Topics in Cognitive Science (2019) 1–4

© 2019 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.

ISSN: 1756-8765 online
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12458

u~
This article is part of the topic “Commentaries on Rafael N
nez’s article, "What happened
to cognitive science?,” Wayne D. Gray (Topic Editor). For a full listing of topic papers,
see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/earlyview

A Response to N
u~nez et al.’s (2019) “What Happened to

Cognitive Science?”
Marjorie McShane, Selmer Bringsjord, James Hendler, Sergei Nirenburg,
Ron Sun
Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Received 5 August 2019; received in revised form 6 September 2019; accepted 6 September 2019

Abstract
N
u~nez et al.’s (2019) negative assessment of the field of cognitive science derives from evalua-
tion criteria that fail to reflect the true nature of the field. In reality, the field is thriving on both
the research and educational fronts, and it shows great promise for the future.

Keywords: Cognitive modeling; Cognitive science; Interdisciplinary; Multidisciplinary

N
~ez et al. (2019) argue that the enterprise of establishing a field called “cognitive
un
science” has failed. This dark verdict derives from the particular criteria and methodology
they chose to employ, which fail to capture the field’s remarkable progress to date and
exciting prospects for the future.
N
u~
nez et al.’s evaluation criteria derive centrally from the concept of “strong cognitive
science,” a term coined by some early commentators on the field. The vision of strong
cognitive science is that of a “gradual attenuation of disciplinary boundaries and loy-
alties” between the six disciplines originally included in the Cognitive Science Hexagon
over 40 years ago (philosophy, psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology,
and neuroscience), resulting in a “cohesive research program” and a “coherent field”
(N
u~nez et al., 2019). This framing of success is excessively demanding on two counts.
First, as the authors amply illustrate, there has never been consensus regarding the

Correspondence should be sent to Marjorie McShane, Cognitive Science Department, Rensselaer Polytech-
nic Institute, Carnegie 312, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY 12180. E-mail: margemc34@gmail.com
2 M. McShane et al. / Topics in Cognitive Science (2019)

discipline’s definition or goals. In an atmosphere of little consensus, one would expect

the evaluation criteria that one adopts to focus on some relatively agreed-upon core rather
than an extreme “strong” view. Second, we can think of no scientific discipline whose
historical path is primarily marked by the convergence of its branches, in terms of theo-
ries, goals, and methods. Take, for example, the current state of linguistics. Some lin-
guists today are recording dying languages, while others are engaging infants with Ernie
and Bert; some are conversing with people while observing their brain activity in fMRI
machines, while others are huddled in libraries studying ancient texts; and of the large
number sitting at their desks mulling over the next enhancement to any of a hundred spe-
cialist theories, very few engage with specialist theories other than their own. Although
there is little common ground between, for example, the Chomskians and the neo-Whorfi-
ans, there is no need to rebrand linguistics as the linguistic sciences or consider the enter-
prise a failure. And certainly not on account of the diversity of methods, approaches, and
close links to neighboring disciplines—such as, for example, computer science. In sum,
the notion of “strong cognitive science” reflects an analysis and projection by some com-
mentators, not a goal widely accepted by the practitioners working in the trenches of this
still-young field. While we refrain from pushing the point, linguistics is hardly alone in
this regard. Even in mathematics itself, there are fundamental clashes in place, for exam-
ple, between the intuitionists and those who see mathematics as disclosing more and more
objective reality.
A more productive way of viewing cognitive science—as it actually is currently, not
an idealized version of it—is as (what we might call) “integrating science.” Under this
view, cognitive science is an enterprise in which a number of empirical disciplines,
such as cognitive psychology, social psychology, experimental philosophy, and linguis-
tics, provide a large amount of data, findings, phenomena, ideas, and other information
for the development of (mostly, but not exclusively, computational) models of aspects
of human cognitive functioning. What computational cognitive scientists then do is sift
through all of this, filtering it through various theoretical lenses (i.e., theoretical per-
spectives). Then they take what remains (that is, what they consider the most important
and most valuable empirical findings) and distill them into coherent and integrative the-
ories, most often expressed in a computational or mathematical formalism (e.g., compu-
tational cognitive architectures come immediately to mind). In turn, these integrative
theories impact other disciplines, including those disciplines from which they draw ini-
tial inspirations. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that, for example, computational
cognitive science papers cite a large number of papers from other disciplines (especially
various empirical disciplines), and that papers from other disciplines in turn cite work
from computational cognitive science. It is, at least in part, this unique and symbiotic
relationship that makes cognitive science useful and valuable. The same may be said
about some theoretical disciplines, such as analytic philosophy. Instead of contributing
empirical results to cognitive science, theoretical disciplines contribute abstract ideas
and analysis, and are in turn influenced by more developed and more integrative theo-
ries (often in the form of a computational or mathematical model) from cognitive
science.
 M. McShane et al. / Topics in Cognitive Science (2019) 3

