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

etween scientific paradigms (Kuhn, 1970). From this perspective, some antagonism
between perspectives is necessary, because newer paradigms are attempting to
show how they are capable of replacing the old and of solving problems beyond the
grasp of the established framework. If one believes that they are engaged in such an
endeavour, then a fervent and explicit rejection of including any of the old paradigm
within the new is to be expected.
According to Kuhn (1970), a new paradigm will not emerge unless a crisis has
arisen in the old approach. Some may argue that this is exactly the case for classical
cognitive science, whose crises have been identified by its critics (Dreyfus, 1972, 1992),
and which have led to the new connectionist and embodied paradigms. However, it
is more likely that it is premature for paradigms of cognitive science to be battling
one another, because cognitive science may very well be pre-paradigmatic, in search
of a unifying body of belief that has not yet been achieved.
The position outlined in Chapter 7, that it is difficult to identify a set of core
tenets that distinguish classical cognitive science from the connectionist and the
embodied approaches, supports this view. Such a view is also supported by the existence
of approaches that draw on the different “paradigms” of cognitive science, such
as the theory of seeing and visualizing (Pylyshyn, 2003c, 2007) discussed in Chapter
8, and the natural computation theory of vision. If cognitive science were not preparadigmatic,
then it should be easy to distinguish its different paradigms, and
theories that draw from different paradigms should be impossible.
If cognitive science is pre-paradigmatic, then it is in the process of identifying
its core research questions, and it is still deciding upon the technical requirements
that must be true of its theories. My suspicion is that a mature cognitive science will
develop that draws on core elements of all three approaches that have been studied.
Cognitive science is still in a position to heed the call of a broadened cognitivism
(Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; Norman, 1980). In order to do so, rather than
viewing its current approaches as competing paradigms, it would be better served
by adopting the pragmatic approach of natural computation and exploiting the
advantages offered by all three approaches to cognitive phenomena.
9.4 A Cognitive Synthesis
Modern experimental psychology arose around 1860 (Fechner, 1966), and more
than a century and a half later is viewed by many as still being an immature, preparadigmatic
discipline (Buss, 1978; Leahey, 1992). The diversity of its schools of
thought and the breadth of topics that it studies are a testament to experimental
psychology’s youth as a science. “In the early stages of the development of any science
different men confronting the same range of phenomena, but not usually all
Towards a Cognitive Dialectic 417