Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

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The Cognitive Sciences: One or Many?
1.0 Chapter Overview
When experimental psychology arose in the nineteenth century, it was a unified discipline.
However, as the experimental method began to be applied to a larger and
larger range of psychological phenomena, this new discipline fragmented, causing
what became known in the 1920s as the “crisis in psychology,” a crisis that has persisted
to the present day.
Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of
different disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics and philosophy,
were fragmenting. Some researchers responded to this situation by viewing
cognition as a form of information processing. In the 1950s, the only plausible
notion of information processing was the kind that was performed by a recent
invention, the digital computer. This singular notion of information processing permitted
cognitive science to emerge as a highly unified discipline.
A half century of research in cognitive science, though, has been informed by
alternative conceptions of both information processing and cognition. As a result,
the possibility has emerged that cognitive science itself is fragmenting. The purpose
of this first chapter is to note the existence of three main approaches within
the discipline: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and
embodied cognitive science. The existence of these different approaches leads to
obvious questions: What are the core assumptions of these three different schools
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