Vol. 23 No. 3 (2020)
Articles

Relational Thinking is at the Core of the Constructive, Top-Down Processes in Humans

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  • Georgi PETKOV

Published 12/10/2020

Keywords

  • Cognitive science,
  • constructivism,
  • relations

How to Cite

PETKOV, G. (2020). Relational Thinking is at the Core of the Constructive, Top-Down Processes in Humans. Psychological Research (in the Balkans), 23(3). Retrieved from https://journalofpsychology.org/index.php/1/article/view/41

Copyright (c) 2020 Psychological Research (in the Balkans)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In almost all domains of psychology and cognitive science, two distinct points of view oppose each other: the first one is that the understanding of the phenomena of the human cognitive system should be sought in the peculiarities of the biological organization of the people; the second one places the emphasis on our memory – our knowledge and beliefs. This article discusses the second paradigm, the so-called constructivism, in the domains of vision, social relationships, emotions, decision-making, and language. The hypothesis is that the constructivist phenomena are associated not with the individual elements but with the relations between them. A logical consequence from this hypothesis is that some part of the human relational knowledge should be innate and speculatively, some possible sources of such knowledge are discussed. In addition to the general theoretical framework, the article also presents some computer simulations that better highlight the possible underlying mechanisms behind these processes.

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