Author: Hiran Ekanayake
Date: 03 Apr 2006

The following is how philosophy has evolved to psychology and then specialized for computer science, what we now referring as “Cognitive Modeling”.

Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, tried to explain the nature of human knowledge.
[Study of mind is a province of philosophy]

In 19th century, experimental psychology developed.
[Study of mind is now a province of experimental psychology]

Wilhelm Wundt and his students initiated laboratory methods for studying mental operations more systematically.

[Experimental psychology became dominated by behaviorism, a view that virtually denied the existence of mind]
According to behaviorists such as J.B. Watson, psychology should restrict itself to examining the relation between observable stimuli and observable behavioral responses. Talk of consciousness and mental representations was banished from respectable scientific discussion. Especially in North America, behaviorism dominated the psychological scene through the 1950s.

[Around 1956, the intellectual landscape began to change dramatically]

George Miller summarized numerous studies which showed that the capacity of human thinking is limited, with short-term memory, for example, limited to around seven items. He proposed that memory limitations can be overcome by recording information into chunks, mental representations that require mental procedures for encoding and decoding the information.

At this time, primitive computers had been around for only a few years, but pioneers such as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon were founding the field of artificial intelligence.

In addition, Noam Chomsky rejected behaviorist assumptions about language as a learned habit and proposed instead to explain language comprehension in terms of mental grammars consisting of rules.

Or?

Philosophy >>> Psychology >>> Computational Models (Cognitive Modeling)

I should make a provision for my references:
Thagard, P. (2004), Cognitive Science, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, [online]. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/