Interrelations

16 September 2020
07:35

The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences (ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil)
identified the domains for the cognitive brain sciences: (1) computation intelligence, (2)
culture, cognition, and evolution, (3) language and linguistics, (4) neuroscience, (5)
philosophy, and (6) psychology. We will soon describe these complex interrelationships, but
here may be mentioned some of the effects and implications of this research: new
information about how individuals think and learn, applications in learning, teaching, and
testing methods, designing intelligent tutoring systems, developing manufacturing systems
for industry, medical diagnosis especially in cases of damaged brains, many—even though
not identified yet—benefits for social sciences…
A rather traditional view would see cognitive science as either theoretical (modeling and
explaining the phenomena of memory, perception, reasoning and language, and looking at
organisms as biological information processing systems) or applied (the above mentioned
educational and social uses, mainly school instruction).
It may safely be said that the roots of cognitive science go as far back as those of philosophy
and psychology, i.e. as far back as Plato and Aristotle, both of whom sought to understand
the nature of human knowledge. In the 17th and 18th century, such philosophers as Robert
Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), John
Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690), George Berkeley (Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710), David Hume and Immanuel Kant
dedicated mush thought and effort on the matter of thought and mind: Rene Descartes is
credited as an important forerunner for contemporary thinking for having distinguished
between body (Res extensa, hard) and mind (Res cogitans, soft) as two separate entities
constituted of two different substances.

Before cognitive science

 Philosophers
 Plato, Aristotle, Descartes,
Hume, Kant, …
 The beginning of psychology
 Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
 First psychology laboratory
 William James (1842-1910)

 The Principles of Psychology

In the second half of the 19th century Wilhelm

Wundt and William James moved these kinds of study into the realm of experimental
psychology: this was soon followed by behaviorism (John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner),
which claimed that behavior as a result of consciousness rather than consciousness itself
could and should be studies (notice effects and prolongations in literature and literary
study—the behaviorist novel, for example).

Interrelations Page 1
Cognitive science proper began in the 1950s when the above perspective started to
change as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon founded and
developed the field of artificial intelligence and other researchers came upon the idea that
what was happening in artificial intelligence could be used to explain how the human mind
works: the Logic Theorist of Newell, Shaw, and Simon worked on the basis of the
fundamental (metaphoric) analogy of computer science, i.e. the human mind works like
computer programs in which algorithms are applied to data structures.
Contemporary names in cognitive science include philosophers (Daniel Dennett, Douglas
Hofstadter), philosopher-linguists like John Searle, Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and
George Lakoff, and psychologists like James McClelland and Steven Pinker.
Almost any introduction to cognitive science begins by emphasizing (we have seen) its
highly interdisciplinary character, and mainly the fact that it consists of or collaborates
with philosophy, psychology, social sciences, various studies of the arts, anthropology,
linguistics and others that we cannot approach here (neuroscience, artificial intelligence
and computer science, mathematics, neurobiology, physics…).
In their 1986 Mind over Machine Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus trace the
links between cognitive science and classic philosophy: according to them, Plato, Galileo,
Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Husserl are among the predecessors of artificial intelligence
and, implicitly, of cognitive science.

Cognitive Science and Psychology

Cognitive Psychology
 Scientific study of mental processes
 Simply put “it is the study of thought”
 Behavior is examined by cognitive psychologists the same
way that physicists infer the force of gravity from the
behavior of objects in the world.
 Mental Processes: remembering, attention, producing and
understanding language, solving problems, and making
decisions
 Thinking is Interrelations
something thatPage is
2 constantly happening, yet
 Cognitive Psychology
 Scientific study of mental processes
 Simply put “it is the study of thought”
 Behavior is examined by cognitive psychologists the same
way that physicists infer the force of gravity from the
behavior of objects in the world.
 Mental Processes: remembering, attention, producing and
understanding language, solving problems, and making
decisions
 Thinking is something that is constantly happening, yet
we rarely stop to think about it

