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The rise of cognitive science in the 20th century
Book chapter

The rise of cognitive science in the 20th century

Carrie Figdor
Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, pp.280-302
Routledge
2018
DOI: 10.4324/9780429508127-12

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Abstract

Cognitive science is the study of individual agency: its nature, scope, mechanisms, and patterns. The multidisciplinarity of cognitive science is an accident of academic history, not a fact about its subject matter. This article explains five key innovations comprising the basic explanatory package of cognitive science. This feature has led the author to believe some misunderstanding about the relation between cognitive science and the discipline-specific ways in which the ideas were initially appropriated, articulated, investigated, and deployed in explanation. Oddly, mathematics is frequently omitted from the list of disciplines contributing to cognitive science even though many pioneers of cognitive science, including Turing, Pitts, Wiener, and Shannon, were mathematicians. The study of these ideas, blended in mathematical logic, unified the conceptual founders of cognitive science. These and other results made the emerging cognitive science of information-processing highly attractive: it seemed "complicated enough to do everything that cognitive theorists have been talking about".
Cognitive Science Feedback Control Loop Turing Machine Tape Network’s Connection Weights Stored Program Computing Unintelligent Behavior Turing’s Model Universal Turing Machine Intuitive Definition Simple Turing Machine Source Freedom Explanatory Package Vegetative State Patients Information Transfer Feedback Control Simple State Transitions Stimulus Independent Thought Algorithmic Level Internal State Transitions Turing Machine Shannon’s Theory Von Neumann Computer Contentful Mental States Classical Computational McCulloch Pitts Neurons

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