What is Cognitive Science? |
ABSTRACT Cognitive Science is foremost a network of researchers. They are linked by the same subject matter, namely, cognition, i.e., how the mind works. This network has its origins in a symposium at MIT in 1956. Cognitive Science has grown exponentially since that point in time, as Howard Gardner's 1987 history of the movement shows. Since Gardner's The Mind's New Science, a number of "overviews" of Cognitive Science chronicle it continued evolution. |
cognitive science is a network of researchers
In the opening chapter of Understanding Cognitive Science, Michael Dawson offers the catalog descriptions from five universities describing their programs in Cognitive Science, adding that by the time of publication, there were some 200 universities offering similar programs. He notes, however, that "cognitive science is not an umbrella organization that encompasses all of the disciplines mentioned [in the catalog descriptions], but is instead a specialized domain that emerges at the intersections of these fields" (5).
He points out, further, that
Researchers found at the intersection of disciplines belong to a community bonded together by a common language ... [because they] share a fundamental assumption that allows them to communicate with one another, even though their particular fields of training might be very different.
Though communication researchers are not included in cognitive science, they do share this assumption.
the domain of cognitive science
The the most part, cognitive scientists share the same conceptual domain: "mind," "cognition," "brain" being the concepts most often listed as descriptors. With respect to the role that communication study can play in cognitive science, its description in the University of Toronto (Scarborough) catalog is quite explicit:
Cognitive Science is the name for a field of academic inquiry that has become popular since the late 1950s. The topic of the field is how people come to have, represent, and communicate knowledge; in general, how people come to be intelligent. It includes many aspects of perception, memory, and communication. (4, italics mine)
It is therefore quite telling that the description goes on to say that: "The field is inherently interdisciplinary; it includes parts of philosophy, psychology, computer science, and linguistics . To a lesser degree, neuroscience and anthropology are involved"—no mention of communication studies. The other catalog descriptions echo the University of Toronto's.
the origins of cognitive science
Howard Gardner, in his The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution, notes that Claude Shannon, "who is usually redited with devising information theory," was a "key progenitor of cognitive science" (21). It is not an accident that the model of Communication was an important factor in the origins of information processing. Shannon's early insight (his Master's thesis at MIT) that "electrical circuits could embody fundamental operations of thought" was seminal. Gardner goes on to describe "three pivotal lines of research" in the 1950s. One is George Miller's work (The Psychology of Communication) and another Colin Cherry's work (On Human Communication).
The origins of cognitive science are clearly in cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and also linguistics. Howard Gardner notes that the psychologist George A. Miller in a talk at the Cognitive Science Workshop in June of 1979 fixed the date of its birth—September, 11, 1956. That was the date of the Symposium on Information Theory held at MIT. As Gardner tells the story:
The second day [of the symposium] stands out in Miller's mind because of two featured papers. The first, presented by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, described the "Logic Theory Machine," the first complete proof of a theorem ever carried out on a computing machine. The second paper, by the young linguist Noam Chomsky, outlined "Three Models of Language." Chomsky showed that a model of lnaguage production derived from Claude Shannon's information-theoretical approach could not possibly be applied successfully to "natural language," and went on to exhibit his own approach to grammar, based on linguistic transformations. As Miller recalls, "Other linguists had said language has all the formal precisions of mathematics, but Chomsky was the first linguist to make good on the claim. I think that was what excited all of us" (1979, p. 8).
Not incidentally, that day George Miller also delivered a seminal paper, outlining his claim that the capacity of human short-term memory is limited to approximately seven entries. (28).
As the field of cognitive science grew, neuroscience played a larger and larger role in the research associate with the field. In his "Conclusion," Gardner indicates that he finds the computational model of the mind, which was supported by the information processing model of cognition and Chomsky's logical view of linguistic representation at the outset of the field, can continue to be "the guiding model of human thought" (388).
Overviews of Cognitive science
Indeed, after Gardner's 1985 history, most of the texts offering overviews of cognitive science devoted many of their pages to the challenges to the computational model of the mind. The controversy is usually summed up as a debate between the advocates of a computational model of the mind and the advocates of a connectionist or network model of the mind associated with the neuroscientists in the field.
The next section of Communication as a Cognitive Science reviews the texts that offer an overview of cognitive science in more detail:
| (1987) The Mind's New Science, Howard Gardiner |
| (1993) Foundations of Cognitive Science, edited by Michael I. Posner |
| (1995) Cognitive Science: An Introduction, Neil A. Stillings, Steven E. Weisler, Christopher H. Chase, Mark H. Geinstein, Jay L. Garfield, Edwina L. Rissland |
| (1998) A Companion to Cognitive Science, ed., William Bechtel and George Graham |
| (1998) Understanding Cognitive Science, Michael Dawson |
| (1999) What is Cognitive Science? Ernest Lepore and Zenon Pylyshyn |
| (2000) Mind, Paul Thagard |
| (2006) Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Study of Mind, Jay Friedenberg and Gordon Silverman |
| (2006) Models and Cognition: Prediction and Explanation in Everyday Life and in Science, Jonathan A. Waskan |
| (2006) Introduction to Cognition and Communication Keith Stenning, Alex Lascarides, and Jo Calder |
Each of these texts will be reviewed for their views of:
- cognitive science
- research issues
- disciplines included
- inclusions
- exclusions
- adherence to the computational model of the mind
- the computational / connectionist controversy
- future research directions
Each entry concludes with a commentary.
jjs
[NOTE: These entries are more detailed versions of the general argument of this entry. You may wish to skip them and go directly to Cognitive Science as Interdisciplinary, which is an argument about Michael Dawson's claim that cognitive scientists form "a community bonded together by a common language."]
Notes:
_ . See the discussion of conceptual domains in The Fields of Communication Study belong to a Cognitive Map of a Domain. ... 
. This point is part of the argument in Communication and Cognition. See in particular the entries The Field of Communication, The Evolution of Communication Theory, and Communication Theory: 2002-2008. ...
. "A Very Personal History." Talk to Cognitive Science Workshop, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. June 1, 1979. Quoted in Gardner's The Mind's New Science, (28).| ...
← previous | next →
last revised:
June 13, 2007
Send comments to jjs.
copyright © jjs, 2007