Construing processes of consciousness: From the commonsense model to the uncommonsense model of cognitive science

One of the late twentieth-century movements in the academic world is cognitive science. It was initiated in the 1950s (1956 has been suggested as the year of birth) in the American research context by scholars such as Herbert A.Simon, George A.Miller and Jerome Bruner, partly as a response to the increasing disciplinary fragmentation of knowledge about human thinking, human knowledge and other aspects of the ‘mind’ and partly a reaction against behaviourism within psychology in the US. It was influenced by certain aspects of the cybernetics of the 1940s and took the computer model of processing symbolically represented information as central; Simon and Kaplan (1989:3) speak of the ‘information-processing revolution of the fifties and sixties, which viewed thinking as a symbol-manipulation process and used computer simulation as a way to build theories of thinking’ (for a critical discussion, see Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991). In taking the computer as a model, cognitive science follows a long tradition in western thinking where the current technology has served as a way of thinking about humans-in terms of clockworks, automata, machines, switchboards (e.g. in H.G. Wells’ popular science writings of the late 1920s/early 1930s, the body is presented as a machine): the computer is merely the current candidate.