1.

Cognitive Science

Definitions; the term

Types of…; domains
Roots; influential works
Disciplinary interrelations
Cognitive science and philosophy
Cognitive science and psychology
Cognitive science and social science/s
Cognitive anthropology
Cognitive science and linguistics
Cognitive science and the arts
Overview

1.1. Definitions; the Term

Probably the earliest entry in an OED dictionary of the word “cognitive” is from 1586 and
shows it to cover facts and processes “pertaining to the action… of knowing;” it seems to
have been used in the context of discussions about Plato and his theories of knowledge, so
that this latter concept, knowledge is presumably the foundation of cognitive science.
George Luger, in his 1994 Cognitive Science: the Science of Intelligent Systems defines
cognitive science as the study of intelligence or of mind, which obviously enlarges the
sphere to contain more than knowledge as such. In their 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh,
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define the term “cognitive” as being “used for any kind
of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms;” one can notice that
it refers not only to processes (operation), but also to the source (structure) of those
processes, and more significantly, that the study can be expressed in “precise terms,” which
we will return to as it points directly to the nature of science.
We may continue our exploration by looking at “precise” dictionary definitions. Thus:
Random House, 2006—“the study of the precise (n.b.) nature of different mental tasks and
the operations of the brain that enable them to be performed, engaging branches of
psychology, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.” The interdisciplinary nature of
the concept involves many more domains than the ones listed in the second part of the
definition, while “precise” comes up again and, moreover, “tasks” seems to be referring to
a direct relationship with the external world, also involving some kind of determinism,
cultural or social . (Notice that our own use of probability or presumability terms and
constructions indicates a tendency to avoid the imperatives of precise). The American
Heritage Dictionary (2006) leaves out “precise” and prefers “processes”: “The study of the
nature of various mental tasks and the processes that enable them to be performed”
(“performance” may and may not be used here as a counterpart or corollary of
“competence”). A simplified view is offered by World Net: “the field of science concerned
with cognition; includes parts of cognitive psychology and linguistics and computer science
and cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind.” One may wonder here—and
elsewhere—if science is cognition or cognition is science, so that what we really are talking
about is the cognition of cognition, or metacognition.
 The term as such—cognitive science—seems to have been coined in 1973 by Christopher
Longuet-Higgins, while commenting on a report of the state of Artificial Intelligence at the
time, and soon after, the Cognitive Science Society was founded and the journal Cognitive
Science was published. Wikipedia may not be often recognized for reliability, but the
definition it offers seems to be the most satisfactory: “Cognitive science is the
interdisciplinary study of the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition and use of
knowledge. It draws from converging evidence and methodology in diverse fields, including
psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, anthropology and linguistics.” Let
us notice that it refers to both the use and the acquisition of knowledge and that the
emphasis is on interdisciplinary.
A Cognitive Science Program of the University of Delaware takes the definition closer to
its origins in the past few decades: “Cognitive science studies the human mind viewed as a
computational process.” So, having invented the computer and its operational processes,
the human mind has come to notice itself at work in a machine representation of itself: thus
the brain contemplates and studies itself by means of such an artificial reflection of its
physiognomy. Artificial intelligence has brought to the foreground the fact that, so far, the
only possible model of human thinking as an instrument of information processing is the
metaphor of brain-as-computer, which the brain itself has come to recognize; so in this
kind of study, instead of seeing the computer as a brain-like device for the process of
(symbolic) information, the mind is regarded as similar to an information processor; and
thus, the stimulus-response behavior of the human being is determined by his mind just as
the input-output behavior or computers is determined by various programmes; software
and hardware represent the image and projection of mind and body. And this creates the
radical functionalist question as to whether cognition is independent of its neuronal basis,
or there is a subtly intimate connection between cognition and this basis; neuroscience is
still in doubt regarding this computational metaphor, but the field is still in its early stages,
and at the same time rapidly expanding; and, of course, the number of questions regarding
the basic components of cognitive processes, or whether they are subsumed by a common
mental mechanism, or the relationship between cognition and the physical apparatus
increases with the growing number of answers proposed.
Consequently, for a more comprehensive definition and description of cognitive science,
one has to return to an internet source (geog.ucsb.edu) by means of the Lycos Retriever:
“Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that has emerged in the past few decades at
the intersection of a number of existing disciplines including psychology, linguistics,
computer science, philosophy, and neuroscience. It…/is/… the interdisciplinary study of
thinking, perception, and intelligent behavior, as determined jointly by the nature of the
environment and by the internal architecture of the intelligent agent, whether human,
animal, or machine… With the advent of Cognitive science… theoretical insights and
methodologies have been shared among disciplines, and interdisciplinary interaction has
become the hallmark of the field. It is a field founded on the principle that new knowledge
should be developed at the intersection among disciplines, and that collaboration will serve
to preserve and strengthen all participating disciplines.”