We also have methodological concerns about the choice of evaluation metrics

employed by N
u~
nez et al., namely, “two bibliometric indicators that analyze the affilia-
tion of authors in the journal Cognitive Science and the citation environment of this jour-
nal, and two socio-institutional indicators that analyze the doctoral training of current
cognitive science faculty and the current undergraduate cognitive science curricula in
North America.” With the exception of the citation environment, these factors reflect
peripheral historical and sociological factors, such as the circumstances and policies of
specific academic institutions, and the career trajectories, priorities, and preferences of
individual academics. With regard to the citation environment, it fails to account for the
fact that journal articles include only immediately relevant references, not the full scope
of literature that has most influenced each author’s thinking.
u~
It is also worth noting that N
nez et al., in their discussion of multi- vs. inter-disciplinary
focus, point out that the field is failing to converge from the former to the latter. Although
the distinction between these terms might seem clear in principle, the boundary between
them often blurs in practice. Take, for example, the field of climate science, which has
gained great prominence as climate-change research has increased in importance. Within
the field, however, there are subareas, such as climate modeling, which have gained from
strong collaboration between people of different backgrounds, particularly computer scien-
tists and physical scientists of various stripes. Within academia, most of these modelers do
not actually belong to a “climate science” department, but remain in their home depart-
ments, where they continue to publish in areas of specialization, be it supercomputing algo-
rithms or carbon sequestration technologies. Further, as the field of climate science grows,
new areas are emerging, ranging from artificial-intelligence-based modeling to sea-ice ana-
lytics—and sometimes the union of the two, as seen in recent efforts to categorize sea-ice
change using AI image analytics. Although these newer areas are represented in climate
science meetings, the associated research is typically published in area-specific journals and
is not yet integrated into the larger climate-modeling efforts. So is the field of climate
science inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary? And why do we care as long as the impor-
tant issue—how the climate is being affected by various factors—is being studied?
The famed Cognitive Science Hexagon was an early, preliminary, coarse-grained con-
ceptualization of how the field might evolve, not a binding writ. The success of the field
does not hinge upon the weighted balance of those initially posited nodes in the
metaphorical hexagon—or even a stable inventory of participating disciplines (which, we
must add, themselves evolve and significantly change over time). In fact, one of the most
important influences on cognitive science—logic—figures neither in that depiction nor in
N
u~nez’s et al.’s analysis. It is noteworthy that, of the 11 occurrences of the string logic
in the article, only once does it appear as a freestanding word (in the other 10 instances,
it is a substring in words like biological, psychological, and methodological). In that sin-
gle standalone instance, logic is in a tucked-away, tangential annotation in Fig. 4. Hence,
readers of the paper in question could not be faulted for inferring that logic, as a disci-
pline or field, is all but absent from both meta-discussion of cognitive science, and from
today’s cognitive science itself. This fact is rather unfortunate, since minimally logic has
long been and continues to be a basis for many parts of linguistics (witness, e.g.,
4 M. McShane et al. / Topics in Cognitive Science (2019)

Montague and predecessors and successors, and formal semantics), computer science
(Church, Turing, G€ odel et al., who taught us that computation is reducible to logical rea-
soning in relatively simple logics; all computability and complexity theory; and both
functional and logic programming to this very day), AI (the logic-based variety), philoso-
phy (analytic philosophy and obviously the part of logic itself that is in philosophy per
se), and also substantive parts of cognitive psychology (e.g., reasoning and decision-mak-
ing, at the very least). Furthermore, mathematics, physics (at least classical mechanics,
quantum mechanics, and special relativity), game theory, decision theory, and so on, are
all axiomatizable, and hence by definition reducible to various types of formal logic; and
these fields are all, of course, quite relevant to cognitive science, in either the form
N
u~nez et al. say was boldly envisioned, but has failed to arrive, or the form they say is
sadly in place.
The unfortunate reality of people engaging with texts is that we tend to skim and
remember sound bites. This imposes a serious responsibility on investigators who choose
to publish sweeping analyses. The average reader of N
u~nez et al.’s piece will remember
cognitive science has failed as a field. We could not disagree more, since neither the defi-
nition nor the metrics provide useful insights into the actual development of an exciting,
still-young, scientific enterprise. The field of cognitive science is thriving on both the
research and educational fronts. We, as practitioners in the field, are not worried about
the grammatical number in the naming convention (cognitive science(s)) or whether the
field is labeled as multi-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or interdisciplinary. What we are
concerned with is exploiting the rich cross-pollination of ideas across many relevant dis-
ciplines, and training the next generation to work creatively within the space of those
ideas. As always, it is about the forest—and may it ever remain so.

Reference

N
~ez, R., Allen, M., Gao, R., Rigoli, C. M., Relaford-Doyle, J., & Semenuks, A. (2019). What happened to
un
cognitive science? Nature Human Behaviour, 3(8), 782–791. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0626-2