Description
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS to its friends) has been four years in the making from conception to publication. It consists of 471 concise articles, nearly all of which include useful lists of references and further readings, preceded by six longer introductory essays written by the volume’s advisory editors. We see MITECS as being of use to students and scholars across the various disciplines that contribute to the cognitive sciences, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and the social sciences more generally, evolutionary biology, education, computer science, artificial intelligence, and ethology.
Although we prefer to let the volume speak largely for itself, it may help to provide some brief details about the aims and development of the project. One of the chief motivations for this undertaking was the sense that, despite a number of excellent works that overlapped with the ambit of cognitive science as it was traditionally conceived, there was no single work that adequately represented the full range of concepts, methods, and results derived and deployed in cognitive science over the last twenty-five years.
Second, each of the various cognitive sciences differs in its focus and orientation; in addition, these have changed over time and will continue to do so in the future. We see MITECS as aiming to represent the scope of this diversity, and as conveying a sense of both the history and future of the cognitive sciences.
Finally, we wanted, through discussions with authors and as a result of editorial review, to highlight links across the various cognitive sciences so that readers from one discipline might gain a greater insight into relevant work in other fields. MITECS represents far more than an alphabetic list of topics in the cognitive sciences; it captures a good deal of the structure of the whole enterprise at this point in time, the ways in which ideas are linked together across topics and disciplines, as well as the ways in which authors from very different disciplines converge and diverge in their approaches to very similar topics. As one looks through the encyclopedia as a whole, one takes a journey through a rich and multidimensional landscape of interconnected ideas. Categorization is rarely just that, especially in the sciences. Ideas and patterns are related to one another, and the grounds for categorizations are often embedded in complex theoretical and empirical patterns. MITECS illustrates the richness and intricacy of this process and the immense value of cognitive science approaches to many questions about the mind.
All three of the motivations for MITECS were instrumental in the internal organization of the project. The core of MITECS is the 471 articles themselves, which were assigned to one of six fields that constitute the foundation of the cognitive sciences. One or two advisory editors oversaw the articles in each of these fields and contributed the introductory essays. The fields and the corresponding advisory editors are
Philosophy (Robert A. Wilson)
Psychology (Keith J. Holyoak)
Neurosciences (Thomas D. Albright and Helen J. Neville)
Computational Intelligence (Michael I. Jordan and Stuart Russell)
Linguistics and Language (Gennaro Chierchia)
Culture, Cognition, and Evolution (Dan Sperber and Lawrence Hirschfeld)
These editors advised us regarding both the topics and authors for the articles and assisted in overseeing the review process for each. Considered collectively, the articles represent much of the diversity to be found in the corresponding fields and indicate much of what has been, is, and might be of value for those thinking about cognition from one or another interdisciplinary perspective. Each introduction has two broad goals. The first is to provide a road map through MITECS to the articles in the corresponding section. Because of the arbitrariness of assigning some articles to one section rather than another, and because of the interdisciplinary vision guiding the volume, the introductions mention not only the articles in the corresponding section but also others from overlapping fields. The second goal is to provide a perspective on the nature of the corresponding discipline or disciplines, particularly with respect to the cognitive sciences. Each introduction should stand as a useful overview of the field it represents. We also made it clear to the editors that their introductions did not have to be completely neutral and could clearly express their own unique perspectives. The result is a vibrant and engaging series of essays.