What Is Cognitive Science?

Cognitive Science is defined on Wikipedia as the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes.  

It encapsulates many different themes from many different disciplines, such as Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Neuroscience. But to truly understand what cognitive science is all about, we need to understand just how it came about. 

Cognitive Science was developed as a response to the limitations of a different way of thinking, Behaviorism. Behaviorism is defined as the theory that Behavior can best be explained by the concept of conditioning, or that repeated exposure to a certain stimulus will result in an anticipated behavior. Critics of behaviorism argue that it only works best for explaining simple behaviors. As behaviors get more complex, explaining them in a behaviorist way becomes increasingly difficult. 

Norbert Weiner, amongst others, in order to combat this problem in Behaviorism, created the Cognitivist approach, which attempted to adopt logic as the guiding force behind understanding the mind. 

Although it has changed thought the decades, with new theories, hypothesis, and research, the core values of the study of Cognitive Science have not changed. 

Fast forward to today, and Cognitive Science is a well-respected, broad, and everchanging study that encapsulates ideas from many different backgrounds of thought and study, which makes it one of the most interesting disciplines to be involved with.