M I N D_I n t r o d u c t i o n t o C og n i t ive S c i e n c e

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence,
embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience,
linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s
when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based
on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational
origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was
formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then, more than sixty
universities in North America and Europe have established cognitive
science programs and many others have instituted courses in cognitive
science.

Teaching an interdisciplinary course in cognitive science is difficult
because students come to it with very different backgrounds. Since 1993,
I have been teaching a popular course at the University of Waterloo called
Introduction to Cognitive Science. On the one hand, the course attracts
computationally sophisticated students from computer science and engineering
who know little psychology or philosophy; on the other, it attracts
students with good backgrounds in psychology or philosophy but who
know little about computation. This text is part of an attempt to construct
a course that presupposes no special preparation in any of the fields of cognitive
science. It is intended to enable students with an interest in mind
and intelligence to see that there are many complementary approaches to
the investigation of mind.

There are at least three different ways to introduce cognitive science to
a multidisciplinary audience. The first is to concentrate on the different
fields of psychology, artificial intelligence, and so on. The second is to organize
the discussion by different functions of mind, such as problem
solving, memory, learning, and language. I have chosen a third pproach,
systematically describing and evaluating the main theories of mental representation that have been advocated by cognitive scientists, including
logic, rules, concepts, analogies, images, and connections (artificial neural
networks). Discussing these fundamental theoretical approaches provides
a unified way of presenting the accomplishments of the different fields of
cognitive science to understanding various important mental functions.

My goal in writing this book is to make it accessible to all students likely
to enroll in an introduction to cognitive science. Accomplishing this goal
requires, for example, explaining logic in a way accessible to psychology
students, computer algorithms in a way accessible to English students,
and philosophical controversies in a way accessible to computer science
students.

Although this book is intended for undergraduates, it should also be
useful for graduate students and faculty who want to see how their own
fields fit into the general enterprise of cognitive science. I have not written
an encyclopedia. Since the whole point of this exercise is to provide an
integrated introduction, I have kept the book relatively short and to the
point, highlighting the forest rather than the trees. Viewing cognitive
science as the intersection rather than as the union of all the relevant fields,
I have omitted many topics that are standard in introductions to artificial
intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and so on. Each
chapter concludes with a summary and suggestions for further reading.

The book is written with great enthusiasm for what theories of mental
representation and computation have contributed to the understanding of
mind, but also with awareness that cognitive science has a long way to go.
The second part of the book discusses extensions to the basic assumptions
of cognitive science and suggests directions for future interdisciplinary
work.

I have been grateful for the reception of the first edition of this book,
especially its translation into Italian, German, Czech, Portuguese, Japanese,
Korean, and two variants of Chinese. For this second edition, I have
brought part I up to date and substantially revised part II, adding new chapters
on brains, emotions, and consciousness. Other additions include a list
of relevant Web sites at the end of each chapter, and a glossary at the end
of the book. My anthology, Mind Readings: Introductory Selections on Cognitive
Science (MIT Press, 1998) remains a useful accompaniment.


share your files at box.net