ABSTRACT
It is not quite clear whether a single science is going to emerge from the current excitement and fussing that surrounds the cognitive sciences. What is clear is that the past several years have seen the emergence of an identifiable group of cognitive sciences. Among the practitioners of these sciences one may, to be sure, find many who are properly called cognitive scientist, in conjunction with the more traditional label of linguist, computer scientist, psychologist, anthropologist, and so forth. As a result I tend to view cognitive science more as an umbrella than as a hat. In order to do justice to the complexity and promise of the cognitive science enterprise, I shall abandon the umbrella metaphor, in part because it suggests inclemency. In the last section of this chapter, I present an alternative model (using a more comfortable metaphor) that describes how the cognitive sciences can live together and possibly merge into a single cognitive science. But I first consider the content of these sciences, their common history, and interfaces.
