Overview

Cognitive science draws upon the tools and techniques of many different disciplines. It is a fundamentally interdisciplinary activity. As we saw in our tour of highlights from the history of cognitive science in Chapters 1 through 3, cognitive science draws on insights and methods from psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, mathematical logic … The list goes on. This basic fact raises some very important and fundamental questions. What do all these disciplines have in common? How can they all come together to form a distinctive area of inquiry? These are the questions that we will tackle in this chapter and the next.

The chapter begins in section 4.1 with a famous picture of how cognitive science is built up from six constituent disciplines. Whatever its merits as a picture of the state of the art of cognitive science in the 1970s, the Sloan hexagon is not very applicable to contemporary cognitive science. Our aim will be to work towards an alternative way of thinking about cognitive science as a unified field of investigation.

The starting-point for the chapter is that the different disciplines in cognitive science operate at different levels of analysis and explanation, with each exploring different levels of organization in the mind and the nervous system. The basic idea of different levels of explanation and organization is introduced in section 4.2. We will look at how the brain can be studied at many different levels, from the level of the molecule upwards.