Instituting the science of mind: intellectual economies and disciplinary exchange at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies

Abstract

Focusing on Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies as a case, this article uses economies of research tool exchange to develop a new way of characterizing cross-disciplinary research. Throughout its life from 1960 to 1972, the Center for Cognitive Studies hosted scholars from several disciplines. However, there were two different research cultures at the Center. With its directors and patrons committed to a philosophy that equated creative science with eclectic search for and invention of new tools, the Center's initial interdisciplinary research culture emphasized the exchange of ideas and methods. Several years later, once its work was well under way, the Center's culture became multidisciplinary. Rather than emphasizing the sharing, invention, location, discussion and stabilization of new research techniques, the Center's multidisciplinary economy involved researchers working in parallel.When the psychologists Jerome Bruner and George Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard in 1960, they conceived of it as an interdisciplinary institution. The Center, regarded by practitioners as the first institutional location for the cross-disciplinary field of cognitive science, 1 included people from the fields of psychology,

One Kind of Human Being

“…These principles grouped and classified significant social problems based on categories of age, behavior, geography, and human nature (among others). Embodying such principles-for example, the problem of social deviance in urban youth-were Jerome Bruner, prominent Harvard psychologist and author of The Process of Education, the public face behind the development of MACOS (for more on Bruner during this time, see Cohen-Cole, 2007), and Peter Dow, who served as curriculum director for the Educational Development Center (EDC), an organization already deeply involved in reforming math and science curricula (Laird, 2004). The reasoning of reform reproduced these social scientific principles.…”

A Place for Materials Science: Laboratory Buildings and Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Pennsylvania

“…In the case of the LRSM, interdisciplinary materials research was initially driven by the post-Sputnik Cold War arms race, but had to be incentivized through the provision of advanced scientific instruments that could only be made available by sharing them across disciplinary boundaries. As Jamie Cohen-Cole (2007) notes in his analysis of Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies, the ''economies of tool exchange'' is central to the formation of research culture within cross-disciplinary research units. Thus, we pay particular attention to the shared ''central facilities'' in the LRSM as the loci of interdisciplinary interactions.…”

Introduction: The Social Sciences in a Cross‐Disciplinary Age

“…Cohen‐Cole () provides an instructive example of the way these definitions can be used profitably in the analysis of disciplinary exchange within the Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies.…”

“…The difficulty of multidisciplinary enterprises to transform themselves into interdisciplinary ones is a recurring theme of historical scholarship on postwar social science. Yet, Cohen‐Cole () studies the counterexample of Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies that was conceived as an interdisciplinary institution, including scholars from natural and social sciences, but gradually endorsed a multidisciplinary culture.…”

“…See, however, Cohen‐Cole (, p. 577) who pointed to its objective of achieving integration through the use of new experimental techniques in relation to the ambition of DSR “to make the social sciences more rigorous on a theoretical level by making them more interdisciplinary” (see also Cohen‐Cole's, 2014, pp. 92–95).…”