Overview

In the late 1970s cognitive science became an established part of the intellectual landscape. At that time an academic field crystallized around a basic set of problems, techniques, and theoretical assumptions. These problems, techniques, and theoretical assumptions came from many different disciplines and areas. Many of them had been around for a fairly long time. What was new was the idea of putting them together as a way of studying the mind.

Cognitive science is at heart an interdisciplinary endeavor. In interdisciplinary research great innovations come about simply because people see how to combine things that are already out there but have never been put together before. One of the best ways to understand cognitive science is to try to think your way back until you can see how things might have looked to its early pioneers. They were exploring a landscape in which certain regions were well mapped and well understood, but where there were no standard ways of getting from one region to another. An important part of what they did was to show how these different regions could be connected in order to create an interdisciplinary science of the mind.

In this chapter we go back to the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s – to explore the prehistory of cognitive science. We will be looking at some of the basic ideas and currents of thought that, in retrospect, we can see as feeding into what came to be known as cognitive science.