From Joe Pater (pater@linguist.umass.edu)

I’m currently working on a piece called “1957: The Birth of Cognitive Science” (as part of a larger project on debates in cognitive science). I have picked that date since it is the publication date of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, and Frank Rosenblatt’s “The perceptron: a perceiving and recognizing automaton”, which can be taken as the genesis of generative linguistics and neural network modeling of cognition respectively (there are other possibilities for the latter, such as McCulloch and Pitts’ and Hebb’s work, but I’m particularly interested in explaining how many of the features of later neural network models and their associated research strategies first appeared in Rosenblatt’s work). The clash between these two paradigms was of course a major feature of cognitive science in the late 1980s and 1990s, and there continues to be considerable productive tension between these approaches, as well as integrative work.

When I suggested this date with this rationale to a colleague in Cognitive Psychology, I was glad to get the assessment that it was “As good a point in time as any, better than most.” I’d be curious, though, to hear other suggestions for birthdates.