The discipline is, in fact, a critical educational tool for engaging students and the public with science and the humanities, and the relationship between them. Archeology demonstrates that there is a continuum from the sciences to the humanities, suggesting that the dichotomy between the two is simply a contingent feature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century European context in which it developed. The entanglement is well illustrated in two developments. The analysis of the evolution of human cognition and language requires both an awareness of the scientific issues of biology, ecology, and behaviour, and an appreciation of the 'meaning' content of cultural phenomena such as art. Parallel to this inquiry, archaeology and cultural anthropology are seeking to define a cultural logic, equivalent to a Darwinian logic, for the evolution of cultural processes.
Cognitive science is aimed at understanding the mental processes that underlie cognitive abilities.
The questions it asks are not new and involve a close interaction between philosophers and linguists working in the humanities and psychologists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists. Cognitive science is distinguished from these traditional disciplines by its highly interdisciplinary approach. Its defining technique is to bring expertise gained from the related disciplines to bear on a set of common questions. To answer these questions cognitive scientists engage in empirical and theoretical studies aimed at assessing their formal and computational models of various aspects of cognition. The interdisciplinary contributions to cognitive science are diverse and include strong contributions from the humanities, particularly in the area of language and reasoning.