Since cognitive science always includes such topics as those studying perception, memory,
attention, and consciousness—all of them well-defined fields within psychology—it has
been presumed that cognitive science simply represents a new vocabulary for psychological
analyses. In their Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
propose the following five principles in evolutionary psychology, each of which represents a
link between psychology and cognitive science: 1. The brain is a physical system; it
functions as a computer; its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate
to your environmental circumstance (the metaphor of mind-as-computer turns the brain—
a biological-physical system whose operation is governed by the laws of physics and
chemistry—into an image or imitation of its own creation, the computer; the term was
coined by Ulrich Neisser in 1967, postulating that the mind has a certain conceptual
structure; cognitive psychology rejects introspection as a method of investigation and
favors scientific or phenomenological methods, such as Freudian psychology: it also differs
from behaviorist psychology by acknowledging the existence of such internal mental states
as belief, desire or motivation). 2. The Darwinian proposition that man’s neural circuits
have been designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during
our species’ evolutionary history (see Principle 5). 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the
iceberg; most of what goes on in our minds is hidden from us. As a result, our conscious
experience can mislead us into thinking that our circuitry is simpler than it really is. Most
problems that we experience as easy to solve are very difficult, in fact—they require very
complex neural circuitry. This points to the problem of awareness or conscious experience
which we have as a result of innumerable specialized mechanisms that gather sensory
information from the world, analyze and evaluate it, identify inconsistencies, fill in gaps,
and finally decide about its meanings. 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving
different adaptive problems: thus, there are neural circuits specialized for vision, for
hearing, for taste and smell, and so on—each of which is like a mini-computer designed to
solve one problem only: these biological machines are therefore calibrated to various
environments in which they evolved. 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind; even
very simple changes in our brains’ circuitry can take many thousands of years. These
principles, Cosmides and Tooby claim, may help one ask four fundamental questions: 1.
Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how do they work? 2. What kind of
information is being processed by these circuits? 3. What information-processing programs
do these circuits embody? 4. What were these circuits initially designed to accomplish?
These and other principles and questions were developed, as a matter of fact, in a
reconceptualization of psychological relationships that has come to be defined as cognitive

Interrelations Page 3
reconceptualization of psychological relationships that has come to be defined as cognitive
psychology
A branch of neuropsychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of
the brain relates to specific psychological processes is called cognitive neuropsychology;
particular emphasis is placed on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or
neurological illnesses. One of the important implications here is that certain cognitive
processes—knowledge of one language, for instance—could be damaged separately from
others, which means that they are controlled by distinct, independent neural processes.
Finally, another field is that of the study of emotion and emotional contagion or
emotional communication; it is not as yet clear that emotions require the representation of
mental states and it may very well be that the emotional system is a relatively independent
one and is able to respond to others’ similar communication by directly picking up on that
specific emotion rather then by representing it somehow; thus emotional communication
may form part of an analog system of communication, including gestures and body
language, which evolved in parallel with representational thinking; Francis F. Steen (1997)
Cognitive Science and Social Science/s
Mark Turner, in The Chronicle Review of October 5, 2001 starts from the assumption that
the fundamental topic of study in cognitive science is the study of mental events, and these
events can occur in single brains or a multitude of brains, and they also can have an
extremely short or an extremely long history; thus they find their place in rhetoric, political
science, economics and sociology, providing the defining problems of social sciences in
general; rhetoric in particular and a theory of rhetoric is absolutely indispensable to
scholars in social sciences. The questions that Turner identifies as specific to cognitive
science are social science questions as well: “What are our basic cognitive operations? How
do we use them in judgment, decision, action, reason, choice, persuasion, expression? Do
voters know what they need to know? How do people choose? What are the best
incentives? When is judgment reliable? Can negotiation work? How do cognitive
conceptual resources depend on social and cultural location? How do certain products of
cognitive and conceptual systems come to be entrenched as publicly shared knowledge and
method?” Sociologists, as a matter of fact, almost always refer to mental events.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND SOCIAL

SCIENCES
SOCIAL COGNITION

The human brain is the evolutionary adaptation of an organism

whose survival is largely dependent on its relations with others

Events can occur in single brains or a multitude of brains

Cognitive Anthropology

Interrelations Page 4
 COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY

HOW DO PEOPLE IN GROUPS AND SOCIETIES CONCEIVE, PERCEIVE

AND EXPERIENCE THEIR WORLD?
WHAT IS CULTURE?
A SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS AND VALUES THAT EXIST IN
THE MINDS OF MEMBERS OF A PARTICULAR SOCIETY

