Intro
10 August 2020
17:20
Probably the earliest entry in an OED dictionary of the word “cognitive” is from 1586 and
shows it to cover facts and processes “pertaining to the action… of knowing;” it seems to
have been used in the context of discussions about Plato and his theories of knowledge, so
that this latter concept, knowledge is presumably the foundation of cognitive science.
What is Cognitive Science?
A science of mind and behavior.
It is a science (scientific method)
It includes research on intelligence and behavior,
especially focusing on how information is
represented, processed, and transformed (in
faculties such as perception, language, memory,
reasoning, and emotion)
It is interdisciplinary (multiple research disciplines,
including psychology, artificial intelligence,
philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, and
anthropology)
George Luger, in his 1994 Cognitive Science: the Science of Intelligent Systems defines
cognitive science as the study of intelligence or of mind, which obviously enlarges the
sphere to contain more than knowledge as such. In their 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh,
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson define the term “cognitive” as being “used for any kind
of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms"
Random House, 2006—“the study of the precise (n.b.) nature of different mental tasks and
the operations of the brain that enable them to be performed, engaging branches of
psychology, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics.”
Necessity of interdisciplinary research
Philosophy
Emotions and moods
Emotions and rationality
Psychology
How emotions affect decisions
Linguistics
Emotional words in different cultures
Neurophysiology
Emotions and hormones
The effect of brain damage
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Necessity of interdisciplinary research
Philosophy
Emotions and moods
Emotions and rationality
Psychology
How emotions affect decisions
Linguistics
Emotional words in different cultures
Neurophysiology
Emotions and hormones
The effect of brain damage
Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study
of mind and intelligence, embracing
philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence,
neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology.
Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s
when researchers in several fields began to
develop theories of mind
History
Attempts to understand the mind and its
operation go back at least to the Ancient
Greeks, when philosophers such as Plato and
Aristotle tried to explain the nature of human
knowledge. The study of mind remained the
province of philosophy until the nineteenth
century, when experimental psychology
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History
Attempts to understand the mind and its
operation go back at least to the Ancient
Greeks, when philosophers such as Plato and
Aristotle tried to explain the nature of human
knowledge. The study of mind remained the
province of philosophy until the nineteenth
century, when experimental psychology
developed
• Cognitive Science’s concern is understanding the
mind and trying to replicate it
• AI
• Its concern is not language, literature, lit criticism
• Linguistics is not an exact science
• But languange cannot be ommited out of any study
of the human mind (and maybe animal or even
plant)
• LANGUAGE ORIGIN
• One longstanding problem in the origin of
human language
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• LANGUAGE ORIGIN
• One longstanding problem in the origin of
human language
One of the main problems to be tackled and eventually solved by cognitive science is
to understand how the mind resides in or inhabits the brain, and the approaches to this
may be
a. analytic, i.e. analysis of both natural and artificial such thinking systems in order to
find whatever functional constraints on cognition that come out from our systems for
knowledge representation:
b. experimental, i.e. finding practical ways of distinguishing among various—
sometimes contradictory—theories of information processing in these natural and/or
artificial intelligence systems; one frequent experimental technique is that of
building a computational model whose behavior can be compared, for instance, to
one found in nature, in humans or animals;
c. synthetic, i.e. constructing hardware and software in artificial machines that exhibit
various aspects of intelligent behavior.
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