A New Paradigm for the Cognitive Sciences

The cognitive sciences (linguistics, cognitive psychology, neural science, epistemology . . . ) developed independently of each other until the middle of this century. Something happened in the 30's and 40's that changed that: the formulation by Alan Turing of the universal machine and the invention of the general purpose digital computer. What is common to these two concepts is the capacity of a machine to imitate a machine of the same kind; everything points in the direction of the human mind having the same capacity, which we call knowledge. Thus, the two events taken together constitute a paradigm which has unified, and is making much more productive, the cognitive sciences.