A Biological/Computational Approach to Culture(s) Is Cognitive Science

Beller, Bender, and Medin rehearse an often repeated statement (challenge 1a): “Cognitive science is not on the right track” because it “never took some of the crucial dimensions of cognition seriously.” Namely, “from the very beginning, they have excluded some fundamental dimensions of cognition from examination—affect, context, culture, and history [...]” (p. 345). To overcome this criticism, I suggest promoting the following perspective on cognitive science. A cognitive approach to any phenomenon—action planning, face recognition, language, culture, arts, religion, etc.—views it as the product of the human brain/mind (or, as the emergent product of interacting brains/minds). The focus on the brain invites biological aspects, while studying the mind entails the computer metaphor. Bottom-up (neuron-to-phenomenon) and top-down (phenomenon-to-neuron) approaches together aim to understand how information flow in the brain produces the observable abilities of the mind. Indeed, many in the first generations of cognitive scholars decided to deny, ignore, put in parenthesis, or underplay the above-mentioned “fundamental dimensions of cognition.” Yet I suggest viewing their decision as a—conscious or unconscious—research strategy, dealing first with (over)simplified cases. Imagine physics if Galilei and Newton had decided not to pursue their research for they could not satisfactorily account for drag and friction! Luckily, the above-mentioned dimensions are gradually reincorporated into cognitive science: not by throwing out the achievements of the earlier generations, but by developing them further. If cognitive science is about a biological/computational approach to functions of the brain/mind, then all such functions ought to interest cognitive science. Functions traditionally studied by humanities are not exceptions, and cognitive scientists must join