La revolucin cognitiva: una perspectiva histrica

La ciencia cognitiva es un nio de los aos 1950, el producto de una poca en

que la psicologa, la antropologa y la lingstica se redefinen a s mismos y
ciencias de la computacin y la neurociencia como disciplinas viniera a la
existencia. La psicologa no poda participar en la revolucin cognitiva hasta
que se haba liberado de conductismo, restaurando as la cognicin a la
respetabilidad cientfica. Para entonces, estaba claro en varias disciplinas que
la solucin a algunos de sus problemas depende de manera crucial de la
solucin de problemas tradicionalmente asignados a otras disciplinas. La
colaboracin fue llamado para: ste es un relato personal de cmo se produjo.
Cualquiera puede hacer historia. Slo un gran hombre puede
escribirla.

El aforismo de Oscar Wilde es apropiado. En el momento, la sugerencia de que

estbamos haciendo historia habra sido presuntuoso. Pero cualquiera puede
hacer historia; escritura la historia es otra cosa. S algo de la beca necesario y
nada que se aproxime lo tiene entrado en la historia que voy a contar aqu.
Pero yo ofrezco este personal cuenta en la esperanza de que pudiera interesar
y ayudar a la verdadera historiadores de la ciencia. En el momento que estaba
pasando, no me haba dado cuenta de que yo era, de hecho, un revolucionario,
y dos historias diferentes se hicieron entrelazados en mi vida. Ellos
desarrollaron simultneamente pero contar la historia psicolgica primero
La revolucin cognitiva en psicologa
La revolucin cognitiva en psicologa era una contrarrevolucin La primera
revolucin se produjo mucho antes, cuando un grupo de psiclogos
experimentales, influenciado por Pavlov y otros fisilogos, propuso redefinir la
psicologa como la ciencia de la conducta. Argumentaron que los fenmenos
mentales no son observables pblicamente. La nica evidencia objetiva
disponible es, y debe ser, conductual. Al cambiar el tema para el estudio del
comportamiento, la psicologa podra convertirse en una ciencia objetiva
basada en las leyes cientficas de la conducta
La revolucin del comportamiento transform experimental la psicologa en los
EE.UU. La percepcin se convirti en la discriminacin, la memoria se convirti
en el aprendizaje, el lenguaje se convirti en la conducta verbal, la inteligencia
se convirti en lo que prueba las pruebas de inteligencia. la vez que fui a la
escuela de posgrado en Harvard a principios del 1940 La transformacin fue
completa. Fui educado para estudiar el comportamiento y aprend a traducir
mis ideas en la nueva jerga del conductismo. Como yo estaba ms interesado

en el habla y la audicin, la traduccin a veces se convirti en complicado. Pero

su reputacin como cientfico podra depender lo bien que se jug el truco. En
1951, publiqu Lenguaje y Comunicacin [1],
un libro que surgi a partir de los cuatro aos de la enseanza de un curso en
Harvard titulado "La Psicologa del Lenguaje. En el prefacio, escrib: "El sesgo
es conductista - no fanticamente conductista, pero ciertamente empaada por
una preferencia. hay no parece ser un tipo ms cientfico de sesgo, o, si no Es
decir, que resulta ser el conductismo, despus de todo. "Como he ledo que
reserve hoy es eclctica, no conductista. Unos aos despus BF Skinner public
Verbal Behavior [2], un verdadero tratamiento conductual del lenguaje y la
comunicacin. por Normas de Skinner, mi libro tena poco o nada que ver con
el comportamiento. En 1951, al parecer, todava me esperaba ganar cientfica
respetabilidad jurando lealtad al conductismo. cinco aos ms tarde, inspirado
por sus colegas como Noam Chomsky y Jerry Bruner, yo haba dejado de
pretender ser un conductista. As que salgo con la revolucin cognitiva en
psicologa para esos aos en la dcada de 1950.

