1985/Gardner/xiii

In the mid-1970s, I began to hear the term cognitive science. Gardner was already such a Harvard expert in psychology that it sounds a great mystery that he was unaware that the cognitive view and science had surely (r)evolved in his own field for decades, allegedly whether since 1948 (as per Gardner himself) or since 1956 (as per Newell, Simon, Miller, etc.), whether suddenly or gradually as usual in scientific progress. Is he professing honestly that he was not one of the cognitive revolutionaries of honor? Already in 1983, two years earlier than this report, however, he published a truly cognitive revolutionary theory, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983). No doubt, he was a real cognitive revolutionary himself! As a psychologist interested in cognitive matters, I naturally became curious about the methods and scope of this new science. When I was unable to find anything systematic written on the subject, and inquiries to colleagues left me confused, I decided to probe further. Some immersion in the writings of self-proclaimed cognitive scientists convinced me that cognitive science was deeply rooted in philosophy and therefore, in a sense, had a long history. At the same time, the field was so new that its leading figures were all alive, and some of them were still quite young. 
I decided that it would be useful and rewarding to undertake a study in which I would rely heavily on the testimony of those scholars who had founded the field as well as those who were at present its most active workers. But in lieu of an oral history or a journalistic account of current laboratory work [...], I decided to make a comprehensive investigation of cognitive science in which I could include the long view -- the philosophical origins, the histories of each of the respective fields, the current work that appears most central, and my own assessment of the prospects for this ambitious field. The more ambitious, perhaps the more artificial and fabricated, according to naturalist Taoism. The cognitive revolution, duly hand in hand with the cognitive science beginning in the said mid-1970s, was to break with the long misguided intellectual tradition, and to rethink the "meaning of meaning" (Odgen and Richards, 1923), the (world) brain of brain (Wells, 1938), the "science of science" (Bernal, 1939), the (man-machine) control of control (Wiener, 1948), the (human) communication of communications (Cherry, 1957), etc. All these are to go "back to basic" synthesis of objects and subjects in the wider context! All these were most desired by Americans fatally suffering the Sputnik trauma. Instead, however, the so-called cognitivists have definitely succeeded in making a scapegoat of young behaviorism, which was then to add up experimental to armchair psychology to make it sound more scientific, and which is now to give way to cognitivism in a far more dehumanized fashion. To be true, such is no cognitive revolution but a dehumanist cognitivist reaction thereto. The centrality of cognitive beings conditioned by surroundings does mean the marginality of automatist makings conditioned by arbitrary artificial programs. Ironically, cognitivists would do without cognitive beings of sense-making, while behaviorists would not. As such, cognitivism itself is a most unfortunate misnomer stormed by the "Invisible College" of dehumanists around artificial intelligence (AI), struggling for survival during the AI winter in the said mid-1970s in the disguise of cognitive scientists, by riding on the new cognitive science in a visionary revolutionary perspective. From the automatist, dehumanist perspective in reality, cognitivist revolutionaries, that is, cognitive reactionaries practically typically prefer machines that think to machines that help think via human-computer interaction (HCI or formerly CHI for Greek X). Cognitivists prefer to see cognitivist machines changing the world, whereas behaviorists to see cognitive minds changed by the world. Which is more cognitive at all? 
It had not escaped my attention that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was a major supporter of work in the cognitive sciences. As suggested by the opening passage "In the mid-1970s, I began to hear the term cognitive science," this passage has it that cognitive science was positively "supported" or artificially conditioned to emerge and evolve, hence, 
* not a sheer natural selection and autonomous evolution 
* but a queer artificial selection and heteronomous evolution! 
It is also mysterious why the Sloan Foundation decided (to help), 
* to speed up the on-going "cognitive revolution" around psychology (Gardner, 1985; Baars, 1986), say, Cognitive Psychology (Neisser, 1967), and after all,
* to build up the "mind's new science" (Gardner, 1985), hence simply new psychology, newly called "cognitive science." I therefore approached its program officer Kenneth Klivington about the possibility of writing a history of cognitive science. To my delight, the Foundation proved receptive, and I began my formal study at the beginning of 1981. [...]