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HISTORY OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE.

Both the symbolic and connectionist approaches to computational cognitive science can trace their origins to two major lines of investigation. First, there was the development of symbolic logic at the turn of the century and Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts's application of logic to the analysis of the behavior of neural networks (1943). Second, there were Alan Turing's analyses of computation (1936) and--using the Imitation Game (now known as the Turing Test)--of whether computers could think (1950). Cognitivism burst upon the scene in 1956. In that year, the following cognitive theories appeared: George Miller's theory of human short-term memory; Noam Chomsky's analysis of formal grammars; Jerome Bruner and colleagues' study of thinking, and Newell and Simon's Logic Theorist--the first artificial intelligence program (presented at the first artificial intelligence conference, at Dartmouth, organized by Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy). This was followed a few years later by Hilary Putnam's (1960) theory of Turing-machine functionalism as a solution to the classic philosophical problem of the relationship of mind and body. In 1979, the journal Cognitive Science appeared; two years later, the first annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was held (its proceedings are now published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Other major cognitive-science journals include: Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Cognition, Linguistics and Philosophy, Mind and Language, Minds and Machines, and Philosophical Psychology; in addition, most journals in the specific cognitive-science disciplines also have articles on cognitive science. Finally, there has been a surge recently of research centers and institutes of cognitive science, as well as graduate and undergradate degree programs, including university departments of cognitive science. (For a more detailed history, see Gardner 1985.)



William J. Rapaport
Fri Sep 6 15:53:47 EDT 1996