Limitaciones de la teora de la informacin Durante esos aos yo

personalmente hice frustrado en mi los intentos de aplicar la teora de la
informacin de Claude Shannon a la psicologa. Despus de algunos xitos
iniciales he podido extenderla ms all el propio anlisis de Shannon de la
carta secuencias en textos escritos. El procesos de Markov en que se bas el
anlisis de Shannon del lenguaje tenan la virtud de ser compatible con el
estmulo-respuesta anlisis favorecido por los conductistas. Pero la informacin
medicin se basa en probabilidades y cada vez ms las probabilidades parecan
ms interesante que su valores logartmicos, y ni las probabilidades ni sus
logaritmos arrojan mucha luz sobre lo psicolgico procesos que fueron
responsables de los ismos. Por lo tanto, yo estaba listo para la alternativa de
Chomsky a Procesos de Markov. Una vez que entend que Shannon Procesos de
Markov no podan converger en lenguaje natural, Empec a aceptar la teora
sintctica como una ms en cuenta la procesos cognitivos responsables de los
aspectos estructurales del lenguaje humano. Las reglas gramaticales que rigen
frases y oraciones no son el comportamiento. son hiptesis mentalistas sobre
los procesos cognitivos responsable de las conductas verbales que
observamos.
El fin del conductismo conductismo era una aventura emocionante para la
psicologa experimental, pero a mediados de la dcada de 1950 se hizo
evidente que no poda tener xito. Como dijo Chomsky, que define la psicologa
como la ciencia de la conducta era como la definicin de la fsica como la
ciencia de la lectura del medidor. Si la psicologa cientfica tuviera xito,
conceptos mentalistas tendran que integrar y explicar los datos de

comportamiento. Todava ramos reacios a utilizar trminos como

"mentalismo" para describir lo que se necesita, por lo que hablamos de la
cognicin en su lugar.
Independientemente de lo que llamamos, la contra-revolucin cognitiva en
psicologa trajo a la mente de nuevo en la psicologa experimental. Creo que es
importante recordar que la mente nunca haba desaparecido de la psicologa
social o clnica. No fue hasta los experimentadores en los EE.UU. que en
realidad crean que el conductismo funcionara. En mi propio caso, cuando me
convert insatisfechos en Harvard entre estricta conductismo de BF Skinner y
SS Stevens '
psicofsica, me dirig a la psicologa social de Jerry Bruner y en 1960 que llev a
la creacin en Harvard del Centro de Estudios Cognitivos. Grupo de Bruner en
Bow Street haba estado llamando a s mismos el 'Proyecto Cognicin' por
algn tiempo, as que simplemente lo cambi a partir de un proyecto para un
centro. Bruner obtuvo una subvencin de la Carnegie Corporation de Nueva
York y Dean Bundy nos dio espacio para albergar la empresa Hemos reunido un
grupo de jvenes graduados brillantes y unos pocos estudiosos de alto nivel
que comparten nuestros intereses. Peter Wason, Nelson Goodman y Noam
Chomsky tuvo la mayor influencia en mi forma de pensar en ese momento.
El conductismo floreci principalmente en los EE.UU. y esta revolucin
cognitiva en psicologa reabri la comunicacin con algunos distinguidos
psiclogos en el extranjero. en Cambridge, Reino Unido, la obra de Sir Frederic
Bartlett sobre la memoria y el pensamiento se haba quedado afectado por el
conductismo. en Ginebra, las ideas de Jean Piaget en las mentes de los nios
haba inspirado a un pequeo ejrcito de seguidores. Y en Mosc, A. R. Luria
fue uno de los primeros en ver el cerebro y la mente como un todo. Ninguno de
estos tres pas un tiempo en el Centro, pero sabamos bien su trabajo. Siempre
dudamos de nosotros mismos pensamos en esas personas y cobr aliento de
su logros. Estoy feliz de decir que el Centro de Harvard para Cognitiva Estudios
fue un xito. Los jvenes graduados brillantes crecieron hasta convertirse en
psiclogos importantes sin miedo de las palabras como la mente y la
expectativa y la percepcin y la memoria. as as fue como experiment la
revolucin cognitiva en psicologa
La revolucin cognitiva y la ciencia cognitiva Mientras los psiclogos
experimentales se replantean la definicin de la psicologa, otros
acontecimientos importantes se estaban produciendo en otros lugares. La
ciberntica de Norbert Wiener fue ganando popularidad, Marvin Minsky y John
McCarthy estaban inventando la inteligencia artificial, y Alan Newell y Herb
Simon estaban usando las computadoras para simular los procesos cognitivos.
Por ltimo, Chomsky fue en solitario redefinir la lingstica En el Addendum
Histrico de Newell y Simon problema humano Resolver [3] que dicen: '1956

