Cognitive Science Notes
History of Cognitive Science
- What is Cognitive Science
- Cognitive Science: an interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind
- The aim of cognitive science
- To provide a unified scientific theory of cognition
- Cognition: includes all conscious and unconscious processed by which knowledge
is accumulated
- Perceiving, recognizing, conceiving, and reasoning
- Analogy: theoretical physics and the aim of explaining the whole of physical
reality
- A relatively new field
- ‘Cognitive Science’ coined in 1973
- First academic department of cognitive science established in 1987
- Field originated in 1950s
- Brief prehistory of cognitive science
- Ancient philosophy: Plato and Aristotle
- The debates begin
- How much of our knowledge is learned through sense experience?
- How is the mind structured?
- How do our thoughts represent things?
- Modern philosophy: Leibniz and Hume
- The debates continue
- A blank slate or carved marble?
- Photocopies or language?
- Early 20th century: Freud and Skinner
- Freud’s expansion of the mind: the unconscious
- Behaviorism: ‘Mind’ and ‘Mental Representation’ are unscientific
concepts
- Pre-Behaviorist Psychology (1879-1913)
- Science of cognition, feelings, consciousness, etc.
- Introspection as a method
- The Behaviorist Paradigm (1913-1958)
- All animals (including humans) learn by classical or operant conditioning
- Learning proceeds only by reinforcement and punishment
- Methods: Collect observations of outwards acts of behavior under a range
of experimental conditions and analyze the results using statistical
techniques
- Crisis: 1950s
- Behaviorism unable to explain lots of psychological phenomena
- The Cognitive Revolution: 1958-present
- The behaviorist paradigm
- Methodological claim: psychologists should just study behavior of humans and
nonhumans
- Introspection is an unreliable and unscientific method
- Commonsense accounts of psychology should be ignored
History of Cognitive Science
- What is Cognitive Science
- Cognitive Science: an interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind
- The aim of cognitive science
- To provide a unified scientific theory of cognition
- Cognition: includes all conscious and unconscious processed by which knowledge
is accumulated
- Perceiving, recognizing, conceiving, and reasoning
- Analogy: theoretical physics and the aim of explaining the whole of physical
reality
- A relatively new field
- ‘Cognitive Science’ coined in 1973
- First academic department of cognitive science established in 1987
- Field originated in 1950s
- Brief prehistory of cognitive science
- Ancient philosophy: Plato and Aristotle
- The debates begin
- How much of our knowledge is learned through sense experience?
- How is the mind structured?
- How do our thoughts represent things?
- Modern philosophy: Leibniz and Hume
- The debates continue
- A blank slate or carved marble?
- Photocopies or language?
- Early 20th century: Freud and Skinner
- Freud’s expansion of the mind: the unconscious
- Behaviorism: ‘Mind’ and ‘Mental Representation’ are unscientific
concepts
- Pre-Behaviorist Psychology (1879-1913)
- Science of cognition, feelings, consciousness, etc.
- Introspection as a method
- The Behaviorist Paradigm (1913-1958)
- All animals (including humans) learn by classical or operant conditioning
- Learning proceeds only by reinforcement and punishment
- Methods: Collect observations of outwards acts of behavior under a range
of experimental conditions and analyze the results using statistical
techniques
- Crisis: 1950s
- Behaviorism unable to explain lots of psychological phenomena
- The Cognitive Revolution: 1958-present
- The behaviorist paradigm
- Methodological claim: psychologists should just study behavior of humans and
nonhumans
- Introspection is an unreliable and unscientific method
- Commonsense accounts of psychology should be ignored
