# Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition.
    CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

## Quotes

    Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

### A - F

* Cognitive science [is] the interdisciplinary field of study of the approach systems and processes that manipulate information.
** American Psychological Association APA (2013). "Glossary of psychological terms," at Apa.org. Retrieved 08-2016.
* Good design is a Renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something.
** Paola Antonelli (2001), curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art, New York, in A Conversation About The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
* The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. ...The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. ...When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.
** David J. Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3), 1995, pp. 200-219

### G - L

* The principal way that cognitive science can contribute to epistemology, I claim, is to identify basic belief-forming, or problem-solving processes. Once identified, these processes would be examined by primary epistemology according to the evaluative dimensions and standards adduced in Part I.
** Alvin Goldman (1986), Epistemology and Cognition. p. 81

### M - R

* Self-awareness is a complex, but carefully constructed illusion: we rightly place high value on the work of those mental agencies that appear able to reflect on the behavior of other agencies—especially our linguistic and ego-structure mechanisms.
** Marvin Minsky, "K-Linesː A Theory of Memory" Cognitive Science 4, pp.117-133 (1980)
* With the hubris common to physicists, I have always felt that I have known what good science is — it is theory cast in terms of mechanisms that describe how parts of the universe behave. With sometimes immense historical delay, these mechanisms always move towards being grounded in the larger mechanistic view of the universe. Theories always propose a view of how the universe is. They can never be effectively argued to be true, but only be brought before the bar of empirical evidence. All the modern concern for contextualism, hermeneutics and the social determination of meaning has its point, but is a mere footnote to the massive evidence for this view of science. The overwhelming success within this framework of modern biology over the last half century has provided another major confirmation, if one is needed. Someday we will get another striking confirmation from cognitive science. Though it can be argued that we are well on our way, we still have an immense distance to go. Arguments are no match for the evidence that cognitive science does not control its subject the way physics, chemistry and now biology do.
** Allen Newell, Draft of an introduction to the Mind Matters Symposium, 26 May 1992, Carnegie Mellon University Archives

### S - Z

* Cognitive introspective psychology and related cognitive science can no longer be ignored experimentally, or written off as "a science of epiphenomena", nor either as something that must, in principle, reduce eventually to neurophysiology. The events of inner experience, as emergent properties of brain processes, become themselves explanatory causal constructs in their own right, interacting at their own level with their own laws and dynamics. The whole world of inner experience (the world of the humanities) long rejected by 20th century scientific materialism, thus becomes recognized and included within the domain of science.
** Roger Wolcott Sperry, "Some Effects of Disconnecting the Cerebral Hemispheres," Nobel lecture 8 December 1981.

## See also

* Cognitive architecture
* Cognitive dissonance
* Cognitive psychology
* Mental image
* Mental process