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

interested in reformulating cognitivism in the context of Gibson’s (1966, 1979) theory
of ecological perception. “Because perception and action take place in continuous
dependence on the environment, they cannot be understood without an understanding
of that environment itself ” (Neisser, 1976, p. 183).
It would appear, then, that there is an extended history of important cognitivists
calling for cognitive science to extend itself beyond the study of what Norman
(1980) called the pure cognitive system. It is equally clear that this message has not
had the desired impact. For instance, had the main theme of Miller, Galanter, and
Pribram (1960) been widely accepted, then there would have been no need for similar
proposals to appear decades later, as with Neisser (1976) and Norman (1980).
Why has cognitive science stubbornly held firm to the classical approach,
emphasizing the study of pure cognition? One possible answer to this question is
that the development of cognitivism in one of cognitive science’s key contributors,
psychology, occurred in a combative context that revealed thesis and antithesis but
was not conducive to synthesis. This answer is considered in more detail below.
It is often claimed that cognitive science is chiefly concerned with the human
cognitive capacities (Gardner, 1984; von Eckardt, 1995). Ironically, the one discipline
that would be expected to have the most to say about human mental phenomena—experimental
psychology—was one of the last to accept cognitivism. This was
because around the time cognitive science emerged, experimental psychology was
dominated by behaviourism.
Behaviourists argued that a scientific psychology must restrict itself to the
study of observable behaviour and avoid invoking theoretical constructs that could
not be directly observed, such as mental representation.
So long as behaviorism held sway—that is, during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—
questions about the nature of human language, planning, problem solving, imagination
and the like could only be approached stealthily and with difficulty, if they
were tolerated at all. (Gardner, 1984, p. 12)
Other disciplines were quicker to endorse cognitivism and to draw upon the insights
of diverse fields of study because they were not restricted by the behaviourist yoke.
For instance, mathematician Norbert Wiener (1948) created the field of cybernetics
after realizing that problems involving communication, feedback, and information
were general enough to span many disciplines. He held “the conviction that
the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been
neglected as a no-man’s land between the various fields” (p. 8).
Wiener realized that progress in cybernetics required interaction between
researchers trained in different disciplines. He was a key organizer of the first
joint meeting concerning cybernetics, held at Princeton in 1944, which included
engineers, physiologists, and mathematicians. This in turn led to the Macy conferences
on cybernetics that occurred regularly from 1946 through 1953 (Conway &
Towards a Cognitive Dialectic 407