And so do anthropologists, since cognitive anthropology focuses on the intellectual and

rational aspects of culture; the ethnoscience studies at Yale in the 1950s seem to have been
at the origins of cognitive anthropology, stressing principles and discovery procedures for
investigating culturally specific semantic systems and native categories. The basic
categories of research performed in cognitive anthropology are semantics, knowledge
structures, models and systems, and discourse analysis. Ethnoscience itself developed
analytical and ethnographic methods for the semantic studies of terminology systems; later
research concentrated on studying (Dan Sperber, James Spradly) how various categories of
cultural knowledge are connected to each other and how categories located in individual
minds are related to cultural categories of whole communities; these accounts of cultural
categories, on the basis of generative linguistics, developed intricate models and systems in
the 1970s; finally computer aided discourse analysis came into play as a tool for entering
the intricacies of such categories, with interest in such fields as religious symbolism (David
Kronenfeld), theories of emotions and others; gradually, these linguistic preoccupations
were replaced by psychological approaches, especially in the work of such anthropologists
as Roy D’Andrade and A. Kimball Romney.

Cognitive Science and Linguistics

As already suggested, the beginnings of cognitive anthropology are rooted in the
relationships between older anthropological studies and linguistics; the intellectual and
rational aspects of culture are investigated through studies of language use, and the
methodology of cognitive anthropology originated in attempts to fit linguistic methods into
social anthropology; the main assumption is that semantic categories marked by linguistic
forms are related to meaningful cultural categories; it is between semantics and pragmatics
that cognitive general anthropology moves, while it is known, from linguists, that a broader
understanding of pragmatics is based on a detailed study of semantics. Such authors as
War Goodenough and Floyd Lounsbury focus on and analyze categories like status
obligations, rights, privileges, powers and the role therein of linguistic utterances. To cut a
long story short, everybody knows that language is the main—if not the only—entry point
for studying cognition, and in the last half-century or so studies have been dedicated to the
knowledge and use of language as a cognitive phenomenon.
Along with many other authors, that range from Saussure onwards, Markus Egg (2003)
lists five principles according to which language relates to the world, to culture, to reality:
language cannot refer to objective structures in the world (arbitrariness of the linguistic
sign); language consists of symbolic units that activate conceptual structures; objective
reality is not independent from human cognition; meaning is something in the brain, not in

Interrelations Page 5
reality is not independent from human cognition; meaning is something in the brain, not in
the world; conceptual structure and real world are only indirectly related.
An almost independent branch in the scientific study of cognition is speech pathology,
which focuses on disordered language and language deficits; it may include references to
the neurobiology of the brain, abnormal psychology, anatomy and physiology of speaking,
language acquisition, acoustic phonetics and psycholinguistics in general. However, the
many implications of the relationships between linguistics and cognitive science (including
cognitive linguistics) require much more than these spare notes.

Cognitive Science and the Arts

DO WE SEE WITH OUR EYES OR OUR BRAINS?

Things that you do not conceptualize you may not see at all.

The scientific study of the arts, or anything like a scientific aesthetics has long been a
subject of debate, since, as Susan Sontag, for example, thought a number of decades ago,
human imagination depends on categories that escape rational investigation; however, with
the advent of cognitive science, the border between psychology and the philosophy of mind
began to be erased and many thought it was time for scientific theory to be applied in the
arts as well; the key fields are those of imagination (is imagination based upon some kind of
knowledge?), emotions (what is the relationship between emotions and illusion?) and
representation (how is information processed so that it may become representation?); other
issues involve questions about interpretation (why, for instance, is the interpretation of a
great work endless?), translation and languages (is all thought linguistic in nature?),
narration (is narrative thinking the basis of all types of human thinking?), and the ineffable
(can anything and everything be expressed in words or in other forms of interpretation?)
Important work has been done in investigating the possibilities of cognitive science in the
field of arts and aesthetics: Stephen Kosslyn and Richard Anderson, Frontiers of Cognitive
Neuroscience (1995); Jenni A. Ogden, Fractured Minds (1996); Stephen Palmer, Vision
Science (1999); Diana Raffman, Language, Music and Mind (1993); Semir Zeki, Inner
Vision (1999)…: bat again, the answer to the question as to what cognitive science can tell
us about art and aesthetics is much to complex and complicated for a short excursion like
the present one.

DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.

„Universitas XXI”, Iaşi, 2010

Interrelations Page 6