What is Cognitive Science?

Written by an assembly of leading researchers in the field, this volume provides an innovative and non-technical introduction to cognitive science, and the key issues that animate the field. Cognitive science is one of the few fields where modern developments in computer science and artificial intelligence promise to shed light on classical problems in psychology and the philosophy of the mind. Ancient questions of how we see the world, understand language, and reason - and even such exotic questions as how a material system can know about the outside world - are being explored with the powerful new conceptual prosthetics of computer modeling. We may, for the first time, be in a position to attempt an integrated theory of cognition based on ideas about cognitive architecture. Thus cognitive science offers the promise of bringing together modern conceptual tools and classical problems in a powerful new scholarly synthesis. The book is divided into sections on Mind, Vision, Language, and Neuroscience, and contains selections on the foundations of cognitive science, cognition development, reasoning, object recognition, eye movements, visual recognition, language processing and acquisition, optimality theory, and neuroscience. Students who are beginning their exploration of cognitive science will find both pedagogical tutorial essays to orient them to this exciting field, as well as more technical material, to provide a sense of how cognitive science is actually practised, at the state of the art.

Ernest Lepore is Director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous articles in philosophy of mind and is co-author (with Jerry Fodor) of Holism (Blackwell 1991). He is editor of Truth and Interpretation (Blackwell 1989) and co-editor (with Robert Van Gulick) of John Searle and His Critics (Blackwell 1992), as well as general editor of the series "Philosophers and Their Critics", also published by Blackwell.

Zenon Pylyshyn joined the faculty of Rutgers University as Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science in 1994. Pylyshyn has published over 60 scientific articles and book chapters, including a paper designated as a Science Citation Classic, What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain, Psychological Bulletin, (1973). He is on the editorial boards of eight scientific journals and on the International Scientific Advisory Board of the BC Advanced Systems Institute.