Overview

In Chapter 4 we saw that cognitive science confronts an integration challenge. The integration challenge emerges because cognitive science is an interdisciplinary enterprise. Cognition and the mind are studied from complementary perspectives in many different academic disciplines, using divergent techniques, methods, and experimental paradigms. Cognitive scientists usually have specialist training in a particular academic discipline. Many are psychologists, for example, or linguists. But as cognitive scientists their job is to look beyond the boundaries of their own disciplines and to build bridges to scientists and theoreticians tackling similar problems with different tools and in different theoretical contexts.

When we think about cognitive science as a whole, rather than simply about the activities of individual cognitive scientists, the fact of interdisciplinarity is its most characteristic and defining feature. The guiding idea of cognitive science is that the products of the different, individual “cognitive sciences” can somehow be combined to yield a unified account of cognition and the mind. The integration challenge is the challenge of explaining how this unity is going to arise. It is the challenge of providing a framework that makes explicit the common ground between all the different academic disciplines studying the mind and that shows how they are related to each other.

The last two sections of the previous chapter explored two examples of local integrations. These are cases where problems thrown up in one region of cognitive science have been tackled using tools and techniques from another region.