Technician sat down with Dr. Ronald Endicott, the program director for the cognitive science program, and asked him some questions about this interesting perspective on the mind.
What is cognitive science?
Cognitive science is an exciting area of research with programs, departments, centers and institutes at universities across the United States and abroad. Cognitive science programs are multidisciplinary, typically represented by faculty in psychology, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, linguistics, logic and the philosophy of mind.
How does it help to take a multidisciplinary view of the mind?
This multidisciplinary perspective has been especially fruitful, since theories of the mind utilize ideas drawn from many disciplines — for example, modeling the mind as a rational and logical agent — a computational system, an evolved organ whose mental program was naturally selected and a socially embedded communicative system subject to broader social explanations.
How did cognitive science begin?
Institutionally, the first cognitive science program began in the early 1980s by the psychologist Donald Norman at University of California, San Diego. But it really started much earlier within the field of psychology itself, with its broad interest in cognitive, biological and social aspects of the mind. However, two things are probably more responsible for the rise of cognitive science than anything else: the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky and the discipline of psycholinguistics, which provided critical tools to discover the structure of the mind, and the rise of the computer model of the mind, which provided a new framework and new methods for testing hypotheses about the mind.
What is the history of the cognitive science program at NCSU?
The cognitive science program at NCSU was founded in 1990. It began as a modest undergraduate minor administered by the Department of Philosophy & Religion and it involved two participating disciplines: psychology and philosophy. Since that time things have changed. Now there are five participating disciplines, with computer science, linguistics and neuroscience joining the other two. The program also has a lecture series, which has brought speakers of international reputation to campus such as Jerry Fodor from Rutgers, George Lakoff from Berkeley, Daniel Dennett from Tufts, Fred Dretske from Duke and Gerd Gigerenzer from Max Planck Institute. See our web page at: http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/cogsci/lecture_series.html.
Finally, the program now offers a new graduate minor in cognitive science. Those who are interested in either the undergraduate or graduate minor in cognitive science should consult our web page at: http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/cogsci/degrees.html.
How would a minor in cognitive science benefit graduating students?
NCSU students will benefit from a minor in cognitive science, since its broad interdisciplinary perspective has become fundamental to any serious study of the mind. Moreover, the diverse interdisciplinary coursework as well as the designation of the minor will give students who participate a decided advantage in some very competitive marketplace: acceptance into graduate schools, placement in research labs, ideas for further research and so on.
