Since its inception in the 1950s, cognitive science has been a community driven by two primary forces. The first is a doctrine: that the mind is a collection of computational processes. The second is an attitude: that investigation of the mind should draw simultaneously on the methods and ideas of several traditionally separate disciplines. The first of these forces calls itself 'computationalism', 'representationalism', 'information processing', or 'cognitivism', and its main manifestations have been the sub-paradigms of symbol-processing and connectionism. The second has produced valuable interaction between the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics and neuroscience. In their stronger forms, these forces argue that the operation of the mind is essentially computational, and that the various 'contributing disciplines' should amalgamate into a single, united federation. In their more moderate forms, they argue that it is useful some of the time to view and model the mind in computational terms, and that the relevant disciplines have more to offer each other than their differences in terminology might suggest. The two forces are related, since the computational view has a place in all of the contributing disciplines; but they are also independent, since interaction between these disciplines has gained its own momentum, and does not necessitate a commitment to computationalism of one sort or another.
Cognitive science has now acquired its first encyclopaedia, in the form of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS), published in 1999. This contains six introductory essays or 'road maps', followed by 471 individual articles, and occupies over 1,000 pages. The individual entries are short, authoritative and admirably accessible. Links between topics and between contributing disciplines are emphasised by extensive crossreferencing, and by the introductory essays on Philosophy,