What is cognitive science?

While I’m thinking about definitions, I came up against the problem of defining “cognitive science” when I wrote my dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” back in the Ancient Days. Cognitive science was rather new and I couldn’t expect literary critics to know what it was. For that matter, no one really knew what it was nor, to this day, does anyone quite know what it is. It’s just a bunch of ideas and themes about the mind, originally inspired by computing.

Anyhow, I chose to say that cognitive science was the study of the relationships between: 

1) behavior,
2) computation,
3) neuroanatomy and physiology,
4) ontogeny, and
5) phylogeny. 

Roughly speaking, behavior is what animals do. Computation is, shall we say (I’ll say a bit more shortly) what nervous systems to in linking perception and action. Neuroanatomy is about the regions of the brain and peripheral nervous system. Cognitive neuroscience, then, is about the relations among neuroanatomy & physiology, behavior, and computation. Ontogeny is the maturation of animals from birth to adulthood – I read a great deal about human developmental psychology early in my career.

As for computing, consider a passage from a most interesting book by Peter Gärdenfors, Conceptual Spaces (MIT 2000) p. 253:

On the symbolic level, searching, matching, of symbol strings, and rule following are central. On the subconceptual level, pattern recognition, pattern transformation, and dynamic adaptation of values are some examples of typical computational processes. And on the intermediate conceptual level, vector calculations, coordinate transformations, as well as other geometrical operations are in focus. Of course, one type of calculation can be simulated by one of the others (for example, by symbolic methods on a Turing machine). A point that is often forgotten, however, is that the simulations will, in general be computationally more complex than the process that is simulated.

I rather suspect that all of these kinds of processes take place in the human brain.

In my way of thinking, though, only the symbolic level processes are irreducibly computational as implemented in the human brain. The other processes are implemented in some non-computational way. That is to say, we can model or simulate anything with computing given an appropriate description of the phenomenon. But that doesn’t mean that the phenomenon is itself computational. The simulation of an atomic explosion is very different from an explosion itself. The former is computational, the latter is not.

Thus, I have been attracted by Walter Freeman’s account of neural ensembles of complex dynamical systems. He has done computer simulations as part of his overall investigation. But that doesn’t mean he thought of those ensembles as performing some computations. No, he thought of them as physical systems with many interacting parts.

So, that second element in that five-way correspondence likely involves more than computing. Just what, that’s not at all clear.