The History of Cognitive Science

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There are 11 videos in this topic

Each topic will contain a number of short video presentations grouped together on a page like this. For each topic, there is also a Readings and Resources page which contains material that you are asked to read or view in addition to these videos. Class discussions will presume that you have watched and read the required material before class.

Video 1: Introducing the topic

We begin at the beginning by outlining why the central concepts of cognitive science require interdisciplinary sensibility

Video 2: Some Greek roots

We take a very brief trip back to ancient Greece to note the contrasting metaphysical visions of Heraclitus and Parmenides, who bring into focus some tensions that we will encounter throughout our journey

Video 3: The cogito is born

Skipping forward to the 17th Century and the time at which a modern mechanistic science was born, we meet Descartes and the cogito, which land us with problems we have yet to extricate ourselves from.

Video 4: Physical vs Mental

Here we discuss the everyday language that uses the term “physical” to describe that which is, in some specific sense, indubitably real.

Video 5: The British Empiricists and Kant

We meet the empiricists, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, who were concerned with the role of the senses. The concerns of these empiricists were at odds with the abstractions of Descartes, and Immanuel Kant is a key figure in attempting to resolve the problems that now arise.

Video 6: The historical context in which scientific psychology is born

Here we make explicit the historical context in which the new field of scientific psychology was born in the middle of the 19th Century.

Video 7: Psychophysics

We look at the currents coming together at the birth of scientific psychology, consider William James as a central figure, and learn a little about Psychophysics, an early exercise in this field, but, uniquely, one which continues to be an active area today.

Video 8: Introspection, History, Psycholanalysis

We briefly discuss introspection as a scientific method, note that the history of scientific psychology is complicated, and briefly look at the contributions of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the field of psychoanalysis

Video 9: Behaviourism

We discuss the concerns of behaviourism, through the examples of B. F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov, learn about two different kinds of conditioning, and recognise that explanations couched in terms of “stimulus” and “response” can be very misleading.

Video 10: The cognitive turn

In the middle of the 20th Century, in the years after WWII, developments in a range of fields led to the development of a new language for understanding human cognition. The computer provided the guiding metaphor, information theory was born, and theories of language became central to accounts of mind. The computational theory of mind was born.

Video 11: The variety of the contemporary scene

We trace some of the many varieties of approaches to themes of cognitive science since the cognitive turn. These include refinements of the basic computational theory, through connectionism, as well as a radically different set of approaches we might group together as embodied.