1.2.Types of…; Domains

Thus one of the main problems to be tackled and eventually solved by cognitive science is
to understand how the mind resides in or inhabits the brain, and the approaches to this
may be
a. analytic, i.e. analysis of both natural and artificial such thinking systems in order to
find whatever functional constraints on cognition that come out from our systems for
knowledge representation:
b. experimental, i.e. finding practical ways of distinguishing among various—
sometimes contradictory—theories of information processing in these natural and/or
artificial intelligence systems; one frequent experimental technique is that of
building a computational model whose behavior can be compared, for instance, to
one found in nature, in humans or animals;
c. synthetic, i.e. constructing hardware and software in artificial machines that exhibit
various aspects of intelligent behavior.
One specific type that is more and more frequently mentioned is that of Embodied
Cognitive Science, also related to the contributions of Johnson and Lakoff, who, in turn,
owe their ideas about thinking and speaking machines to Alan M. Turing’s 1950
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” This domain of research aims directly at
explaining the functioning of mechanisms that underlie intelligent behavior by modeling
systems based on mind and body as a single entity and uncovering principles of intelligent
behavior; the latter do not concern us here, but they have been identified as: the principle
of parallel, loosely-coupled processes, the principle of sensory-motor coordination, the
principle of cheap design and redundancy, the principle of ecological balance, and the
value principle (connectionism in Gerald Edelman’s Darwin III robot).
The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences (ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil)
identified the sic domains for the cognitive brain sciences: (1) computation intelligence, (2)
culture, cognition, and evolution, (3) language and linguistics, (4) neuroscience, (5)
philosophy, and (6) psychology. We will soon describe these complex interrelationships, but
here may be mentioned some of the effects and implications of this research: new
information about how individuals think and learn, applications in learning, teaching, and
testing methods, designing intelligent tutoring systems, developing manufacturing systems
for industry, medical diagnosis especially in cases of damaged brains, many—even though
not identified yet—benefits for social sciences…
A rather traditional view would see cognitive science as either theoretical (modeling and
explaining the phenomena of memory, perception, reasoning and language, and looking at
organisms as biological information processing systems) or applied (the above mentioned
educational and social uses, mainly school instruction).

1.3.Roots; Influential Works

It may safely be said that the roots of cognitive science go as far back as those of philosophy
and psychology, i.e. as far back as Plato and Aristotle, both of whom sought to understand
the nature of human knowledge. In the 17 th and 18th century, such philosophers as Robert
Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), John
Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690), George Berkeley (Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710), David Hume and Immanuel Kant
dedicated mush thought and effort on the matter of thought and mind: Rene Descartes is
credited as an important forerunner for contemporary thinking for having distinguished
between body (Res extensa, hard) and mind (Res cogitans, soft) as two separate entities
constituted of two different substances. In the second half of the 19 th century Wilhelm
Wundt and William James moved these kinds of study into the realm of experimental
psychology: this was soon followed by behaviorism (John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner),
which claimed that behavior as a result of consciousness rather than consciousness itself
could and should be studies (notice effects and prolongations in literature and literary
study—the behaviorist novel, for example).
Cognitive science proper began in the 1950s when the above perspective started to
change as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon founded and
developed the field of artificial intelligence and other researchers came upon the idea that
what was happening in artificial intelligence could be used to explain how the human mind
works: the Logic Theorist of Newell, Shaw, and Simon worked on the basis of the
fundamental (metaphoric) analogy of computer science, i.e. the human mind works like
computer programs in which algorithms are applied to data structures.
Contemporary names in cognitive science include philosophers (Daniel Dennett, Douglas
Hofstadter), philosopher-linguists like John Searle, Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and
George Lakoff, and psychologists like James McClelland and Steven Pinker. Otherwise, the
Cognitive Science Millenium Project offers a list of the one hundred most influential works
in cognitive science from the twentieth century: of which the following may be highlighted
for their unchallenged importance:

1906—Sir Charles S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System;

