Introduction to topiCS Volume 18, Issue 1

When I took up my position as Executive Editor of topiCS five years ago, I did so with a strong desire to broaden the scope of cognitive science beyond what had become its dominating core disciplines (Bender, 2019, 2021)—and especially to reconnect it with anthropology, the discipline that, in Margaret Boden's (2006) words, went “missing” (and see Bender, Hutchins, & Medin, 2010; Núñez et al., 2019). While this desire resonates with what has been expressed in writing (e.g., Beller, Bender, & Medin, 2012; Cooper, 2019; Gentner, 2019; Goel, 2019; Levinson, 2012), many scholars in non-mainstream disciplines still awaited clearer signs of welcome (cf. the contributions to the topic “Should Anthropology Be Part of Cognitive Science?” coedited by Sieghard Beller & Doug Medin in 2012 in topiCS, and the voices cited in Goel, 2019). One small but visible step in this direction was taken when we launched the Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award in Cognitive Science—a two-tier conference prize recognizing and highlighting exciting cognitive research in disciplines that have been traditionally under-represented at our annual conferences and in our journals (Bender, 2021). When an organized symposium is awarded the prize, it receives the second part of the prize once it is also submitted to topiCS and accepted for publication. Since its announcement in 2021, this prize has been awarded to eight teams, half of which accepted the invitation to turn their symposium into a proposal to topiCS. The first one of those has now been finalized with the topic in this issue. What makes me particularly excited about this specific topic is that it happens to be one that does bridge anthropology and cognitive science—edited by linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis (Wayne State University, US) and cognitive scientist Helena Miton (Stanford Graduate School of Business, US). The two had organized their symposium on The Deep History of Information Technologies: A Cognitive Perspective at CogSci 2021 and submitted their proposal two years later. Apparently, this is the time needed to convince scholars from “minority disciplines” to place their faith in a cognitive science editorial board and cognitive science audience... Once accepted and put into action, however, both the editors of the topic and the authors of the contributions to it were so dedicated that they delivered one of the fastest turnaround times for a topic to date. The degree of diversity covered by the completed topic is breath-taking, including the range of domains, from units of language or tools for time-keeping and math to medicinal knowledge; cognitive functions, such as remembering and transmission of information, computing, and organizing; cultural instances spanning all around the globe from Aboriginal Australia to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and back in time to medieval England, the Visigoths, Ancient Rome, and even the Upper Palaeolithic; and, last but not least, the contributing disciplines, which straddle perspectives and approaches from anthropology, archaeology, biology, classics, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, and psychology, as well as cognitive science ‘proper’. Such diversity in all possible facets renders this topic a truly worthy recipient of the Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award. Each of the 15 contributions is not only a rich source of information and insights on particular cognitive technologies but also a powerful argument for why cognitive science, the study of the mind, would benefit from a stronger historical perspective on those cognitive technologies that make it perform better. In their introduction to the topic (Chrisomalis & Miton, this issue), the editors skillfully integrate the different parts, set them in a historical perspective, and highlight distinct, yet interconnected themes. In so doing, they provide a scholarly overview of why their topic is both scientifically intriguing, in its own right, and a promising nexus for “future interdisciplinary cognitive scholarship.” topiCS encourages letters and commentaries on all topics, as well as proposals for new topics. Letters are not longer than two published pages (ca. 400–1000 words). Commentaries (between 1000 and 2000 words) are often solicited by Topic Editors prior to the publication of their topic, but they may also be considered after publication. Letters and commentaries typically come without abstract and with few references, if any. The Executive Editor and the Senior Editorial Board (SEB) are constantly searching for new and exciting topics for topiCS. Feel free to open communications with a short note to the Executive Editor ([email protected]) or a member of the SEB (for a list, see the publisher's homepage for topiCS: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/homepage/EditorialBoard.html).

Cognition · Discipline · Editorial board · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Language and cultural evolution

• What happened to cognitive science

  Open Access•Rafael Núñez, Michael Allen et al.•Nature Human Behaviour•2019

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