Where is Cognitive Science Now?

An important goal of cognitive science, identified by many earlier practitioners and proponents of the field, was to form a well-integrated study of the mind within a coherent theoretical framework that would bring together several existing disciplines including cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and anthropology (Collins, 1977; Gardner, 1987; Miller, 2003; Boden, 2006). There is little doubt that cognitive science is, and has been, multi-disciplinary — it fosters the interchange of ideas from multiple disciplines. However, it is less clear whether cognitive science has developed into the envisioned integrated inter-discipline, with a cohesive theoretical framework and common methodologies (Van den Besselaar & Heimeriks, 2001). Although often used interchangeably, multi- and inter-disciplinarity are different (Choi & Pak, 2006) and have distinct educational, theoretical, and institutional implications. Speakers in this symposium will address this question using qualitative and quantitative evidence and further discuss their visions for the future of the field given its current status.