Within cognitive science fields there is a distinction made between mental and physical existence. For example, the idea of a tree, and the physical tree itself are distinguished as separate entities. Our knowledge of the tree is limited to the representation of it created in our minds. The question is raised, does our idea of trees correctly portray what trees are physically?
How are we to know when the mind has represented the world accurately? This discrimination is perhaps the most fundamental task of cognitive science, "...to tell the dance from the dancers ,the message from the medium, the functional software from the hardware, to use more recent idioms."(Leiber p.6) To accomplish this task both cognitive structures, and cognitive processes are the objects of study.
The roots of cognitive science can be traced to early philosophical questions. Namely, two questions raised by Plato in his dialogue "Meno". These questions are:
Today the cognitive sciences have broken into a number of disciplines including psychology, linguistics, and computer science. Perhaps the cognitive aspects of artificial intelligence relate most to environmental informatics. The explosive growth in the field of information science has led to the need for quick cognitive processes. Computers have been able to model intelligent mental processes with basic building blocks. They have the ability to accept input symbols, generate output symbols, store and erase symbols, and to compare symbols and branch according to the comparison outcome.
Successful simulation of global feedback depends on the availability of a richly structured representation of information relevant to the environmental domain. As environmental data bases continue to grow, the need for efficient search procedures grows also. Thus current work in artificial intelligence will revolve around both cognitive structures as well as cognitive processes. (Leiber, 1991, p.6)
Compiled by
Joshua Bills jdb5@cec.wustl.edu Last updated 11/6/94.