“Spring and Fall Fashions in Cognitive Science” is the text of the first presidential address given to the Cognitive Science Society in 1986 (twenty years ago). It was the 8th year of the Society and the address was given by Zenon Pylyshyn whose book on “Seeing and Visualizing” is my latest fave. This paper is reasonably short and, unlike most of Pylyshyn’s writing, reasonably accessible due to the fact that:
“It was an after-dinner talk and should be read in that spirit, even though there is a serious message hidden in there somewhere”.
The serious message is a very important one. (Pylyshyn’s work is only “inaccessible” due to the information density of each sentence – he writes clearly, concisely and pleasingly, but each paragraph has rich and deep concepts to be considered making it difficult to read quickly – and this is not a criticism by any stretch of the imagination !!!)
Fashions come around again, and just as clothes are moving through the 80’s cycle, so it appears, are issues in cognitive science. Although perhaps it would be fairer to say that it has taken twenty years for people to understand the nature of these issues sufficiently to begin to consider them.
Interestingly, I am also only just beginning to appreciate the real quality of the Monash Psychology Department in which I spent my formative academic years: it was a purely experimental department (ie had no clinical programs) and had the reputation of being focussed on “rats and stats”, but in reality, it was a true cognitive science department with strength across all the fields which would currently constitute cognitive science of the sort alluded to below.
Finally, my conclusion. What do I think of Cognitive Science, I heard you ask (didn’t you?). I have always found psychology depressing because I came into it from physics and engineering thinking that, since it experimentally studied the human mind it was a science. I soon realized that it was not a science but a catalog, and a methodology for adding to the catalog. I don’t doubt that it is a useful catalog: it’s certainly important to know such things as how to help people who are depressed or to understand how people’s memory or opinions can be changed in emotional contexts or by clever questioning (say in eyewitness testimony). But many of us had hoped that there was a theoretical science like physics or chemistry there somewhere and we were disappointed. I now believe that the problem is simply that there is no unitary subject matter for psychology — it is not a natural scientific domain. But I find renewed hope now that within psychology lies one or more natural scientific domains, and that cognition, suitably circumscribed to include those aspects that are explainable in terms of symbol processing operations (together with the nonsymbolic mechanisms required to support symbol processing) may be one of those natural scientific domains.
I think that Professor Ross Day, founding chair of the Monash Psych Department, did an excellent job in circumscribing a natural scientific domain as the focus of his experimental psychology department.