Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 9, September 2022.

Núñez et al (2019) argue (1) that the field of Cognitive Science has failed, in that it has not arrived at a cohesive theory, and (2) that this is contrary to the intentions of the founders. Their survey of publication and citation patterns bears out the lack of a cohesive theory and also provides corroboration for (3) the concern that the field is becoming unbalanced, with psychology overweighted (Gentner, 2010). I will argue against points (1) and (2), but agree with (...) point (3). My central claim is that cognitive science was never meant to have one unified theoretical framework, nor should it have. (shrink)

Cognitive science was established as an interdisciplinary domain of research in the 1970s. Since then, the domain has flourished, despite disputes concerning its interdisciplinarity. Multiple methods exist for the assessment of interdisciplinary research. The present study proposes a methodology for quantifying interdisciplinary aspects of research in cognitive science. We propose models for text similarity analysis that provide helpful information about the relationship between publications and their specific research fields, showing potential as a robust measure of interdisciplinarity. We designed and developed (...) models utilizing the Doc2Vec method for analyzing cognitive science and related fields. Our findings reveal that cognitive science collaborates closely with most constituent disciplines. For instance, we found a balanced engagement between several constituent fields—including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science—that contribute significantly to cognitive science. On the other hand, anthropology and neuroscience have made limited contributions. In our analysis, we find that the scholarly domain of cognitive science has been exhibiting overt interdisciplinary for the past several decades. (shrink)

A recent article (Núñez et al., 2019) claims that cognitive science, while starting off as a multidisciplinary enterprise, has “failed to transition to a mature inter‐disciplinary coherent field.” Two indicators reported in support of this claim target one of the two journals of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science, depicting cognitive science as an increasingly monodisciplinary subfield which is dominated by psychology. With a focus on the society's other journal, Topics in Cognitive Science, the present commentary reveals a greater degree (...) of interdisciplinarity and discusses the relative values of diversity and integration for the field. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 6-13, January 2022.

A recent issue of Topics in Cognitive Science featured 11 thoughtful commentaries responding to our article “What happened to cognitive science?” (Núñez et al., 2019). Here, we identify several themes that arose in those commentaries and respond to each. Crucial to understanding our original article is the fundamental distinction between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavors: Cognitive science began (and has stayed) as multidisciplinary but has failed to move on to form a cohesive interdisciplinary field. We clarify and elaborate our original argument (...) and reiterate the importance of a data‐driven evaluation of the current status of the field, which exhibits a marked disciplinary imbalance, a lack of a coherent conceptual core, and a striking absence of a consistent curriculum in the institutions that grant degrees in this domain. Half a century after the creation of cognitive science, it may now be a good time to revisit goals and visions for how to best approach the ever‐fascinating scientific study of the mind(s). (shrink)

Cognitive science has converged in many ways with cognitive psychology, but while also maintaining a distinctive interdisciplinary nature. Here we further characterize this existing state of the field before proposing how it might be reconceptualized toward a broader and more distinct, and thus more stable, position in the realm of sciences.