podran adoptarse como el ao crtico para el desarrollo del procesamiento de

la informacin psicologa "(p. 878). Esto no es difcil de justificar. 1956 fue el
ao en que McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon y Nat Rochester realizaron una
conferencia sobre la inteligencia artificial en el Dartmouth al que asistieron casi
todos los que trabajan en el campo en ese momento. En 1956 Shannon y
McCarthy editar Estudios Autmatas [4], y Minsky hizo circular un informe
tcnico que, despus de muchas revisiones, y 5 aos ms tarde, se convirti en
su influyente artculo, 'Pasos hacia la inteligencia artificial "[5]. Fue tambin en
1956 cuando Jerry Bruner, Jackie Goodenough y George Austin public un
estudio del pensamiento [6], que tomaron en serio la nocin de estrategias
cognitivas. En 1956 la teora de deteccin de seales se aplic a la percepcin
por Tanner, Swets, Birdsall y otros en ICHIGAN. Publiqu un artculo titulado 'El
nmero mgico siete, ms o menos wo' [7] describe algunos lmites en nuestra
capacidad humana para procesar la informacin. En 1956 la sala Goodenough
y Floyd Lounsbury publicaron varios artculos sobre anlisis componencial que
se convirti en modelo para la antropologa cognitiva, y JB Carroll editar una
coleccin de trabajos de Benjamin Lee Whorf sobre los efectos del lenguaje en
el pensamiento. En resumen, 1956 fue un buen ao para los interesados en
teoras de la mente, pero fue slo ligeramente mejor que los aos
inmediatamente anteriores y posteriores. Muchos estaban montando las olas
que comenzaron durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial: los de la teora del servo,
teora de la informacin, la teora de deteccin de seales, teora de la
computacin y los propios ordenadores.
Momento de la concepcin
Newell y Simon estaban en lo correcto al poner un dedo en 1956, que no slo
fue crucial en su propio desarrollo, sino para todos nosotros. De hecho, puedo
reducirla an ms. Salgo con el momento de la concepcin de la ciencia
cognitiva como 11 de septiembre 1956, el segundo da de un simposio
organizado por el "Grupo de Inters Especial en Teora de la Informacin" en el
Instituto de Tecnologa de Massachusetts [8]. En ese momento, por supuesto,
nadie se dio cuenta de que algo especial haba ocurrido para que nadie pens
que necesitaba un nombre; eso vino mucho despus. El presidente del comit
organizador fue Peter Elias, quien haba llegado recientemente en el MIT de
una beca junior en Harvard. El primer da, 10 de septiembre, se dedic a la
teora de la codificacin, pero es el segundo da del simposio que yo considero
que es el momento de la concepcin de la ciencia cognitiva. La maana
comenz con un artculo de Newell y Simon en su 'mquina lgica'. El segundo
documento era de IBM: Nat Rochester y sus colaboradores haban usado la
computadora ms grande entonces disponible (un IBM 704 con una memoria
de ncleos 2048 palabras) para poner a prueba la teora neuropsicolgica de
Donald Hebb de asambleas celulares. Victor Yngve entonces dio una charla
sobre el anlisis estadstico de las lagunas y su relacin con la sintaxis. La
contribucin de Noam Chomsky utiliza teora de la informacin como hoja para

