MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit Cambridge, United Kingdom.
The MARCS Institute and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Western Sydney University, Australia.
Cognition. 2021 Aug;213:104688. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104688. Epub 2021 Mar 26.
Science regularly experiences periods in which simply describing the world is prioritised over attempting to explain it. Cognition, this journal, came into being some 45 years ago as an attempt to lay one such period to rest; without doubt, it has helped create the current cognitive science climate in which theory is decidedly welcome. Here we summarise the reasons why a theoretical approach is imperative in our field, and call attention to some potentially counter-productive trends in which cognitive models are concerned too exclusively with how processes work at the expense of why the processes exist in the first place and thus what the goal of modelling them must be.
科学经常会经历一个阶段，在这个阶段中，描述世界的工作被优先于解释世界的工作。本刊《认知》大约 45 年前创刊，就是为了结束这样一个阶段；无疑，它为我们当前的认知科学氛围做出了贡献，在这个氛围中，理论是非常受欢迎的。在这里，我们总结了在我们的领域中采用理论方法的必要性，并提请注意一些可能适得其反的趋势，即认知模型过于关注过程是如何运作的，而忽略了过程存在的原因，以及建模的目标必须是什么。
