How Cognition came into being

Abstract

Jacques Mehler and I started Cognition, to break the grip of empiricist associationist behaviorism and stultifying style requirements on scientific discourse, and to liberate Cognitive Psychology's contributions to social issues. The journal provided opportunities for upcoming generations to expand Cognitive Psychology, publishing new concepts unhindered by established topics and standard formats. As the journal matured, Jacques kept. it fresh for 4 decades, seeking young scientists, novel ideas, and elegant writing, as it midwifed the emergence from Reductionist Behaviorism through Cognitive Psychology to rationalist Cognitive Science. The journal now has opportunities to nurture further progress in the future of Cognitive Science. I speculate that the field will keep associationist processes but integrate them with a new kind of non-reductionist theory that eschews detailed predictions, and which which interprets the brain as an enactor of thought, but not its structural cause. Ideally it will provide a set of constraints on the action of brain and mind that subsume and explain behavioral regularities, the role of frequency, how the brain externalizes those constraints and how the externalization processes emerge developmentally as a function of innate factors, structures unique to the mind and brain, experience and natural law.