The origins and nature of the cognitive paradigm: an overview

Cognitive Science, 1980

2008

As the electronic version of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (Wilson and Keil, 1999) has now lost its disembodied (and unquotable) form and become incarnate as the official reference work of a vital and expansionary cognitive science, a less reassuring picture of the field is evoked by Two Sciences of Mind, the result of the workshop on Reaching for Mind: Foundations of Cognitive Science, hosted by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour and the Sheffield Computer Science Department, in 1995.

French Studies In The Philosophy Of Science, 2009

s Mind as Machine is the most comprehensive account of the history of the cognitive sciences yet to appear. The book has been ten years in the making, and one is tempted to view it as the culmination of Boden's prolific career as a cognitive scientist herself, her magnum opus. Boden, who is at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex (a unit she founded in 1987), has authored or edited no fewer than ten books on topics in and related to cognitive science (mainly artificial intelligence), and has published well over sixty articles and reviews on the subject. Although the book is presented as a history of cognitive science, her aim is twofold: she wishes to provide not only a historical account of the field, but also a better sense of what cognitive science actually is. These two aims are for her inextricably linked: one cannot properly understand cognitive science without a historical perspective. In her past work, Boden has often posed questions in cognitive science from both philosophical and historical perspectives. Given the cross-disciplinary nature of her work, Boden's new book has potential appeal for cognitive scientists as well as historians. Anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century brain and behaviour sciences will find it valuable, given that we have very few historical treatments of cognitive science available to us, and the book also has promise as a reference for university courses -though a potential obstacle here is its hefty price tag.

Cognitive science or cognitive sciences? This question can be rephrased in other terms: One science of the mind or several sciences about the mind? This question synthesizes the tension, presented all over the book, between the different disciplines that collaborate together to study the mind – with the ultimate goal of formulating a theory that ties all the results together and unifies the different research programs. This common basis is the idea that mental operations are information-processing operations. The whole book is an attempt to show how all the interdisciplinary endeavors that study the mind turn around this idea. The book presents the main historical milestones of cognitive science and their particular methods, always with the aim to elucidate the connections and links between the different procedures and the whole project of understanding the mind from an information-processing point of view.

2000

In D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 1266-1294., 2012

This article sheds light on the history of the sciences of mind within which the development of cognitive linguistics can be situated. It shows that it is the modern inheritor of an older tradition, antedating the behaviorist ascendancy in mid-twentieth century psychology which preceded classical cognitive science. This tradition, centered in psychology but drawing heavily on biology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, was a kind of cognitive science avant la lettre. It is a measure of the poverty of behaviorism that psychology was compelled to concede disciplinary leadership in classical cognitive science to formalist linguistics and computer science. This article also considers conceptual foundations in psychology, including rule versus schema, the role of imagery in language comprehension and in cognition, consciousness and metacognition, self and autobiographic memory, meaning, embodiment, linguistic schemas and metaphor, and representation and symbolization.

Minds and Machines, 1999

1994

Problems laying at the foundation of cognitive sciences, such as the mind-body problem, the existence of qualia or the symbol grounding problem are all due to the lack of proper language to describe mind events. Such language is introduced in this paper. Cognitive systems are viewed primarily from the mentalistic point of view. Concepts and symbols interact strongly forming "mind objects". Mind states are identified with activations of these objects. An abstract, multidimensional "mind space" is defined, with the axes (dimensions) of the coordinate system corresponding to features of internal representations, such as preprocessed sensory data and abstract qualities. This space serves as a theater for mental events. A neural network, or a brain, is a natural realization for such model of the mind. Activation of objects of the mind space is governed by psychophysical laws and brings casual changes in the neural hardware. From the neuropsychological point of view mind objects result from activity of the neural cell assemblies. No fundamental problems with understanding of the real minds arise and the way to computational models of artificial minds is clear. The problem of free will and consciousness is also discussed.

Theory & Psychology, 2009

The MIT Press eBooks, 1993

Human Arenas, 2024

The paper attempts to place the emergence of cognitive science (CS) as an interdisciplinary research program in historical context. A broad overview of the institutional and intellectual situations during the early postwar period is presented, focusing primarily on psychology and artificial intelligence (AI). From an institutional perspective, the paper shows that although computers and computer science were closely linked with weapons research during World War II, the postwar creation of cognitive science had no military connection, but was largely enabled by small grants from private foundations, though the RAND Corporation was involved to a limited extent. From an epistemic perspective, the paper shows: (1) that neobehaviourist learning theory was not replaced by, but flourished parallel to cognition-oriented psychology in the 1950s, because they were located in different sub-disciplines; (2) that the key theoretical inputs into CS were developed separately at first, and each group remained affiliated with the discipline or complex of disciplines from which it came. A certain tension remained at the core of the project between the machine dreams of the emerging AI community and the idea of autonomous mental processes central to cognitive psychology.

Topics in Cognitive Science, 2009

Although philosophy has often been an outlier in cognitive science to date, this paper describes two projects in naturalistic philosophy of mind and one in naturalistic philosophy of science that have been pursued during the past 30 years and that can make theoretical and methodological contributions to cognitive science. First, stances on the mind-body problem (identity theory, functionalism, and heuristic

Journal of intelligent systems, 1994

The quest for foundations is a natural enough preoccupation for anyone concerned with the nature and conditions of knowledge. The epistemologist and the cognitive scientist alike have long shared the basic working assumption that knowledge in all its myriad forms can be constructed in a systematic, rule-governed way from some common basis. This assumption of foundationalism seems indeed to provide an essential condition for even constituting issues of knowledge as a well-defined, selfcontained domain of inquiry. In cognitive science, foundationalism finds its most direct expression in the classical perspective of the computational theory of mind. This refers to the now familiar idea that minds, like conventional computers, are instances of universal symbol processing machines, viz., devices capable of carrying out any finitely specifiable effectively computable function. Universal machines, as implemented in actual physical devices, form the broad class of systems called physical symbol systems (Newell, 1980), hence the well known formulation of the computational theory of mind as the physical symbol system hypothesis: "The hypothesis is that humans are instances of physical symbol systems and, by virtue of this, mind enters into the physical universe" (Newell, 1980, p. 136). The plausibility of the hypothesis rests to a great extent on the notion of an effectively computable function, something which not only circumscribes the functional capabilities of physical symbol systems, but 205

2019

This book consists of an edited collection of original essays of the highest academic quality by seasoned experts in their fields of cognitive science. The essays are interdisciplinary, drawing from many of the fields known collectively as “the cognitive sciences.” Topics discussed represent a significant cross-section of the most current and interesting issues in cognitive science. Specific topics include matters regarding machine learning and cognitive architecture, the nature of cognitive content, the relationship of information to cognition, the role of language and communication in cognition, the nature of embodied cognition, selective topics in visual cognition, brain connectivity, computation and simulation, social and technological issues within the cognitive sciences, and significant issues in the history of neuroscience. This book will be of interest to both professional researchers and newer students and graduate students in the fields of cognitive science—including compu...