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

worked against synthesis, because exploring such ideas has the ideological impact
of abandoning the cognitive revolution.
In this chapter I then proceed to consider two approaches for making the completion
of a cognitive dialectic more likely. One approach is to consider the successes
of the natural computation approach to vision, which developed influential
theories that reflect contributions of all three approaches to cognitive science. It
was able to do so because it had no ideological preference of one approach over the
others. The second approach is for classical cognitive science to supplement its analytical
methodologies with forward engineering. It is argued that such a synthetic
methodology is likely to discover the limits of a “pure” paradigm, producing a tension
that may only be resolved by exploring the ideas espoused by other positions
within cognitive science.
9.1 Towards a Cognitive Dialectic
A dialectic involves conflict which generates tension and is driven by this tension
to a state of conflict resolution (McNeill, 2005). According to philosopher
G. W. F. Hegel (1931), ideas evolve through three phases: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Different approaches to the study of cognition can be cast as illustrating a
dialectic (Sternberg, 1999).
Dialectical progression depends upon having a critical tradition that allows current
beliefs (theses) to be challenged by alternative, contrasting, and sometimes even
radically divergent views (antitheses), which may then lead to the origination of
new ideas based on the old (syntheses). (Sternberg, 1999, p. 52)
The first two aspects of a dialectic, thesis and antithesis, are easily found throughout
the history of cognitive science. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 present in turn the elements
of classical, connectionist, and embodied cognitive science. I have assigned both
connectionist and embodied approaches with the role of antitheses to the classical
thesis that defined the earliest version of cognitive science. One consequence
of antitheses arising against existing theses is that putative inadequacies of the
older tradition are highlighted, and the differences between the new and the old
approaches are emphasized (Norman, 1993). Unsurprisingly, it is easy to find differences
between the various cognitive sciences and to support the position that cognitive
science is fracturing in the same way that psychology did in the early twentieth
century. The challenge to completing the dialectic is exploring a synthesis of the
different cognitive sciences.
One kind of tool that is becoming popular for depicting and organizing large
amounts of information, particularly for various Internet sites, is the tag cloud or
word cloud (Dubinko et al., 2007). A word cloud is created from a body of text; it
400 Chapter 9