Abstract
Over the last decades, Interdisciplinarity (ID) has become one of the leading research practices. Traditionally, cognitive science is considered one of the most prominent examples of ID research by including disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, anthropology and linguistics. Recently, however the ID character of cognitive science has become under pressure. According to a study by Leydesdorff and Goldstone (2013), research in this domain gets more and more absorbed by cognitive psychology and the interdisciplinary character of cognitive science is steadily fading away. In this paper, we will examine this claim and argue that its conclusion is premature. We will show that there are reasons to think that the interdisciplinary character of cognitive science is more robust and that the configuration of ID relations may be more dynamic than portrayed by ID skeptics. The reason, or so we will argue, is that ID research is a consequence of the theoretical framework(s) in place, i.e. it is in the nature of ID that fluctuations occur depending on what is held to be the nature of cognition. Our findings are twofold. On the one hand, we will show that the reintegration of cognitive science into cognitive psychology – and with it an approximation towards biology and neuroscience – is, as a matter of fact, the fruit of past ID research. On the other hand, we will demonstrate that novel conceptual frameworks open the possibility for restoring ID relations and foster new ID research.
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Notes
- 1.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that the nature of ID is dynamic.
- 2.
It is not our goal to capture the full history of ID here (for an exhaustive discussion about the history of ID see Thompson Klein, 1990). We just want to inform the reader about the origin and importance of ID research in the past and now.
- 3.
Rescorla (2020) discusses in detail all forms of the computational theory of mind.
- 4.
The first issue of the journal Cognitive Science appeared in 1977 and the first meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was held between the 13th–16th of August 1979.
- 5.
Or, as an anonymous reviewer has pointed out to us, the design of computers converged to the best of our abilities to the way brain works.
- 6.
In a related analysis of the journal Cognition, Cohen Priva and Austerweil (2015) conclude that developments in cognitive science over the last decades went from abstract theorizing to more experimental approaches.
- 7.
Miller (2003) calls this change the cognitive revolution in psychology.
- 8.
Hidden nodes mediate between input and output nodes.
- 9.
According to Boden, there is a fourth problem for connectionism, namely the size of the neural networks. Connectionists simply work with networks that are too small. Even though the number of elements in artificial networks rises steadily, it is still not large enough. This problem may however only exist temporarily. With the growth of computational power, who knows what computer scientists can do in a few decades.
- 10.
Originally the idea was defended by Patricia and later Paul Chruchland (Churchland, 1995, 2007; Churchland et al., 1990; Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992), and more recently by Chris Eliasmith and Gualtiero Piccinini (Eliasmith, 2013; Eliasmith & Anderson, 2003; Piccinini & Bahar, 2013; Piccinini & Shagrir, 2014).
- 11.
This theme was already explicit in The Embodied Mind (Varela et al., 1991).
- 12.
Also, a related article by Andrea Bender (2019) about a second major research journal within the Cognitive Science Society (Topics in Cognitive Science), points to a greater extent of ID research in cognitive science.
- 13.
We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
- 14.
This is also coherent with Cohen Priva’s and Austerweil’s idea (Cohen Priva & Austerweil, 2015) that research in cognitive science has seen a development from abstract theorizing to experimental approaches.
- 15.
Radicals will insist that in the case of basic cognition there are no representations involved (Hutto and Myin, 2013).
- 16.
Consider, for instance, the idea that tools shape cognition (Floridi, 2014).
- 17.
It has been pointed out to us by an anonymous reviewer that not all of cognition may be hierarchical. In what we say, we can be neutral about this point since it is enough that cognition often entails hierarchical organization. We only want to show that there may be an interesting intersection between cognition and deep-learning research.
- 18.
implementing however the PP framework.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Olga Pombo for her support. We would also like to thank Jorge Jesuíno and Shahid Rahman for their comments. Further, we would like to extend our gratitude to the audience of the Lisbon ICPOS 2016, the 2017 INTREPID and TINT international conference “Interdisciplinary Futures: Open the Social Sciences 20 Years Later” and the 2017 IASC conference “Crossing Borderlines: Controversies and Interdisciplinarity”. It really helped to improve this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the members of the Centro de Filosofia das Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, the members of the Arg-Lab (IFILNOVA) and the members of the Lisbon Mind, Cognition and Knowledge Group for their ideas.
Klaus Gärtner’s work is endorsed by the financial support of FCT, ‘Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.’ under the Stimulus of Scientific Employment (DL57/2016/CP1479/CT0081) and by the Centro de Filosofia das Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (UIDB/00678/2020).
Robert W. Clowes’s work is endorsed by the financial support of FCT, ‘Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.’ under the Stimulus of Scientific Employment (DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0021) and personal grant (SFRH/BPD/70440/2010).
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Gärtner, K., Clowes, R.W. (2023). Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science and the Nature of Cognition. In: Pombo, O., Gärtner, K., Jesuíno, J. (eds) Theory and Practice in the Interdisciplinary Production and Reproduction of Scientific Knowledge. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20405-0_9
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