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<p>I wish I could take credit for that statement but I am essentially paraphrasing Skinner who stated in his last public speech before his death in 1990:</p>
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<p>Cognitive science has taken on many of the accoutrements of science especially the use of the scientific method as it has progressively migrated outside of the humanities. The main problem is that it seeks explanations of human and nonhuman behavior that invoke inner forces which cannot be substantiated or tested: intention, reason, belief, agency, executive function, and conscious awareness. In that sense it is like creationism or intelligent design seeking supra-natural explanations to behavior. </p>
<p>Cognitive science like many other interdisciplinary fields suffers from a definitional problem. the list of disciplines involved is dizzying: psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, computer science, anthropology, sociology, and biology.</p>
<p>Throw away biology and neuroscience and nothing is left that is truly testable. I would contend that is largely BECAUSE of recent advances in neurobiology that cognitive science has achieved any level of validation or scientific merit. Concepts such as memory, attention, learning, development of language have all been informed through advances in neuroscience. Neurobiology does not answer all the questions of cognitive science but it certainly provides it with a testable scientific foundation and has helped invalidate long held beliefs about left/right brain specificity, racial or gender based differences in intelligence, language acquisition or whether animals were capable of causal reasoning.</p>
<p>Throw that away and you are left with philosophical inquiries, which may be interest in themselves but have little intersection with science. That was Skinner’s whole point. To artificially limit your pursuit of the study of a field as dynamic as cognitive science because of preconceived notions of “science as boring” based on nothing more than high-school impressions is very shortsighted. I don’t buy the argument of “I don’t need to study experimental science, only theory”. My response is that if it is not testable, it simply is not science!</p>
<p>BTW the analogy is more astronomy without physics is pseudo science. Computer science is more a tool, the mathematics of program construction or algorithmics, than a separate scientific discipline.</p>