Cognitive science has never produced anything practical

Cognitive science has never produced anything practical

Let's go back to the term "cognition." One of the definitions of cognition is the ability of all living beings to process information through perception (stimuli received from the outside through different senses), acquired experience, and subjective characteristics that help generalize all this information to evaluate and interpret the surrounding environment. That said, thinking is considered the most important cognitive process.

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The problem is that cognitive science, which represents a very clear transition from biology in the study of the brain, does not eventually play out into anything practically useful. For example, into new kinds of computed tomography, to say nothing of the new artificial intelligence methods.

So cognitive science emerged as a response to behaviorism and an attempt to find a new approach to understanding human consciousness, human thinking, and brain function. In over a hundred years, it has made huge advances. Science subsections, methods, approaches, and hypotheses abound.

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Behaviorism combines elements of philosophy and psychological theory. It emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a response to the fact that various branches of psychology were unable to experimentally test different hypotheses. Behaviorism, in its turn, failed to provide approaches to understanding human consciousness, thinking, and brain function.

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There is an attempt to create some kind of interdisciplinary research area combining the theory of cognition, cognitive psychology, and the theory of artificial intelligence as well.

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Thus, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and the like — even neurology, neurobiology, neurophysiology, and philosophy of consciousness — are considered part of cognitive science. These sciences include a whole other set of quasi separate sciences under the high-sounding name of cognitive anthropology. This division is way too large.

Where did cognition and cognitive science come from in the first place? Let's start with behaviorism (see Google or Wikipedia for more details). It is an approach to the study of human and animal behavior. According to it, behavior is made up of reflexes, reactions to stimuli, motivation, and some personal story based on reinforcement and punishment.

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