On Tue, 26 Nov 2013 08:16:33 -0800, Christopher Green wrote:
On 2013-11-26, at 10:28 AM, Frantz, Sue wrote:
2. When did "cognitive science" split from psychology?
I got this one! Psychology is just one element of cognitive science.
Computer
science, linguistics, and philosophy were founding constituents as
well. (Some
add neuroscience and anthropology, but those were less central,
originally.) I
published an article about this issue nearly 20 years ago (Ack!!):
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/cognit.htm
As much as I agree with much that Chris Green says in this paper,
I have to take issue with the following statement:
|McCulloch and Pitts (1943/1965) entitled the paper that might be
|considered to be AI's inaugural paper, "A logical calculus of the
|ideas immanent in nervous activity." While it is clear even from the
|title that McCulloch believed a model of the brain's electronic
structure
|would result in the creation of a mind, it is equally clear that he
|was a mental realist.
As important as McCulloch and Pitts' 1943 is, especially for the
development of neural network models, one can argue that a more
important paper is Claude Shannon 1937 master's thesis which first
analyzed systems of relay and switching circuits in terms of
Boolean logic (analyses relevant to systems such as those
used in telephone systems and which, by analogy, McCulloch and
Pitts would argue describe the operation of the nervous system).
Although M&C were unaware of Shannon thesis and related papers
at the time of their 1943 paper, they would know of him and his
work shortly, especially in the context of the Macy (no, not the dept
store) conferences. The Wikipedia entry provides a useful summary; see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
I quote from the entry:
|While studying the complicated ad hoc circuits of the differential
|analyzer, Shannon saw that Boole's concepts could be used to
|great utility. A paper drawn from his 1937 master's degree thesis,
|A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,[8] was
|published in the 1938 issue of the Transactions of the American
|Institute of Electrical Engineers.[9] It also earned Shannon the A
|Alfred Noble American Institute of American Engineers Award in
|1939. Howard Gardner called Shannon's thesis "possibly the most
|important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the
century."[10]
Of course, Shannon's mathematical theory of communication or
information theory would become the foundation of information
processing theory in psychology but I'll leave that for another day. ;-)
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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