Is cognitive science washed up?

Rafael Núñez, Michael Allen, Richard Gao, Carson Miller Rigoli, Josephine Relaford-Doyle and Arturs Semenuks, What happened to cognitive science?, Nature Human Behaviour (2019)

Abstract

More than a half-century ago, the ‘cognitive revolution’, with the influential tenet ‘cognition is computation’, launched the investigation of the mind through a multidisciplinary endeavour called cognitive science. Despite significant diversity of views regarding its definition and intended scope, this new science, explicitly named in the singular, was meant to have a cohesive subject matter, complementary methods and integrated theories. Multiple signs, however, suggest that over time the prospect of an integrated cohesive science has not materialized. Here we investigate the status of the field in a data-informed manner, focusing on four indicators, two bibliometric and two socio-institutional. These indicators consistently show that the devised multi-disciplinary program failed to transition to a mature inter-disciplinary coherent field. Bibliometrically, the field has been largely subsumed by (cognitive) psychology, and educationally, it exhibits a striking lack of curricular consensus, raising questions about the future of the cognitive science enterprise.

While I hopped on board cognitive science during my graduate years – I filed a dissertation on Cognitive Science and Literary Theory in 1978 – I can't say I find this surprising.

From the discussion:

The cognitive science enterprise faced, from the start, substantial challenges to integration. Over the decades, things became ever more elusive. Steady challenges to the fundamental tenets of the field, failures in classical artificial intelligence handling common sense and everyday language, major difficulties in integrating cultural variation and anthropology, as well as developments in brain research, genomics and evolutionary sciences seem to have gradually turned the enthusiastic initial common effort into a rather miscellaneous collection of academic practices that no longer share common goals and paradigms. Indeed, in scientometrics, unlike successful cases of interdisciplinary integration such as biochemistry, cognitive science has been referred to as the textbook case of failed interdisciplinarity and disappearance.

This failed integration has also been aggravated by the fact that over the years the term ‘cognitive’ has become highly polysemous and theoretically loaded, even in inconsistent ways. For instance, in cognitive psychology it primarily denotes information-processing psychology, following influential work in the 1960s76 that saw cognitive science as essentially the marriage between psychology and artificial intelligence, in which neuroscience and the study of culture played virtually no role. Thus, cognitive psychology doesn’t just designate a subfield of psychology that studies cogni-tion and intelligence. Rather, it usually refers to a specific theoretical approach and research program in psychology. As a consequence, research on thought, language and reasoning based on, say, the work of Jean Piaget or Lev Vygotsky—who studied the psychology of thought, reasoning, and language—is normally not considered cognitive psychology. Indeed, in recent cognitive psychology textbooks, the work of these great pioneers is not even mentioned. When attached to linguistics, ‘cognitive’ denotes an entirely different thing. ‘Cognitive linguistics’ refers to a specific field that emerged in the 1980s as an explicit alternative to Chomskian linguistics, defending the view that language is not a special-purpose module but is governed by general principles of cognition and conceptualization. Thus, the term ‘cognitive’ in cognitive linguistics designates a school in linguistics that it is fundamentally opposed to—and inconsistent with—Chomskian linguistics, which, with its formal treatment of language, had appealed to the computer scientists, anti-behaviourist psychologists and analytic philosophers of the 1950s and earned it a privileged founding role in cognitive science in the first place.

Another founding role was played by psychology, which, according to previous findings and the indicators analyzed here, has become decidedly overrepresented in cognitive science. But rather than being a “conquest” of the field, there seems to be a progressive disinterest on the part of other disciplines in investigating the mind in terms of the computationalist–representationalist tenets defined by the cognitive revolution.

Addendum, from my notes a couple of years ago: 

So what do the cognitive sciences know, really?

On the one hand, there’s nothing uniting them like evolution unites the biological sciences. So one might say that they know nothing. But, a lot of work’s been done in the last half to three-quarters of a century and, really, it’s not nothing. There’s something there; in fact, quite a lot. So we have to hold these two things in the mind at the same time: At one and the same time we know a lot and we know nothing.