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

8
Seeing and Visualizing
8.0 Chapter Overview
Zenon Pylyshyn is one of the leading figures in the study of the foundations of cognitive
science. His own training was highly interdisciplinary; he earned degrees in
engineering-physics, control systems, and experimental psychology. In 1994, he
joined Rutgers University as Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and
Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. Prior to his arrival at Rutgers
he was Professor of Psychology, Professor of Computer Science, Director of the
University of Western Ontario Center for Cognitive Science, and an honorary professor
in the departments of Philosophy and Electrical Engineering at Western. I
myself had the privilege of having Pylyshyn as my PhD supervisor when I was a
graduate student at Western.
Pylyshyn is one of the key proponents of classical cognitive science (Dedrick
& Trick, 2009). One of the most important contributions to classical cognitive science
has been his analysis of its foundations, presented in his classic work Computation
and Cognition (Pylyshyn, 1984). Pylyshyn’s (1984) book serves as a manifesto for
classical cognitive science, in which cognition is computation: the manipulation
of formal symbols. It stands as one of the pioneering appeals for using the multiple
levels of investigation within cognitive science. It provides an extremely cogent
argument for the need to use a cognitive vocabulary to capture explanatory generalizations
in the study of cognition. In it, Pylyshyn also argued for establishing the
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