FREE ESSAY ON WHAT LEAD TO THE BIRTH OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE

WHAT LEAD TO THE BIRTH OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Cognitive science, in the study of how organisms process information as well carry out
life functions. The study of Cognitive science is said to have been originated in the
1940's and 1950's when researchers in various fields of science began to develop theories
on the mind based on complex representations and computational procedures (Thagard,
Cognitive Science). There are numerous branches of science whose theories contributed to
the development of Coginitive Science. These subdivisions include cybernetics,
theoretical computer science, linguistics, experimental pyschology, and neuroscience. 
Cybernetics, a term used by Norbert Wiener is the study of control and communication in
animals as well as machines (Lu, Definition of Cognitive Science). Some key events that
took place in the 1940's and 50's within the branch of cybernetics that contributed to
the advancement of Cognitive Science were two article's, Behavior, Purpose and Teleology
by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow and A Logical Calculus of the
Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts both published in
1943. These articles discussed regulatory processes. These articles stimulated
conferences about Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social
Systems and took place between the years of 1944 and 1953. To many, one of the most
important events in the development of Cognitive science took place in 1948. This was the
year that Norbert Wiener published his book Cybernetics (Jogasurya, Origin of
Cybernetics).
Alan Turning was an english mathematician heavily involved in the development of
theoretical Computer Science. In 1936, Turing invented what is known as the Turing
machine. A Turing machine is hypothetical device that represents how computation is done.
All computational processes can be abstractly described using a Turing machine. 
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Before the 1950's, linguistics was
broken down into two main catagories, historical linguistics and structural liguistics.
Noam Chomsky, an American linguist played an important role in the development of
linguistics. Chomsky founded transformational-generative grammer.
Transformation-generative grammer is a highly influential system of linguistic analysis.
Because of Chomsky and his contributions, the behaviorsits accounts of language were
challenged, human computations became the focus for liguistics, and focus was directed
away from how grammer's are learned to how grammers are a mental 'organ' (Andrews, The
Birth of Cognitive Science)