Guseltseva M.S. Review article Mitchell G. Ash, Situating Cognitive Science after 1945

An overview of the article “Situating Cognitive Science after 1945” by Mitchell G. Ash (Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Vienna, Austria) is presented. The author examines the emergence of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary research program, purposefully placing it in a historical context. He notes that the institutionalization of cognitive science was driven only in part by dedicated weapons research and largely by donations from private foundations. The Second World War was critical to the intensification of interdisciplinary collaboration and the growth of innovation in science and technology, and this, in turn, led to institutional changes that helped build the cognitive science agenda. M. Ash consistently pursues the idea that the history of the formation of cognitive sciences should not be viewed in a linear perspective, namely, as a movement from behaviorism to cognitive neuroscience. Modern cognitive science arose from a whole fusion of applied and fundamental, theoretical and empirical research; from the objective logic of science leading to transdisciplinarity and the self-organizing network of scientific communications. At the same time, contrary to the views of some historians of psychology, the neo-behaviorist theory of learning was by no means supplanted by cognitive-oriented psychology, but developed in the 1950–1960s. in parallel with her. These cutting-edge research fields belonged to different subdisciplines, and therefore significant theoretical developments in the field of computer science developed independently of each other for a long time. In the article offered to the reader, M. Ash sets the goal not so much to discuss current research or the history of cognitive science, but to consider its emergence in a historical context, where the formation of cognitive psychology is only one side of the general transdisciplinary movement.

Key words: history of science, history of psychology, neo-behaviorism, cognitive science, Mitchell G. Ash

For citation: Guseltseva, M.S. (2024). Review article Mitchell G. Ash, Situating Cognitive Science after 1945. New Psychological Research, No. 3, 269–280. DOI: 10.51217/npsyresearch_2024_04_03_12

Acknowledgment

The article was prepared within a state task, project FNRE-2024-0016.