dynamical systems theory approach to cognition.
Newell, A (1990) Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [bookstore]
Newell, A. and Simon, H.A. (1976) Computer science as empirical enquiry: symbols and search. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 19, 113-126.
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