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

the same particular phenomena, describe and interpret them in different ways”
(Kuhn, 1970, p. 17).
Cognitive science was born in 1956 (Miller, 2003). Because it is about a century
younger than experimental psychology, it would not be surprising to discover that
cognitive science is also pre-paradigmatic. This might explain the variety of opinions
about the nature of cognition, introduced earlier as the competing elements
of classical, connectionist, and embodied cognitive science. “The pre-paradigm
period, in particular, is regularly marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate
methods, problems, and standards of solution, though these serve rather to
define schools than produce agreement” (Kuhn, 1970, pp. 47–48).
The current state of cognitive science defines an as yet incomplete dialectic.
Competition amongst classical, connectionist, and embodied cognitive science
reflects existing tensions between thesis and antithesis. What is missing is a state
of synthesis in which cognitive science integrates key ideas from its competing
schools of thought. This integration is necessary, because it is unlikely that, for
instance, a classical characterization of the pure cognitive system will provide a
complete explanation of cognition (Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; Neisser, 1976;
Norman, 1980).
In the latter chapters of the current book, several lines of evidence are presented
to suggest that synthesis within cognitive science is possible. First, it is extremely difficult
to find marks of the classical, that is, characteristics that uniquely distinguish
classical cognitive science from either the connectionist or embodied approaches.
For instance, classical cognitive science was inspired by the digital computer, but a
variety of digital computers incorporated processes consistent with connectionism
(such as parallel processing) and with embodied cognitive science (such as external
representations).
A second line of evidence is that there is a high degree of methodological similarity
between the three approaches. In particular, each school of cognitive science
can be characterized as exploring four different levels of investigation: computational,
algorithmic, architectural, and implementational. We see in Chapter 6 that
the different approaches have disagreements about the technical details within each
level. Nevertheless, all four levels are investigated by all three approaches within
cognitive science. Furthermore, when different approaches are compared at each
level, strong similarities can be identified. This is why, for instance, that it has been
claimed that the distinction between classical and connectionist cognitive science is
blurred (Dawson, 1998).
A third line of evidence accounts for the methodological similarity amongst the
different approaches: cognitive scientists from different schools of thought share
many core assumptions. Though they may disagree about its technical details, all
cognitive scientists view cognition as a form of information processing. For instance,
418 Chapter 9