The Computer and the Mind

Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary field, comprising cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, and anthropology. In recent years, cognitive science has become a predominant paradigm in studies of the mind. Cognitive science incorporates concepts and methods from philosophy, cognitive psychology etc., whereas behaviorism dominated the psychological sciences during the first part of this century. Cognitive scientists are interested in mental structures and processes of the mind. Several individuals have attempted more rigorous definitions of cognitive …

…is modular, we have no idea how non-modular cognition could work. According to Fodor, cognitive science has hardly gotten started. I believe that cognitive science really got its start when the observation was made that perhaps the structures that programs manipulate, the computational symbols, were like our thoughts and ideas, mental symbols. The early successes of mimicking lots of human cognitive performance by such symbolic programs are responsible for the vitality of cognitive science today.