una exposicin pblica de transformacin la gramtica generativa. Elias

coment que otros lingistas le haba dicho que el lenguaje tiene toda la
precisin de las matemticas, pero Chomsky fue la primera lingista para
respaldar el reclamo. Su papel 1956 contena las ideas que l ampli un ao
ms tarde en su monografa, Estructuras sintcticas [9], que inici una
revolucin cognitiva en lingstica terica. Para completar el segundo da, G. C.
Szikali describi algunas experimentos sobre la velocidad de reconocimiento
perceptivo, yo hablamos de cmo podemos evitar el cuello de botella creado
por nuestra memoria a corto plazo limitado, y Swets y Birdsall explic la
importancia de la teora de deteccin de seal para el reconocimiento de
percepcin. El simposio concluy al da siguiente. Dej el simposio con una
conviccin, ms intuitiva que racional, que la psicologa experimental, la
lingstica terica y la simulacin por ordenador de los procesos cognitivos
eran todas las piezas de un todo ms amplio, y que el futuro iba a ver una
elaboracin progresiva y la coordinacin de sus preocupaciones compartidas.

El nacimiento de la ciencia cognitiva

Para 1960 estaba claro que algo interdisciplinario estaba sucediendo. En
Harvard llambamos estudios cognitivos, de la Carnegie-Mellon que llamamos
en psicologa del procesamiento de informacin, y en La Jolla que llamamos
ciencia cognitiva.
Lo que usted llama en realidad no importa hasta 1976, cuando la Fundacin
Alfred P. Sloan se interes. La Fundacin Sloan acababa de completar un gran
exitoso programa de apoyo a un nuevo campo llamado dos vicepresidentes de
la Fundacin, Steve White y Al Singer 'neurociencia "y, pensaban que el
prximo paso sera cerrar la brecha entre el cerebro y la mente. Necesitaban
alguna manera para referirse a esta nueva etapa y que seleccionaron "ciencia
cognitiva." Ellos crearon un Programa Especial de Sloan en Ciencia Cognitiva
con el fin de explorar las posibilidades.
Me enter de la participacin de la Fundacin en 1977 de Kenneth A.
Klivington, que estaba en el personal de la Fundacin. Mi recuerdo es que Ken
haba hablado con Marvin Minsky y otros en el MIT y fue teniendo en cuenta la
recomendacin de que la Fundacin invertir en inteligencia artificial.
Descaradamente, sostuve que en ese caso el dinero de la Fundacin se
gastara la compra de computadoras. Afirm que la IA no era ms que parte de
un movimiento mucho ms grande. En ese momento la Fundacin Sloan era
sensible a la acusacin de que se haba convertido en parte de la dotacin del
MIT, as que mi cabildeo para un grupo ms amplio fue bien recibida.