1927—Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams;
1930—Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World;
1934/1964—Lev Vygostky, Thought and Language;
1945—B. F. Skinner, The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms;
1948—Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and
the Machine;
1948—C. E. Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication;
1950—A. M. Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence;
1953—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations;
1956—Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality;
1956—J. R. Bruner, J. J. Goodnow, G. A. Austin, A Study of Thinking;
1957—Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures;
1960—W. Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain: The Origins of Adaptive Behavior;
1962—Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions;
1972—A. Newell & H. A. Simon, Human Problem Solving;
1973—A. R. Luria, The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology;
1975—M. Minsky, A Framework for Representing Knowledge;
1978—W. Kintsch & T. W. van Dijk, Toward a Model of Text Comprehension and
Production;
1980—J. R. Searle, Minds, Brains and Programs;
1983—J. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind: An Esssay on Faculty Psychology;
1986—A. Baddeley, Working Memory;
1987—G. M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection;
1987—Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance;
1990—A. Newell, Unified Theories of Cognition;
1991—Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained;
1995—E. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild.

1.4. Disciplinary Interrelations

1.4.1. Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Almost any introduction to cognitive science begins by emphasizing (we have seen) its
highly interdisciplinary character, and mainly the fact that it consists of or collaborates
with philosophy, psychology, social sciences, various studies of the arts, anthropology,
linguistics and others that we cannot approach here (neuroscience, artificial intelligence
and computer science, mathematics, neurobiology, physics…).
In their 1986 Mind over Machine Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus trace the
links between cognitive science and classic philosophy: according to them, Plato, Galileo,
Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Husserl are among the predecessors of artificial intelligence
and, implicitly, of cognitive science. Here they are, in one relevant passage:

“Kant had a new idea as to how the mind worked. He held that all concepts were
really rules. For example, the concept for dog is something like the rule: If it has
four legs, barks, and wags its tail, then it’s a dog… Husserl, who can be regarded
as the father of the information-processing model of the mind, argued that
concepts were hierarchies of rules, rules which contained other rules under them.
For example, the rule for recognizing dogs contained a subrule for recognizing
Tails. Husserl also saw that such rules would have to tell us not about any parti-
cular dog, or dog in general, but about the typical dog. All the basic ideas used
by Minsky (see above) and his students of artificial intelligence were in place.”
(p.4)

This intricate relationship between artificial intelligence and the study of philosophy
may point to the fact that cognitive science is, in fact, philosophy, and that even though the
conscious beings we call researchers cannot, most likely, create artificial consciousness,
they can think about their own consciousness, like Kant, in the language of philosophical
concepts on one hand, and in a programming language on the other; anything that may be
described as computer phenomenology will indicate that any artificially constructed mental
phenomenon has the ability to reveal itself; intentionality itself, however, poses problems
that artificial intelligence cannot as yet grapple with, though it may simply (!) mean the
correspondence between an algorithm and data structures; we can only remember that, as
far back as 1651, Thomas Hobbes decided that “by ratiocination I mean computation.” The
whole problem seems to reside in the fact that the attributes that philosophy studies as
peculiar to mind and intelligence may be, sooner or later, thought of as specific to alien
forms of “life,” such as advance computer systems. For the time being, it seems that
cognitive science can have some general contributions to the philosophy of science by such
accounts provided by Lindley Darden (Reasoning in Biological Discoveries, 2006), Ronald
Giere (in P. Caruthers, S. Stich & M. Seigal, eds., The Cognitive Basis of Science, 2002),
Nancy Nersessian (in idem) and Paul Thagard (Computational Philosophy of Science,
1988…)

