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

However, it is clear that Miller, Galanter, and Pribram’s (1960) message about
the environment had little substantive impact. Why else would Norman (1980) be
conveying the same message twenty years later? It is less clear why this was the
case. One possibility is that as cognitivism took root in experimental psychology,
and as cognitive psychology in turn influenced empirical research within cognitive
science, interest in the environment was a minority position. Cognitive psychology
was clearly in a leading position to inform cognitive science about its prototypical
domain (i.e., adult human cognition; see von Eckardt, 1995). Perhaps this informing
included passing along antagonist views against core behaviourist ideas.
Of course, cognitive psychology’s antagonism towards behaviourism and
the behaviourist view of the environment is not the only reason for cognitive science’s
rise as a classical science. Another reason is that cognitive science was not so
much inspired by cybernetics, but was instead inspired by computer science and
the implications of the digital computer. Furthermore, the digital computer that
inspired cognitive science—the von Neumann architecture, or the stored-program
computer (von Neumann, 1993)—was a device that was primarily concerned with
the manipulation of internal representations.
Finally, the early successes in developing classical models of a variety of highlevel
cognitive phenomena such as problem solving (Newell et al., 1958; Newell &
Simon, 1961, 1972), and of robots that used internal models to plan before executing
actions on the world (Nilsson, 1984), were successes achieved without worrying
much about the relationship between world and agent. Sense-think-act processing,
particularly the sort that heavily emphasized thinking or planning, was promising
new horizons for the understanding of human cognition. Alternative approaches,
rooted in older traditions of cybernetics or behaviourism, seemed to have been completely
replaced.
One consequence of this situation was that cognitive science came to be defined
in a manner that explicitly excluded non-classical perspectives. For example, consider
von Eckardt’s (1995) attempt to characterize cognitive science. Von Eckardt
argued that this can be done by identifying a set of domain-specifying assumptions,
basic research questions, substantive assumptions, and methodological assumptions.
Importantly, the specific members of these sets that von Eckardt identified
reflect a prototypical classical cognitive science and seem to exclude both connectionist
and embodied varieties.
Consider just one feature of von Eckardt’s (1995) project. She began by specifying
the identification assumption for cognitive science—its assumed domain of
study. According to von Eckardt, the best statement of this assumption is to say
that cognitive science’s domain is human cognitive capacities. Furthermore, her discussion
of this assumption—and of possible alternatives to it—rejects non-classical
variants of cognitive science.
410 Chapter 9