ABSTRACT
How cognitive scientists view the mental processes of thinking, knowing, perceiving,
attending, remembering, problem solving, and decision making depends mostly on how
they learned their trade. This includes whether they were educated to think behav-
ioristically or in Gestalt terms or whether their teachers and the authors of the textbooks
they studied in school were developmentalists, psycholinguists, neuropsychologists, or
cognitive stylists. To understand what the field has discovered about such matters requires
that we first understand how the cognitive sciences evolved and how they are structured,
including (a) what philosophical assumptions about mind and body funded their re-
search; (b) what behaviorist, Gestaltist, psycholinguist, or developmentalist bias influ-
enced the results of their experiments; and (c) which of the various perspectives of neu-
roscience, artificial intelligence, or anthropology gave direction to their investigations.
