Bly B.M., Rumelhart D.E. (eds.) Cognitive Science

Academic Press, 1999, -409 p.Cognitive science is the study of mental representations and computations and of the physical systems that support those processes. Cognitive science includes cognitive psychological examination of thinking, but also much more. It includes investigations of the ways in which the human brain and other systems, natural or artificial, make possible complex behavior that depends on internal system states. These states and processes may not be amenable to direct measurement, either because they are not accessible to instruments or because they are not, per se, equivalent to any specific measurable state of matter or energy. Such an intangible object of inquiry seems to preclude the possibility of external, objective validation or to take cognitive science out of the realm of empirical sciences altogether. In fact, it does neither.
The success of science in using empirical measurements to test detailed predictions about the world has drawn particular attention to the act of measurement as a distinguishing characteristic of the scientific method. But the fact that scientific arguments often depend on careful measurement does not mean that science depends on measurement alone; indeed, it could not. No measurement is so free of conceptions that it consists only and entirely of the actuality of a thing. Does this mean that all views are equally correct? On the contrary: the success of science depends on the fact that some ways of conceiving of measurements and their implications correspond with the world better than others. As scientists, we seek a collection of conceptions that coheres and covers the facts of the world, as we observe them. Not all observations are equally true, as the proverbial cliff quickly proves.
This metaphysical issue is a hoary philosophical chestnut and it will not be settled by cognitive scientists. But as we sensibly flee from the argument, we should not pretend that we have avoided it by including only objective measurements as constraints on our theories. To think that this is what we, or indeed any scientist, have done is to adopt a rather unrealistic view of science altogether. Physics might be thought to concern only measurables and measurements, but of course this is not and has never been true. All general claims go beyond the scope of a brute fact, as they depend on language and concepts for their very formulation. It is only that in the case of cognitive science we face the doubly complex problem that the object of our interest is the very instrument of our scientific inquiry: the mind itself.
Exactly because theories of cognition can only be inferred by a potentially recursive exploration of the most intricate physical properties and outrageously complex behavior of organisms, cognitive science is both interesting and hard. Faced with this daunting problem, cognitive science has often revisited familiar debates and rehearsed carefully polarized dichotomies, hoping to find conclusive, orderly answers to its deep questions. The chapters in this volume confront some of these issues, but it should be noted that in all cases, the aim is to eschew heat in favor of light.
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?
This is partly because in spite of tremendous progress, cognitive science has not converged on rigorous, overarching theories of the mind: this goal is universally acknowledged to be one of the most difficult topics science can confront. In part it is because the methodological ties and foundational assumptions of the various intersecting disciplines related to cognitive science are strong, even for scientists whose work is entirely concerned with the study of cognition. Perhaps most simply, for any individual scientist, it is difficult to identify with a field that is changing so fundamentally, and so rapidly. Even as cognitive science has emerged as a discipline, it has changed radically with changing ideas about the nature of the mind, particularly the introduction of neuroscientific, connectionist, and, more recently, evolutionary perspectives on the mind and the brain.
In constructing this volume, we have sought to avoid presenting an assembly of connected but conflicting approaches to studying cognition. Rather we have asked the contributing authors to address problems central to the understanding of cognition, drawing as broadly as possible on the ideas that have been infused into cognitive science from a number of disciplines. The resulting volume includes chapters on action, attention, categorization, cognitive development, language, reasoning, and emotion. All of these chapters focus on a domain and aim to present what might be called broad cognitive scientific view of that domain. In addition, we have included a chapter on the cognitive neuroscience approach to the study of cognition because cognitive neuroscience now occupies a central position in the understanding of cognition and that represents a change that has occurred gradually since the early 1980s, one that we believe warrants particular attention.Coordinate Transformations in the Genesis of Directed Action
Attention
Categorization
Reasoning
Cognitive Development
The Brain Basis of Syntactic Processes: Architecture, Ontogeny, and Phylogeny
The Cognitive Neuroscience Approach
Emotion