A multidisciplinary field of research that draws upon anthropology, artificial intelligence (e.g., symbolic information-processing models, neural networks, machine learning), cognitive psychology, computer sciences, epistemology, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy (especially philosophy of mind and of mathematics). Its overarching goal is to answer long-standing epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge, its sources and component parts, and how it develops. As a consequence of such a goal, it addresses a diversity of topics that include attention, consciousness, intuition, perception, problem solving, and reasoning. Cognitive science is a direct outcome of the so-called cognitive revolution that originated in the mid-1950s when there was an upsurge of interest in theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. It became distinct from cognitive psychology with the formation of Cognitive Science Society in the mid-1970s. In its relatively short existence, cognitive science has achieved much, particularly with regard to models of human cognitive bias and risk perception. It has been responsible for a new theory of the philosophy of mathematics, and a range of theories covering artificial intelligence, persuasion and coercion. Moreover, it has become firmly established as integral part of modern linguistics. Having become distinct from cognitive psychology, cognitive science is not always viewed in a positive light by cognitive psychologists. For example, Jerry Fodor (1994) dismissed it with the following barbed remark: “Cognitive science is where philosophy goes when it dies” (p. 110) in a paper Concepts: A potboiler. Cognition, 50, 95-113.
See Analogical reasoning, Artificial intelligence (AI), Attention, Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive psychology, Consciousness, Cybernetics, Hixon symposium, Interdiscipline, Linguistics, Monism, Neural net, Perception, Problem solving, Psycholinguistics, Reasoning (psychology)