"Cognitive scientists view the human mind as a complex system that receives, stores, retrieves, and transmits information. These operations on information are called computations or information processes, and the view of the mind is called the computational or information-processing view."  
 
Stillings et al., Cognitive Science: An Introduction, p. 1  
 
 
"In a sense, the root problem of cognitive science is to understand how the cognitive architecture makes mundane human competence possible."  
 
Stillings et al., Cognitive Science: An Introduction, p. 18  
 
 
"Here is the central hypothesis of cognitive science: Thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."  
 
Paul Thagard, Mind, p. 10  
 
 
"I think cognitive science is simply any theory about how the mind does what it does -- that is, cognitive science is anything but behaviorism. It is any theory that contends that there is a mental level of processing. Cognitive science is any attempt to explain how the mind and brain produce intelligent behavior. So cognitive science is certainly here to stay."  
 
Hubert Drefus, from an interview in Speaking Minds, Baumgartner & Payr (Eds.), 1995, p. 73  
 
 
"My own view is that cognitive science is basically just cognitive psychology, only done with more methodological and theoretical sophistication than cognitive psychologists have been traditionally trained to do it."  
 
Jerry Fodor, from an interview in Speaking Minds, Baumgartner & Payr (Eds.), 1995, p. 85  
 
 
"Cognitive science, I think, is largely methodologically eclectic. By that I mean that we believe that there is no absolute path to truth, but every method has its strengths and weaknesses. What we usually mean in part by 'discipline' is exactly that there is a methodological discipline, a method that is the accepted method for this discipline to proceed. Cognitive science does not yet have a 'discipline' in that sense. What it has is a collection of methods that have been developed, some uniquely in cognitive science, but some in related disciplines. The difficult part here is learning to have respect for the disciplines of other fields."  
 
David Rumelhart, from an interview in Speaking Minds, Baumgartner & Payr (Eds.), 1995, p. 196  
 
 
"I am not sure whether there is such a thing as cognitive science. But it is often useful to get together with people who have related interests and to work together. I do not take these departmental categories too seriously: are you really a philosopher or a linguist or a historian or a psychologist or a cognitive scientist? Such questions are not really very interesting, and I think they are for university deans to worry about -- mostly useful for budgets. When you work on a real intellectual problem, you just work on the problem. I remember when I was a young philosopher, people used to tell me, 'What you are doing is not real philosophy; it is only linguistics.' But nowadays it is 'real philosophy'. People change their opinions, so I would not worry too much about how to categorize cognitive science."  
 
John Searle, from an interview in Speaking Minds, Baumgartner & Payr (Eds.), 1995, pp. 204 - 205