The role of competence theories in cognitive psychology

This paper discusses several common misunderstandings regarding theories of competence. Such theories are characterized as being concerned with the epistemological side of cognitive psychology and as being based primarily on evidence of a special kind: intuitions of competent performers. The nature of such evidence is examined in relation to the question of objectivity. The position that competence may be described in terms of implicit rules is discussed from several perspectives. Finally a number of empiricist objections to the notion of competence are examined: particularly ones based on the fact that whereas competence theories are infinitary, deterministic, and formally complete, observations of actual performance suggest that it is best characterized as finitary, probabilistic, and heuristically organized. Finally the question of the psychological reality of competence formalisms is discussed and it is argued that the claim of the psychological reality of amechanism, as opposed to a structural description, is only appropriate when the mechanism accounts parsimoniously for the widest possible range of empirical phenomena.