Actividades interdisciplinarias
Yo argument que al menos seis disciplinas participaron: la psicologa, la
lingstica, la neurociencia, la ciencia de la computacin, la antropologa y la
filosofa. Vi la psicologa, la lingstica y la informtica como un elemento
central, los otros tres como perifrico. Estos campos representan, y siguen
representando, una divisin institucional conveniente pero intelectualmente
torpe. Cada, por accidente histrico, haba heredado una manera particular de
ver la cognicin y cada uno haba progresado lo suficiente como para
reconocer que la solucin a algunos de sus problemas depende de manera
crucial de la solucin de los problemas tradicionalmente asignados a otras
disciplinas. La Fundacin Sloan acept mi argumento y un comit de personas
de los diversos campos fue montado para resumir el estado de la ciencia
cognitiva en 1978, y para escribir un informe recomendando las medidas
adecuadas. El comit se reuni una vez, en Kansas City. Pronto se hizo evidente
que todo el mundo conoca su propio campo y haba odo hablar de dos o tres
hallazgos interesantes en otros campos. Despus de horas de debate, los
expertos en la disciplina X crecieron dispuestos a hacer ningn juicio acerca de
la disciplina Y, y as sucesivamente. Al final, ellos hicieron lo que tenan
competencia para hacerlo: cada resumi su propio campo y los editores Samuel Jay Keyser, Edward Walker y yo mismo - remendado un informe
(Keyser, SJ, Miller, GA, y Walker, E ., Ciencia Cognitiva en 1978. un informe de
sub indito a la Fundacin Alfred P. Sloan, Nueva York). Nuestro informe tena
una figura, que se reproduce aqu (Fig. 1). Los seis campos estn conectados
en un hexgono. Cada lnea de la figura representa un rea de investigacin
interdisciplinaria que estaba bien definida en 1978 y que implic la
herramientas de las dos disciplinas que unidos entre s. Por lo tanto, la
ciberntica utilizan conceptos desarrollados por la informtica para modelar
funciones cerebrales dilucidados en neurociencia. Del mismo modo, la ciencia y
la lingstica informtica ya estaban vinculados a travs de la lingstica
computacional. La lingstica y la psicologa estn unidos por la
psicolingstica, la antropologa y la neurociencia estn vinculados por los
estudios de la evolucin del cerebro, y as sucesivamente. Hoy en da, en mi
opinin, todos los quince posibles vnculos podran crear instancias con la
investigacin respetable, y los enlaces once vimos como existente en 1978 se
han fortalecido considerablemente. El informe fue presentado, revisado por el
comit de expertos tro, y aceptado por la Fundacin Sloan El programa que se
inici previstas subvenciones para varias universidades con la condicin de que
los fondos sean utilizado para promover la comunicacin entre las disciplinas.
uno de las subvenciones ms pequeas fueron a Michael Gazzaniga, entonces
en la Escuela de Medicina de Cornell, y le permiti iniciar lo que ha convertido
desde entonces en la neurociencia cognitiva. como consecuencia del programa
Sloan, muchos eruditos se convirtieron en Conocer y tolerante con el trabajo en

otras disciplinas. para varios aos, seminarios interdisciplinarios, coloquios y

simposios floreci
Ciencias cognitivas hoy

Por desgracia, la Fundacin Alfred P. Sloan no sigui esta iniciativa, pero las
interacciones estimulados a principios de 1980 han dejado su huella. Algunos
veteranos de aquellos das se preguntan si el programa tuvo xito, y si
realmente hay algo ahora que podemos llamar "ciencia cognitiva". Por mi
parte, prefiero hablar de las ciencias cognitivas, en plural. Pero el sueo
original de una ciencia unificada que descubrir las capacidades de
representacin y computacionales de la mente humana y su realizacin
estructural y funcional en el cerebro humano todava tiene un atractivo que no
puedo resistir.

Ingles
The cognitive revolution:a historical perspective

Cognitive science is a child of the 1950s, the product of a time when

psychology, anthropology and linguistics were redefining themselves and
computer science and neuroscience as disciplines were coming into existence.
Psychology could not participate in the cognitive revolution until it had freed
itself from behaviorism, thus restoring cognition to scientific respectability. By
then, it was becoming clear in several disciplines that the solution to some of
their problems depends crucially on solving problems traditionally allocated to
other disciplines. Collaboration was called for: this is a personal account of how
it came about.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Oscar Wildes aphorism is appropriate. At the time, thesuggestion that we were

making history would have been presumptuous. But anybody can make history;
writing history is another matter. I know something of the scholarship required
and nothing approaching it has gone into the story I will tell here. But I offer
this personal account in the hope that it might interest and help the real
historians of science. At the time it was happening I did not realize that I was,

in fact, a revolutionary, and two different stories became intertwined in my life.