1.4.2. Cognitive Science and Psychology

Since cognitive science always includes such topics as those studying perception, memory,
attention, and consciousness—all of them well-defined fields within psychology—it has
been presumed that cognitive science simply represents a new vocabulary for psychological
analyses. In their Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
propose the following five principles in evolutionary psychology, each of which represents a
link between psychology and cognitive science: 1. The brain is a physical system; it
functions as a computer; its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate
to your environmental circumstance (the metaphor of mind-as-computer turns the brain—
a biological-physical system whose operation is governed by the laws of physics and
chemistry—into an image or imitation of its own creation, the computer; the term was
coined by Ulrich Neisser in 1967, postulating that the mind has a certain conceptual
structure; cognitive psychology rejects introspection as a method of investigation and
favors scientific or phenomenological methods, such as Freudian psychology: it also differs
from behaviorist psychology by acknowledging the existence of such internal mental states
as belief, desire or motivation). 2. The Darwinian proposition that man’s neural circuits
have been designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during
our species’ evolutionary history (see Principle 5). 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the
iceberg; most of what goes on in our minds is hidden from us. As a result, our conscious
experience can mislead us into thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is. Most
problems that we experience as easy to solve are very difficult, in fact—they require very
complex neural circuitry. This points to the problem of awareness or conscious experience
which we have as a result of innumerable specialized mechanisms that gather sensory
information from the world, analyze and evaluate it, identify inconsistencies, fill in gaps,
and finally decide about its meanings. 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving
different adaptive problems: thus, there are neural circuits specialized for vision, for
hearing, for taste and smell, and so on—each of which is like a mini-computer designed to
solve one problem only: these biological machines are therefore calibrated to various
environments in which they evolved. 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind; even
very simple changes in our brains’ circuitry can take many thousands of years. These
principles, Cosmides and Tooby claim, may help one ask four fundamental questions: 1.
Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how do they work? 2. What kind of
information is being processed by these circuits? 3. What information-processing programs
do these circuits embody? 4. What were these circuits initially designed to accomplish?
These and other principles and questions were developed, as a matter of fact, in a
reconceptualization of psychological relationships that has come to be defined as cognitive
psychology; on the other had, the “appropriateness” as a concept refers to adaptive
problems and many other problems which are, however, the by-products of circuits that
were initially designed to solve adaptive problems. Moreover, in recent years, these
innovative contributions to psychological thinking have been referred to as the second
cognitive revolution or evolutionary psychology (see above), or philosophy of mind and
psychology, including such researchers as Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Shaun
Gallagher, Daniel Dennett, Thomas Metzinger, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Michael
Cole, Matthew Ratcliffe, Francisco Varela…
A branch of neuropsychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of
the brain relates to specific psychological processes is called cognitive neuropsychology;
particular emphasis is placed on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or
neurological illnesses. One of the important implications here is that certain cognitive
processes—knowledge of one language, for instance—could be damaged separately from
others, which means that they are controlled by distinct, independent neural processes;
lobotomy might cause one individual to lose completely one of the several languages he
could speak before the operation. Obviously, another implication is that such processes
could be localized to specific areas of the brain.
Interesting studies in neurpsychology have been carried on on autistic patients, who lack
completely the ability to understand other minds; psychologists developed intriguingly
fascinating studies on the simulation theory, interaction theory, the deconstructive theory
of autism or of blindsight, for example.
Finally, another field is that of the study of emotion and emotional contagion or
emotional communication; it is not as yet clear that emotions require the representation of
mental states and it may very well be that the emotional system is a relatively independent
one and is able to respond to others’ similar communication by directly picking up on that
specific emotion rather then by representing it somehow; thus emotional communication
may form part of an analog system of communication, including gestures and body
language, which evolved in parallel with representational thinking; Francis F. Steen (1997)
refers, in this respect, to decoupled thinking and focuses, in his The Time of
Unrememberable Being, on the ability to read other minds.

1.4.3. Cognitive Science and Social Science/s

Mark Turner, in The Chronicle Review of October 5, 2001 starts from the assumption that
the fundamental topic of study in cognitive science is the study of mental events, and these
events can occur in single brains or a multitude of brains, and they also can have an
extremely short or an extremely long history; thus they find their place in rhetoric, political
science, economics and sociology, providing the defining problems of social sciences in
general; rhetoric in particular and a theory of rhetoric is absolutely indispensable to
scholars in social sciences. The questions that Turner identifies as specific to cognitive
science are social science questions as well: “What are our basic cognitive operations? How
do we use them in judgment, decision, action, reason, choice, persuasion, expression? Do
voters know what they need to know? How do people choose? What are the best
incentives? When is judgment reliable? Can negotiation work? How do cognitive
conceptual resources depend on social and cultural location? How do certain products of
cognitive and conceptual systems come to be entrenched as publicly shared knowledge and
method?” Sociologists, as a matter of fact, almost always refer to mental events.

1.4.4. Cognitive Anthropology

And so do anthropologists, since cognitive anthropology focuses on the intellectual and

rational aspects of culture; the ethnoscience studies at Yale in the 1950s seem to have been
at the origins of cognitive anthropology, stressing principles and discovery procedures for
investigating culturally specific semantic systems and native categories. The basic
categories of research performed in cognitive anthropology are semantics, knowledge
structures, models and systems, and discourse analysis. Ethnoscience itself developed
analytical and ethnographic methods for the semantic studies of terminology systems; later
research concentrated on studying (Dan Sperber, James Spradly) how various categories of
cultural knowledge are connected to each other and how categories located in individual
minds are related to cultural categories of whole communities; these accounts of cultural
categories, on the basis of generative linguistics, developed intricate models and systems in
the 1970s; finally computer aided discourse analysis came into play as a tool for entering
the intricacies of such categories, with interest in such fields as religious symbolism (David
Kronenfeld), theories of emotions and others; gradually, these linguistic preoccupations
were replaced by psychological approaches, especially in the work of such anthropologists
as Roy D’Andrade and A. Kimball Romney.

