Mindcraft is a series of opinion posts on current issues in cognitive science by Brains Blog founder Gualtiero Piccinini. Do you agree? Disagree? Please contribute on the discussion board below! If you’d like to write a full-length response, please contact editor Dan Burnston.
A lot of philosophers still use the term “cognitive science”. For example, a few days ago Zoe Drayson gave a talk about what she takes explanation to be in “cognitive science”.
I stopped using the label “cognitive science” years ago and I urge you to do the same. The most recent philosophy journal in this area is aptly called Philosophy and the Mind Sciences. The Philosophy Gourmet Report has switched its area coverage from Philosophy of Cognitive Science to Philosophy of the Psychological, Cognitive, and Brain Sciences. When I co-founded a relevant international society with Inês Hipólito, we called it the International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind.
Why are many of us abandoning the label “cognitive science”?
As Danielle Williams reminded us in her keynote at the Society for Philosophy and Neurosccience, the term “cognitive science” can be traced to a 1978 Sloan Foundation report that tried to establish “cognitive science” as an interdisciplinary collective endeavor analogous to “Neuroscience”. I’m all for interdisciplinary work. But, as far as I can tell, “cognitive science” didn’t work out as envisioned in the 1978 Sloan Foundation report. 47 years later, there are a few “cognitive science” programs, journals, and conferences, but almost no “cognitive science” departments. So, IMO there is no such science as “cognitive science”. There are still departments of Psychology (though their experimental, modeling, and explanatory practices are largely continuous with Cognitive Neuroscience), and there are Neuroscience (which is itself a conglomerate of different disciplines), Psychiatry (which was excluded from the “cognitive hexagon” in the Sloan Foundation report), Anthropology, Linguistics, and Behavioral Biology (which was also excluded from the “cognitive hexagon” in the Sloan Foundation report). So, there are several mind sciences, some of which were included in the Sloan Foundation report’s definition of “cognitive science”, but I don’t see any science that corresponds to the label “Cognitive Science”.
To be more accurate and inclusive, I’ve been using “mind sciences”, but anything more accurate and inclusive than “cognitive science” might also work.
I agree and have been doing the same (sciences of the mind, mind sciences), mainly because cognitive science has (to me) become more closely associated with AI, even if there’s still ‘cognitive psychology’ and related neurosciences. The relation between minds and AI is still far from clear and is contested, so I find this label is inclusive of the contested cases and so allows me to move on to whatever I’m interested in discussing without endorsing a particular view on them.