Cognitive Sciences

Origins

The term cognitive science was coined in the 1970s to advocate a common set of concerns and ideas that form the intersection rather than just the union of all the fields that might be called cognitive sciences. There is no analogous interdisciplinary field called social science but rather a host of largely independent disciplines, such as sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology. Several fields are often placed among both the cognitive and the social sciences, including psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. This double placement is natural for fields that are concerned with the operations of individual minds and with the operations of minds in social contexts, as occurs in subfields such as social psychology, cognitive anthropology, and sociolinguistics.

Cognitive Sciences and Social Sciences: Relationship

Despite this overlap, there is an obvious difference in primary focus between the cognitive and social sciences, with the former concerned with the mental processes of individuals and the latter concerned with the social processes (mostly) of groups, such as companies and nations. Hence, we can use the term mind–group problem for the set of issues about the relation between the cognitive and social sciences. Progress in both the cognitive and the social sciences requires dealing with these issues, as is evident from recent interdisciplinary developments. For example, cultural psychology has been challenging the presuppositions of individualist cognitive psychology, and behavioral and neural economics have begun to provide alternatives to traditional approaches to economic analysis.

Dealing with the mind–group problem must begin with an understanding of the nature of the theories that are used to explain cognitive and social processes. Little is to be gained by viewing theories as sets of formalized universal statements, as the logical positivists advocated, because theories in both the cognitive and the social sciences rarely have this kind of structure. Instead, there is growing appreciation that cognitive and social theories can be better understood as descriptions of mechanisms, which are systems of parts whose interconnections produce regular changes. From this perspective, explanations of both cognitive and social phenomena consist of describing the mechanisms—parts and interactions—that causally produce the changes that require explanation. The relevant mechanisms are not just the simple push–pull interactions of Newtonian physics but can involve all the complexity of biological systems, including feedback relations and chaotic unpredictability. Then the mind–group problem takes on this form: What are the relations among the mental mechanisms relevant to explaining individual behavior and the social mechanisms relevant to explaining social behavior? This formulation is obviously controversial for practitioners of the cognitive and social sciences, who claim that explanations of human behavior cannot be mechanistic because they need to rely on introspection of self or empathic interpretation of others.

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