They unfolded concurrently but I will tell the psychological story first

The cognitive revolution in psychology

The cognitive revolution in psychology was a counterrevolution The first
revolution occurred much earlier when a group of experimental psychologists,
influenced by Pavlov and other physiologists, proposed to redefine psychology
as the science of behavior. They argued that mental events are not publicly
observable. The only objective evidence available is, and must be, behavioral.
By changing the subject to the study of behavior, psychology could become an
objective science based on scientific laws of behavior
The behavioral revolution transformed experimental psychology in the US.
Perception became discrimination, memory became learning, language became
verbal behavior, intelligence became what intelligence tests test.
the time I went to graduate school at Harvard in the early 1940s the
transformation was complete. I was educated to study behavior and I learned
to translate my ideas into the new jargon of behaviorism. As I was most
interested in speech and hearing, the translation sometimes became tricky. But
ones reputation as a scientist could depend on how well the trick was played.
In 1951, I published Language and Communication [1], a book that grew out of
four years of teaching a course at Harvard entitled The Psychology of
Language. In the preface, I wrote: The bias is behaviorist not fanatically
behaviorist, but certainly tainted by a preference. There does not seem to be a
more scientific kind of bias, or, if there is, it turns out to be behaviorism after
all. As I read that book today it is eclectic, not behaviorist. A few years later
B.F. Skinner published Verbal Behavior [2], a trulybehavioral treatment of
language and communication. By Skinners standards, my book had little or
nothing to do with behavior. In 1951, I apparently still hoped to gain scientific
respectability by swearing allegiance to behaviorism. Five years later, inspired
by such colleagues as Noam Chomsky and Jerry Bruner, I had stopped
pretending to be a behaviorist. So I date the cognitive revolution in psychology
to those years in the early 1950s.
Limitations of information theory During those years I personally became
frustrated in my attempts to apply Claude Shannons theory of information to
psychology. After some initial success I was unable to extend it beyond
Shannons own analysis of letter sequences in written texts. The Markov
processes on which Shannons analysis of language was based had the virtue
of being compatible with the stimulusresponse analysis favored by
behaviorists. But information measurement is based on probabilities and
increasingly the probabilities seemed more interesting that their logarithmic

values, and neither the probabilities nor their logarithms shed much light on
the psychological processes that were responsible for them. I was therefore
ready for Chomskys alternative to Markov processes. Once I understood that
Shannons Markov processes could not converge on natural language,I began
to accept syntactic theory as a better account of the cognitive processes
responsible for the structural aspects of human language. The grammatical
rules that govern phrases and sentences are not behavior. they are mentalistic
hypotheses about the cognitive processes responsible for the verbal behaviors
we observe.
The end of behaviorism Behaviorism was an exciting adventure for
experimental psychology but by the mid-1950s it had become apparent that it
could not succeed. As Chomsky remarked, defining psychology as the science
of behavior was like defining physics as the science of meter reading. If
scientific psychology were to succeed, mentalistic concepts would have to
integrate and explain the behavioral data. We were still reluctant to use such
terms as mentalism to describe what was needed, so we talked about
cognition instead.
Whatever we called it, the cognitive counter-revolution in psychology brought
the mind back into experimental psychology. I think it is important to
remember that the mind had never disappeared from social or clinical
psychology. It was only experimentalists in the US who really believed
that behaviorism would work. In my own case, when I became dissatisfied at
Harvard between B.F. Skinners strict behaviorism and S.S. Stevens
psychophysics, I turned to Jerry Bruners social psychology and in 1960 that led
to the creation at Harvard of the Center for Cognitive Studies. Bruners group at
Bow
Street had been calling themselves the Cognition Project for some time, so we
simply changed it from a project to a center. Bruner obtained a grant from the
Carnegie Corporation of New York and Dean Bundy gave us space to house the
enterprise We assembled a group of bright young graduates and a few senior
scholars who shared our interests. Peter Wason, Nelson Goodman and Noam
Chomsky had the most influence on my thinking at that time.
Behaviorism flourished primarily in the US and this cognitive revolution in
psychology reopened communication with some distinguished psychologists
abroad. In Cambridge, UK, Sir Frederic Bartletts work on memory and thinking
had remained unaffected by behaviorism. In Geneva, Jean Piagets insights into
the minds of children had inspired a small army of followers. And in Moscow,
A.R. Luria was one of the first to see the brain and mind as a whole. None of
these three spent time at the Center but we knew their work well. Whenever

