Seventeenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

I examine how the conceptual, material, and social practices of the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science created a new way by which society construed human minds. Conceptually, cognitive scientists provided the metaphor of “computer-as-mind,” which allowed people to shift their understanding of human minds away from the more dominant hydraulic metaphors used by Descartes and Freud to the digital computer. Materially, cognitive scientists created forms of artificial intelligence which allowed people to move beyond philosophical abstractions about minds to concrete interactions with tangible software programs that seemed to think and reason in a similar way to humans. Socially, cognitive scientists were able to obtain sizable amounts of funding for their research, thus establishing their perspective on human minds as a credible scientific endeavor. I argue that it was the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science—the interchange between cognitive psychologists, philosophers of mind, computer scientists, among others—that fostered a new understanding of human minds that could not have been achieved by any single discipline, alone.