Is the way we make up our minds, the way that our minds are made up?

Abstract

Cognitive science was originally conceived as the interdisciplinary study of the mind, which would include contributions from linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, education, psychology and neuroscience.  Things didn’t play out in quite this way, however, and today the field is dominated by artificial intelligence, computational models of the mind, and neuroscientific approaches to cognition, all of which focus on the brain alone, often with a lurking (ghostly) homunculus.  The cognitive scientist, Edwin Hutchins, has suggested that this rather narrow perspective was the inevitable result of assuming that human cognition was sufficiently modular that we could focus on the brain alone, ignore context, culture and history, and then integrate these later. In his view, this assumption hasn’t paid off. Cognitive science still lacks a good theory of brain function, relying on 19th century psychological concepts, along with machine metaphors, while culture, context and history (and behaviour more broadly), remain ignored for the most part. What, then, should cognitive science look like? Or rather, what could it look like if we could rid ourselves of our current baggage, and embraced not only an interdisciplinary, but an integrative, systems approach, to the study of mind? 

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