Author Description

In 1990, Jerome Bruner suggested it was time to take stock of what is now referred to as the "cognitive revolution" - not only to reasses its progress, but to review the dominant role artificial intelligence and computers came to play in it. This volume assembles several leading thinkers to address these questions, and many others that stem from them, in an attempt to examine psychology's and cognitive science's success at using computers to understand human mind and behavior. The "cognitive revolution" has, in many respects, been a watershed in our contemporary struggles to comprehend what is crucially significant about human beings. As a result of intellectual and technological innovations since World War II, theorists now possess a more powerfully insightful model for mind than was available in the past. Can we now save cognitive science's claim that the mind is analogous to computer software, or must we start from the beginning? In Reassessing the Cognitive Revolution, leading scholars from diverse fields of cognitive science - linguistics, psychology, neuropsychology, and philosophy - present their latest, carefully considered judgments about the future of this intellectual movement. Jerome Bruner, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Putnam, and Margaret Boden, among others, have written original chapters in a nontechnical style that can be enjoyed and understood by an interdisciplinary audience of psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists alike.