For the Sciences They Are A‐Changin’: A Response to Commentaries on Núñez et al.’s (2019) “What Happened to Cognitive Science?”

Abstract

A recent issue of Topics in Cognitive Science featured 11 thoughtful commentaries responding to our article “What happened to cognitive science?” (Núñez et al., 2019). Here, we identify several themes that arose in those commentaries and respond to each. Crucial to understanding our original article is the fundamental distinction between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavors: Cognitive science began (and has stayed) as multidisciplinary but has failed to move on to form a cohesive interdisciplinary field. We clarify and elaborate our original argument and reiterate the importance of a data‐driven evaluation of the current status of the field, which exhibits a marked disciplinary imbalance, a lack of a coherent conceptual core, and a striking absence of a consistent curriculum in the institutions that grant degrees in this domain. Half a century after the creation of cognitive science, it may now be a good time to revisit goals and visions for how to best approach the ever‐fascinating scientific study of the mind(s).

Quantifying Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science and Beyond

“…Thus, pluralism or divergence in cognitive science, whether feature (Bender, 2019) or bug (Núñez et al, 2020), is a relatively new phenomenon emerging from decades of previous work following alternative theoretical assumptions (Gibson, 1979;Hutchins, 1995;Port & Van Gelder, 1995;Rumelhart, McClelland, & Group, 1986;Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 2016; for reviews, see Dale, 2008;Dale, Dietrich, & Chemero, 2009). This could explain concerns about a lack of a "cohesive conceptual core" like those expressed in Núñez et al (2019Núñez et al ( , 2020. These authors note the "striking lack of a core and consistency in the curriculum of universities and colleges that grant bachelor's degrees in cognitive science" (Núñez et al, 2020, p. 800).…”

Toward Greater Integration: Fellows Perspectives on Cognitive Science

“…The Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in 2007 was held in Nashville, TN, in a hotel complex with such an intricate architectural structure that the place not only was wallpapered with maps of the building, but in addition had staff positioned at every major corner to help orient those getting lost. Cognitive science as a field has been described in ways that evoke images of that building, with a major line of criticism directed at its multidisciplinary composition and its purported lack of integration and intellectual coherence (Núñez et al, 2019(Núñez et al, , 2020van den Besselaar & Heimeriks, 2001;Von Eckardt, 1993; for responses to such criticism, see the commentaries in topiCS introduced by Gray, 2019). While this multidisciplinarity is, in fact, appreciated by many of its practitioners (e.g., Cooper, 2019;Dale, Dietrich, & Chemero, 2009;Gentner, 2019;Schunn, Crowley, & Okada, 1998), and explicitly embraced by the Society's two journals (Bender, 2019(Bender, , 2021Dale, 2021), it also entails some challenges.…”

Integration by Parts: Collaboration and Topic Structure in the CogSci Community

“…Núñez et al (2019) conclude that there is an imbalanced contribution of the constituent disciplines to cognitive science, suggesting that cognitive science remains premature in its efforts to forge a coherent interdisciplinary field. The results sparked controversy and a range of responses (see overview in Gray, 2019;Núñez et al, 2020), both theoretical and empirical. Many of these addressed the inherent challenges of measuring interdisciplinarity, noting for example that an author's departmental affiliation provides at best "a useful proxy for a scholar's background" (Bender, 2019).…”