Cognitive science is a field that began with the realization that
researchers in varied disciplines-psychology, artificial intelligence,
linguistics, philosophy, formal semantics, neuroscience, and others-had
taken on a common set of problems in representation and meaning, in
reasoning and language. Nevertheless, cognitive science as a whole
enjoys no common methodology or theoretical framework, and is in danger
of becoming even more fragmented with time. There are two reasons for
this. First, cognitive science is built on existing methodologies that
have different historical origins. AB a result, the psychologist's truth
is different from the linguist's truth. The artificial intelligence
researcher's truth is different from the philosopher's truth. The
neuroscientist's truth is different from the formal semanticist's truth.
All too often there is little or no recognition of the relevance of work
in other disciplines to one's own concerns. Second, cognitive scientists
tend to develop theories around isolated problems. For instance, there
are theories about how humans categorize concepts, about how humans
analyze linguistic expressions syntactically, about how the English
tense system works semantically, about how humans reason about space or
reason about time, about how goal-directed problem solving occurs, about
how the brain computes, and so on.