Cognitive Science: Defining an Interdiscipline |
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This page is a collection of definitions of cognitive science. It makes no pretense of order (save chronological), selectivity (I add them as I come across them), or comprehensiveness. It developed out of my initial forays into cognitive science, at which time I was struck by the trope of disciplinary lists. I was fascinated by the inclusion and exclusion of disciplines, the implicit ranking (whose underlying structure is often unclear; see Stillings et al (1995), whose text provides two lists, differently ordered), and the occasional attempt to suggest the relative coherence or incoherence of collective disciplinary efforts. Not surprisingly, my own discipline (English) does not receive any mention. For ease of scanning, and for the only mildly interested, I have underlined disciplinary lists where they appear in the definitions below. I would appreciate any materials suggested for inclusion, as well as
any other feedback. |
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2005 "How do people think? The effort
to answer this question is the domain of cognitive science, a field of
study that includes cognitive psychology and parts of computer science,
linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy." 1999 "We recognize that the approach in
cognitive science . . . is essentially computational; the capacity for
intelligence is viewed in this discipline as arising from the processing
of representations." "Twenty years ago, a handbook of
cognitive science would have included chapters on philosophy, cognitive
psychology, linguistics, and computer science. An unusual volume
might have included a chapter on neuroscience, but more likely, one
chapter or more would have explained that a science of the mind need not
be overly concerned with the implementational details of human cognition.
The chapters would have put forward somewhat distinct perspectives, separated
by each field's very different notions of what is important and in certain
cases even what is true. Cognitive science today includes ideas from a
number of fields, but it has moved beyond an interdisciplinary hodge-podge
to become the locus of a more coherent collection of concepts. Still,
few scientists identify themselves primarily as 'cognitive scientists'
and even fewer come from departments of cognitive science. Why?"
(xvi) 1998 "Definitions of cognitive science
typically emphasize the field's multidisciplinary roots . . . . Among
the disciplines named as contributors to the foundations of cognitive
science are anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, engineering,
human-computer interaction, linguistics, medicine, neuroscience, philosophy,
psychology, sociology, and others. However, cognitive science is thought
to be an emergent discipline in and of itself, rather than just the superset
of its constituent disciplines. Cognitive science forums have stated explicitly
from the beginning that they place a strong priority on material that
is relevant to audiences from numerous disciplines, and that material
relevant to only one discipline is inappropriate (e.g. Collins, 1977).
Moreover, it has been argued that cognitive science is not just cognitive
psychology with some additional bells and whistles (Hardcastle, 1996)."
(108) 1997 "A very different but widespread contemporary
conception of philosophy, facilitated by W.V. Quine's well-known critique
of the analytic/synthetic distinction, has it that philosophy is continuous
with linguistics and psychology in forming part of an amalgam known as
'cognitive science' (roughly, the intersection of artificial intelligence,
cognitive psychology, the neurosciences, Chomskyan linguistics, philosophy
of mind and parts of related fields such as anthropology and sociology)."
(6) 1995 "At the undergraduate level, we feel
that cognitive science is best conceived of as a broad interdisciplinary
field that draws primarily on psychology, artificial intelligence,
linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience. The disciplines are to
some extent distinct in their methods, theories, and results, yet they
are strikingly unified by the convergence of their core questions and
by the emergence in each of them of a computational, or information processing,
view. In this text we try to maintain a consistent computational viewpoint,
while honoring the distinctive contributions of each of the disciplines." "Cognitive science as 'the mind's
new science' (Gardner 1985) is almost by definition interdisciplinary.
Whenever authors try to define what cognitive science is, they point out
that it is a joint effort of specific disciplines to answer long-standing
questions about the working of the mind--particularly knowledge, its acquisition,
storage, and use in intelligent activity. In most cases, the disciplines
of psychology, philosophy, Artificial Intelligence (computer science),
linguistics, and neuroscience are listed as the five key disciplines
contributing to and involved in cognitive science. Gardner (1985, 7) adds
anthropology in this list, but this inclusion remains rather isolated."
(Introduction, 11) "Though I hope and expect that artificial
intelligence researchers, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists,
ethologists, linguists, neurophysiologists, philosophers of mind, roboticists,
and such can learn of activity in other fields from this multidisciplinary
tour, it's not designed only for them." [Franklin never uses the
term cognitive science to describe this aggregate] (Preface ix) "The problem of how the brain actually
works is currently the object of a great deal of attention in cognitive
science, which as you know is a field of multidisciplinary research that's
been developing at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and
mathematics over the last couple of decades" 1993 "Cognitive science (here broadly
construed so as to include cognitive neuroscience) is the study of cognition.
Cognition is that internal, knowledge-based processing which is causally
responsible for our intelligent behavior. . . . Often, cognitive scientists
talk more grandiosely; their science is not merely cognition but the mind."
(1029) 1992 "About the same time as my interest
in problems of the mind began, the new discipline of cognitive science
was born. Cognitive science promised a break with the behaviorist tradition
in psychology because it claimed to enter the black box of the mind and
examine its inner workings. But unfortunately most of the mainstream cognitive
scientists simply repeated the worst mistake of the behaviorists: They
insisted on studying only objectively observable phenomena, thus ignoring
the essential features of the mind. Therefore, when they opened up the
big black box, they found only a lot of little black boxes inside."
(Introduction xii) 1991 "Today we see the emergence of a
new interdisciplinary matrix called cognitive science, which includes
not only neuroscience but cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial
intelligence, and, in many centers, philosophy. Furthermore, most
of cognitive technology, which is essential for the contemporary science
of mind, has been developed only in the past forty years-the digital computer
being the most significant example." (xvi) 1990 "The book you are holding is the second
of a three-volume introduction to contemporary cognitive science. The
thirty chapters that make up the three volumes have been written by thirty-one
authors, including linguists, psychologists, philosophers, computer
scientists, biologists, and engineers." (Foreword ix)
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