Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science and the Nature of Cognition

Over the last decades, Interdisciplinarity (ID) has become one of the leading research practices. Traditionally, cognitive science is considered one of the most prominent examples of ID research by including disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, anthropology and linguistics. Recently, however the ID character of cognitive science has become under pressure. According to a study by Leydesdorff and Goldstone (2013), research in this domain gets more and more absorbed by cognitive psychology and the interdisciplinary character of cognitive science is steadily fading away. In this paper, we will examine this claim and argue that its conclusion is premature. We will show that there are reasons to think that the interdisciplinary character of cognitive science is more robust and that the configuration of ID relations may be more dynamic than portrayed by ID skeptics. The reason, or so we will argue, is that ID research is a consequence of the theoretical framework(s) in place, i.e. it is in the nature of ID that fluctuations occur depending on what is held to be the nature of cognition. Our findings are twofold. On the one hand, we will show that the reintegration of cognitive science into cognitive psychology – and with it an approximation towards biology and neuroscience – is, as a matter of fact, the fruit of past ID research. On the other hand, we will demonstrate that novel conceptual frameworks open the possibility for restoring ID relations and foster new ID research.