we doubted ourselves we thought of such people and took courage from their
accomplishments. Im happy to say the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies
was a success. The bright young graduates grew up to become important
psychologists unafraid of words like mind and expectation and perception and
memory. So that was how I experienced the cognitive revolution in psychology
The cognitive revolution and cognitive science While experimental
psychologists were rethinking the definition of psychology, other important
developments were occurring elsewhere. Norbert Wieners cybernetics was
gaining popularity, Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy were inventing artificial
intelligence, and Alan Newell and Herb Simon were using computers to
simulate cognitive processes. Finally, Chomsky was single-handedly redefining
linguistics In the Historical Addendum to Newell and Simons Human Problem
Solving [3]they say: 1956 could be taken as the critical year for the
development of information processing psychology (p. 878). This is not difficult
to justify. 1956 was the year that McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon and Nat
Rochester held a conference on artificial intelligence at Dartmouth that was
attended by nearly everyone working in the field at that time. In 1956 Shannon
and McCarthy edited Automata Studies [4], and Minsky circulated a technical
report that, after many revisions, and 5 years later, became his influential
article, Steps toward artificial intelligence [5]. It was also in 1956 that Jerry
Bruner, Jackie Goodenough and George Austin published A Study of Thinking
[6], which took seriously the notion of cognitive strategies. In 1956 signaldetection theory was applied to perception by Tanner, Swets, Birdsall and
others at ichigan. I published an article entitled The magical number seven,
plus or minus wo[7]describing some limits on our human capacity to process
information. In 1956 Ward Goodenough and Floyd Lounsbury published several
articles on componential analysis that became models for cognitive
anthropology, and J.B. Carroll edited a collection of papers by Benjamin Lee
Whorf on the effects of language on thought. In short, 1956 was a good year
for those interested in theories of the mind, but it was only slightly better than
the years just preceding and following. Many were riding the waves that began
during World War II: those of servo theory, information theory, signal-detection
theory, computer theory and computers themselves.
Moment of conception
Newell and Simon were right to put a finger on 1956, which was not only
crucial in their own development but for all of us. Indeed, I can narrow it down
even further. I date the moment of conception of cognitive science as 11
September, 1956, the second day of a symposium organized by the Special
Interest Group in Information Theory at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology [8]. At the time, of course, no one realized that something special
had happened so no one thought that it needed a name; that came much later.
The chairman of the organizing committee was Peter Elias, who had only

recently arrived at MIT from a Junior Fellowship at Harvard. The first day, 10
September, was devoted to coding theory, but it is the second day of the
symposium that I take to be the moment of conception for cognitive science.
The morning began with a paper by Newell and Simon on their logic machine.
The second paper was from IBM: Nat Rochester and collaborators had used the
largest computer then available (an IBM 704 with a 2048-word core memory) to
test Donald Hebbs neuropsychological theory of cell assemblies. Victor Yngve
then gave a talk on the statistical analysis of gaps and its relation to syntax.
Noam Chomskys contribution used information theory as a foil for a public
exposition of transformational generative grammar. Elias commented that
other linguists had told him that language has all the precision of mathematics
but Chomsky was the first linguist to back up the claim. His 1956 paper
contained the ideas that he expanded a year later in his monograph, Syntactic
Structures [9], which initiated a cognitive revolution in theoretical linguistics. To
complete the second day, G.C. Szikali described some experiments on the
speed of perceptual recognition, I talked about how we avoid the bottleneck
created by our limited short-term memory, and Swets and Birdsall explained
the significance of signal-detection theory for perceptual recognition. The
symposium concluded on the following day. I left the symposium with a
conviction, more intuitive than rational, that experimental psychology,
theoretical linguistics, and the computer simulation of cognitive processes were
all pieces from a larger whole and that the future would see a progressive
elaboration and coordination of their shared concerns.
The birth of cognitive science
By 1960 it was clear that something interdisciplinary was happening. At
Harvard we called it cognitive studies, at Carnegie-Mellon they called in
information-processing psychology, and at La Jolla they called it cognitive
science.What you called it didn't really matter until 1976, when the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation became interested. The Sloan Foundation had just completed
a highlysuccessful program of support for a new field called neuroscience and
two vice-presidents of the Foundation, Steve White and Al Singer, were thinking
that the next step would be to bridge the gap between brain and mind. They
needed some way to refer to this next step and they selected cognitive
science. They created a Sloan Special Program in Cognitive Science in order to
explore the possibilities. I learned of the Foundations interest in 1977 from
Kenneth A. Klivington, who was on the staff at the Foundation. My recollection
is that Ken had talked to Marvin Minsky and others at MIT and was considering
a recommendation that the Foundation invest in artificial intelligence.
Shamelessly, I argued that in that case the Foundations money would be spent
buying computers. I claimed that AI was merely part of a much larger
movement. At that time the Sloan Foundation was sensitive to the charge that
it had become part of the MIT endowment, so my lobbying for a broader
constituency was well received.

