Understanding the "cognitive revolution" in psychology

In this paper it is argued that the "cognitive revolution" in psychology is not best represented either as a Kuhnian "paradigm shift," or as a movemen t from an instrumentalist to a realist conception of psychological theory, or as a continuous evolution out of more "liberalized" forms of behaviorism , or as a return to the form of "structuralist" psychology practiced by Wun dt and Titchener. It is suggested that the move from behaviorism to cogniti vism is best represented in terms of the replacement of (operationally defi ned) "intervening variables" by genuine "hypothetical constructs" possessin g cognitive "surplus meaning," and that the "cognitive revolution" of the 1 950s continued a cognitive tradition that can be traced back to the 1920s. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.