ABSTRACT
The topic of consciousness has occupied philosophers and metaphysicians for centuries. What distinguishes the scientific approach to this topic, however, is a methodology—a set of tools that permit the empirical and theoretical study of a phenomenon in an objective, reproducible way. The relation between this methodology and the phenomenon of consciousness has a restless and controversial history. The topic of consciousness was central to psychology at its inception as a scientific enterprise. However, it rapidly fell into disfavor, in part because the method that seemed most appropriate for studying it (introspection) was abandoned as a scientific method. During the 1960s there was a brief reawakening of the topic. This was probably due in part to sociological factors, but almost certainly it had something to do with the advent of a set of empirical and theoretical methods, now known as cognitive science, that provided a scientific way of asking and answering questions about phenomena such as memory, language, and attention—phenomena clearly related to consciousness.
