Empiricism, sciences, and engineering: cognitive science as a zone of integration

An article by Alexandra Kirsch accepted for publication in Cognitive Processing occasioned debate among reviewers about broad methodological issues in cognitive science. One of these issues is the proper place of Popperian falsificationism in the interdisciplinary cluster. Another is the tension between abstract models and theories that apply to wide classes of cognitive systems, and models of more restricted scope intended to predict specifically human patterns of thought and behavior. The lead editorial in a Commentary debate invited by the journal’s editors considers these issues from the perspective of a pragmatist philosophy of science inspired by Herbert Simon’s classic (The sciences of the artificial (2nd edition 1981; 3rd edition 1996), MIT Press, Cambridge, 1969) reflections on the blurring of the distinction between science and engineering in cognitive science.