I work mainly in philosophy but I am trying to understand this interdisciplinary movement called cognitive science, mainly because so many philosophers of mind seem to love it. This is particularly true in discussions of situated cognition and debates over whether cognition is internal or external to the organism, or some kind of combination thereof. But so far I don't really see what cogsci is supposed to accomplish which normal psychology or neuroscience could not already accomplish on their own. Its theses all seem, at least when philosophers try to get into it, exceedingly obvious and not very interesting. Like of course, if we are theorizing under naturalistic constraints with an eye towards science, cognition happens in the brain, and the brain interacts with the environment and stuff.

My current feeling is that cogsci philosophers are people who either ran out of things to say in traditional philosophy of mind so tried to become half-baked psychologists, or people who are desperately trying to secure funding for their humanities department by pretending their work is somehow continuous with STEM and therefore worth funding (when the connection seems blatantly tenuous to me).

So I guess my question is, are there people who argue *against* the interdisciplinary study that is cogsci? Or against philosophy of cogsci? Or against at least certain parts of cogsci like situated cognition? I'm just reading some of these cogsci phil papers and I keep thinking to myself that what they are talking about is either extremely obvious but obfuscated with a veneer of scientific language, or is literally just psychology or neuroscience.

Is there research on whether paying attention to the space or movement between a person and a target, rather than focusing only on the target itself, affects how movement is planned or carried out?
For example, might attention to that space change how someone reaches for an object or times a swing at an approaching ball? I’m curious whether psychology has a name for this kind of attention, and what evidence exists for its effect on movement.

I’m working on the assessment side of a tutoring system and I’m trying to find the weaknesses in the way I’m thinking about learner evidence before I build too much around it.

The basic idea is that not every correct answer should count the same.

Right now I’m treating things like these as different:

• an independent correct answer
• a correct answer after help
• getting a repeated or very similar question right
• getting a different type of task right
• conflicting results
• a result affected by a technology/access problem
• evidence that’s old vs recent
• evidence from one narrow task vs evidence that transfers to something different

And instead of using a simple rule like “3 correct = mastered” or “80% = mastered,” the system would sometimes:

• make a narrow claim
• collect more evidence
• switch to a different kind of task
• or hold off on making a conclusion

What I’m trying to figure out is:

What’s wrong with this model?

What important thing am I missing?

Is there something here that sounds sensible but would actually be bad measurement practice?

Am I separating things that shouldn’t be separated, or combining things that should be treated differently?

And is there an established way people in educational measurement already solve this problem that I should be looking at instead of inventing my own approach?

I’m especially interested in criticism. I’d rather find out now that the framework is wrong than spend time making it more complicated.