The import and export of Cognitive Science

Abstract

From its inception, a large part of the motivation for Cognitive Science has been the need for an interdisciplinary journal for the study of minds and intelligent systems. In the inaugural editorial for the journal, Allan Collins (1977) wrote “Current journals are fragmented along old disciplinary lines, so there is no common place for workers who approach these problems from different disciplines to talk to each other” (p. 1). The interdisciplinarity of the journal has served a valuable cross-fertilization function for those who read the journal to discover articles written for and by practitioners across a wide range of fields. The challenges of building and understanding intelligent systems are sufficiently large that they will most likely require the skills of psychologists, computer scientists, philosophers, educators, neuroscientists, and linguists collaborating and coordinating their efforts.