Blackwell Reference Online

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P hilosophy of mind An interdisciplinary investigation of human cognition and cognitive processes such as thinking, reasoning, memory, attention, learning, mental representation, perception, and problem solving. It emerged in the 1970s, and psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, computer science, and artificial intelligence all contribute to this enterprise. While artificial intelligence attempts to get computing machines to approximate a human mind, the basic idea of cognitive science is to view the human mind as a computer-like information processing system. It is hence an attempt to understand the human cognition system in terms of the developments of computer science and artificial intelligence. Initially cognitive science viewed computation as the manipulation of symbols, but its recent development has taken the form of connectionism or neural network modeling. “The basic inspiration of cognitive science went something like this: human beings do information processing.” Searle, in Bunnin and Tsui-James (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy ... log in or subscribe to read full text