1. Overview
This article is a note I wrote while reading the post in nature
The are mainly 6 fields in the cognitive science community
- Psychology
- Linguistics
- Artificial Intelligence
- Anthropology
- Philosophy
- Neuroscience
Cognitive science has a short history if we check out the creation of the flagship journal in this fiel—Cognitive Science—is in1977.
In the post, author use bibliometric indicators and socio-institutional indicators to analyze the development of cognitive science
2. The Challenge
The difficulties from the beginning was achieving interdisciplinary
Howard Gardner wrote an influential book Mind‘s New Science. In the book, Howard characterized some essnetial original features of the cognitive science
- it’s necessary to speak about mental representations and separate from biological
- “the faith that central to any understanding of the human mind is the electronic computer.” — ragard brain as a device like computer
So in 1970s and 1980s, it’s hard for the community to give a defintion that can won the support of a majority of cognitive scientist
In 1990s, the challenge became even harder since new frameworks such as
- ‘connectionism’ challenged the basic assumption that the mind performed computations serially
- ‘distrtibutied cognition’ argued that cognition does not reside in individuals’s head but among enviroments
- ‘embodied cognition’ advanced the theory that cognition is grounded in bodily features rather than amodal representations
- …
All in all, cognitive science has been multidiscipinary from its birth.
- Multidiscipinarity: just like control theory, draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within their boundaries. So you can find people do the related research in different fields, but using the same tools—cognitive science or control science etc.
- Interdisciplinarity: synthesizes and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole. There would be new theory invented by researchers rather than using the old tools.
3. The Situation
Most of the researcher in cognitive science focus on Psychology(about 60%)
3.1. Training
The doctoral training for an academic field is critical.
Only 4 universities offered doctoral program for exactly “Cognitive Science”
- JHU
- RPI
- UCSD
- CEU