Interdisciplinary activities

I argued that at least six disciplines were involved: psychology, linguistics,

neuroscience, computer science, anthropology and philosophy. I saw
psychology, linguistics and computer science as central, the other three as
peripheral. These fields represented, and still represent, an institutionally
convenient but intellectually awkward division. Each, by historical accident, had
inherited a particular way of looking at cognition and each had progressed far
enough to recognize that the solution to some of its problems depends crucially
on the solution of problems traditionally allocated to other disciplines. The
Sloan Foundation accepted my argument and a committee of people from the
several fields was assembled to summarize the state of cognitive science in
1978, and to write a report recommending appropriate action. The committee
met once, in Kansas City. It quickly became apparent that everyone knew his
own field and had heard of two or three interesting findings in other fields. After
hours of discussion, experts in discipline X grew unwilling to make any
judgments about discipline Y, and so forth. In the end, they did what they were
competent to do: each summarized his or her own field and the editors
Samuel Jay Keyser, Edward Walker and myself patched together a report
(Keyser, S.J., Miller, G.A., and Walker, E., Cognitive Science in 1978. An
unpublished report sub to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, New York).Our report
had one figure, which is reproduced here (Fig. 1). The six fields are connected
in a hexagon. Each line in the figure represented an area of interdisciplinary
inquiry that was well defined in 1978 and that involved thetools of the two
disciplines it linked together. Thus, cybernetics used concepts developed by
computer science to model brain functions elucidated in neuroscience.
Similarly, computer science and linguistics were already linked through
computational linguistics. Linguistics and psychology are linked by
psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience were linked by studies of the
evolution of the brain, and so on. Today, I believe, all fifteen possible links could
be instantiated with respectable research, and the eleven links we saw as
existing in 1978 have been greatly strengthened. The report was submitted,
reviewed by nother committee of experts, and accepted by the Sloan
Foundation The program that was initiated provided grants to several
universities with the condition that the funds be used to promote
communication between disciplines. One of the smaller grants went to Michael
Gazzaniga, then at the Cornell Medical School, and enabled him to initiate what
has since become cognitive neuroscience. As a consequence of the Sloan
program, many scholars became familiar with and tolerant of work in other
disciplines. For several years, interdisciplinary seminars, colloquia and
symposia flourished.

Cognitive sciences today

Unfortunately, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation did not follow up this initiative,
but the interactions stimulated in the early 1980s have left their mark. Some
veterans of those days question whether the program was successful, and
whether there really is something now that we can call cognitive science. For
myself, I prefer to speak of the cognitive sciences, in the plural. But the original
dream of a unified science that would discover the representational and
computational capacities of the human mind and their structural and functional
realization in the human brain still has an appeal that I cannot resist.