ABSTRACT
What I shall be calling standard cognitive science has roots in a number of disciplines, including computer science, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. Because my interest is less in tracing the history and development of standard cognitive science than in providing an idea of its theoretical and methodological commitments,1 I propose to introduce some important ideas within standard cognitive science through discussion of several exemplary research projects. These projects are (i) Allen Newell and Herbert Simon’s General Problem Solver; (ii) Saul Sternberg’s work on memory recall; and (iii) computational analyses of perception. Despite the diverging explanatory targets of these three enterprises, they are remarkably similar in how they conceive of the process of cognition and in their commitments to how cognition should be studied.2