1.4.5. Cognitive Science and Linguistics

As already suggested, the beginnings of cognitive anthropology are rooted in the

relationships between older anthropological studies and linguistics; the intellectual and
rational aspects of culture are investigated through studies of language use, and the
methodology of cognitive anthropology originated in attempts to fit linguistic methods into
social anthropology; the main assumption is that semantic categories marked by linguistic
forms are related to meaningful cultural categories; it is between semantics and pragmatics
that cognitive general anthropology moves, while it is known, from linguists, that a broader
understanding of pragmatics is based on a detailed study of semantics. Such authors as
War Goodenough and Floyd Lounsbury focus on and analyze categories like status
obligations, rights, privileges, powers and the role therein of linguistic utterances. To cut a
long story short, everybody knows that language is the main—if not the only—entry point
for studying cognition, and in the last half-century or so studies have been dedicated to the
knowledge and use of language as a cognitive phenomenon.
Along with many other authors, that range from Saussure onwards, Markus Egg (2003)
lists five principles according to which language relates to the world, to culture, to reality:
language cannot refer to objective structures in the world (arbitrariness of the linguistic
sign); language consists of symbolic units that activate conceptual structures; objective
reality is not independent from human cognition; meaning is something in the brain, not in
the world; conceptual structure and real world are only indirectly related.
An almost independent branch in the scientific study of cognition is speech pathology,
which focuses on disordered language and language deficits; it may include references to
the neurobiology of the brain, abnormal psychology, anatomy and physiology of speaking,
language acquisition, acoustic phonetics and psycholinguistics in general. However, the
many implications of the relationships between linguistics and cognitive science (including
cognitive linguistics) require much more than these spare notes.

1.4.6. Cognitive Science and the Arts

The scientific study of the arts, or anything like a scientific aesthetics has long been a
subject of debate, since, as Susan Sontag, for example, thought a number of decades ago,
human imagination depends on categories that escape rational investigation; however, with
the advent of cognitive science, the border between psychology and the philosophy of mind
began to be erased and many thought it was time for scientific theory to be applied in the
arts as well; the key fields are those of imagination (is imagination based upon some kind of
knowledge?), emotions (what is the relationship between emotions and illusion?) and
representation (how is information processed so that it may become representation?); other
issues involve questions about interpretation (why, for instance, is the interpretation of a
great work endless?), translation and languages (is all thought linguistic in nature?),
narration (is narrative thinking the basis of all types of human thinking?), and the ineffable
(can anything and everything be expressed in words or in other forms of interpretation?)
Important work has been done in investigating the possibilities of cognitive science in the
field of arts and aesthetics: Stephen Kosslyn and Richard Anderson, Frontiers of Cognitive
Neuroscience (1995); Jenni A. Ogden, Fractured Minds (1996); Stephen Palmer, Vision
Science (1999); Diana Raffman, Language, Music and Mind (1993); Semir Zeki, Inner
Vision (1999)…: bat again, the answer to the question as to what cognitive science can tell
us about art and aesthetics is much to complex and complicated for a short excursion like
the present one.

1.5.Overview
In spite of all that has been shown above, the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science is
largely unrealized, since though it makes frequent use of something that might be called a
scientific method, including simulation and modeling, the exact relationship between
cognitive science and other fields is far from being agreed on by all authors. Moreover,
since the explanation of consciousness—and self-consciousness—is its main objective, it
remains unlikely that all neuronal processes in our heads correlate with consciousness and
any simple definition of the latter concept remains an illusion. It also remains unclear if a
certain language system is essential for consciousness; and finally, it is only probable that
consciousness correlates only to some (what?) extent with the degree of complexity of any
nervous system. And there are, of course, quite a number of questions still waiting for an
answer: Why are we conscious and self-conscious? Is there anything like virtual
consciousness, and if there is, what is essential for it and what is the nature of visual
representation? How can the problems that puzzle philosophers of qualia be solved? Can
there be a full account of the manner in which subjective experiences arise from cerebral
processes? And last, but essentially not least, how is meaning generated by the brain?
In so far as we are concerned here, the main contribution of cognitive science is in the
philosophy of language and rational epistemology, thus constituting a substantial branch of
modern linguistics; as well as the fact that there are already significant developments
toward a cognitive literary theory or poetics.

DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed. „Universitas

XXI”, Iaşi, 2010