INTRODUCTION

Thinking about the integration challenge in Part II reinforced one of the key themes in our historical survey in Part I. The fundamental principle of cognitive science is that cognition is information processing. In Part I we saw how cognitive science emerged when researchers from different disciplines, all tackling very different problems, ended up converging on this basic insight. In Part II I proposed thinking about the integration challenge in terms of different mental architectures, where a mental architecture involves (1) a model of how the mind is organized into different cognitive systems, and (2) an account of how information is processed within (and across) those cognitive systems. The chapters in Part III introduce different ways of thinking about the second of these – how information is processed. The overall organization of the mind will be the subject of Part IV.

The first way of thinking about information processing, explored in Chapters 6 and 7, is closely tied to what is often called the computational theory of mind. Its central organizing principle is the so-called physical symbol system hypothesis, originally proposed by Herbert Simon and Allen Newell. According to the physical symbol system hypothesis, cognitive information processing has to be understood in terms of the rule-governed transformation of physical symbols. This way of thinking about information processing is inspired by the metaphor of the mind as computer.