1 History and core themes

Two characteristics of cognitive science are central and obvious. First, it is cognitive, aiming toward empirical and theoretical understanding of cognition. Its founding disciplines addressed intelligence in humans (cognitive psychology) and computers (artificial intelligence), with special scrutiny given to language as a paradigmatic domain of human competence (linguistics). Over time, the understanding of what it is to be cognitive has expanded, diversified, and become more contentious. Second, it is interdisciplinary: ideas and methods of inquiry propagate across traditional boundaries, and collaborations thrive among the founding fields and also philosophy, sociology, anthropology, developmental psychology, education, and neuroscience. Some of these collaborations have created or reinvigorated interdisciplinary fields such as psycholinguistics, language acquisition, linguistic anthropology, cognitive sociology, computational linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience; others have contributed research strategies, especially computer simulation of mental activity; and many more have contributed to particular strands of inquiry. Beyond these, there are few if any core characteristics embraced by all cognitive scientists. Instead, there are themes that emerge as important in particular eras or approaches and also some dichotomies that unify advocates on each side but divide them from each other. To get more of the full story, see the Further Reading at chapter's end. Here we situate the mutable themes of cognitive science within a brief historical tour, organized as follows: