ABSTRACT
The core focus of cognitive science is to relate the activities of mind, which are never directly observable from a third-person perspective, to those measures that are directly observable, measurable, and sometimes quantifiable from the crucial thirdperson perspective. Because the activities of mind either exist for us only as traditional language needing replacement (Churchland and Churchland 1998) or as influential, albeit invisible, perhaps emergent, transformations of information (O’Connor 2000; Clayton 2004), cognitive science begins by acknowledging the inferential nature of its work. Cognitive science, comprised of psychology, neuroscience, computer science,
linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy (Miller 2003), is thus central to future interdisciplinary scholarship and decision-making around science and religion, for two primary reasons. First, any perspectives from within religious communities, religious studies, and philosophy that would turn toward public or private decision-making about moral action, education, the environment, the law, and medicine must have a conception of human nature and/or human agency, which necessarily includes the mind. Second, cognitive science is the science that seeks to relate the psychological functions of information processing (in thought, emotion, intention, volition, valuation, agency) to the physically measurable signals from the human body (measures from the brain, heart, skin, eyes, breath, bodily posture, bodily movements). Without implying any reduction of psychology to biology or to computer science, cognitive science is the science concerned with testing hypotheses about the invisible processes of mind using the visible measures of the body, whether that body is organic and alive, or manufactured and computerized. Indeed, cognitive science is itself an interdisciplinary science because it is not only concerned with associating measurable internal processes in a carbon or silicon body with behavior, but it is centrally concerned with how the mind links these two. This concern with the mind is why experimental psychology is a core part of cognitive science. It is not true, as many students and even some psychologists say, that psychology is the science of behavior. As Noam Chomsky stated at the beginning of the cognitive turn in psychology, saying that psychology is the science of behavior is like saying that “physics
is the science of meter reading” (quoted in Miller 2003). Cognitive science is impossible to do in any complete fashion without models of mental processes, since without such models, the measurables (such as brain activity and behavior) have no meaning. What follows takes up the views of cognition in cognitive science and the
methods of cognitive science, prior to turning toward a brief introduction of major loci in cognitive science. Throughout, there is a heavy influence of experimental fields, particularly cognitive psychology, social psychology, information-processing models of mind, and experimental cognitive, affective, and social neuroscience. Less attention will be given to cognitive linguistics, anthropology, and phenomenology (see especially Zahavi 2001; Thompson 2007; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008), not because they are less important, but because of space limitations.
