A cadre of thinkers called cognitive scientists has been investigating some of the same issues that first possessed the Greeks. As did the Greeks, they seek to understand what is known, ponder the sources of knowledge, conjecture about the various vehicles of knowledge, reflect on language, and speculate on the nature of the activity of knowing. Cognitive science, although reaching back to the Greeks, is radically new. It is defined as a contemporary, empirically based effort to answer epistemological questions concerned with the nature of knowledge, its components, its sources, its development, and its deployment. This book consists of three parts. Part I deals with the history of interdisciplinary conversations and projects and the founding of cognitive science in chapters two and three. Part II, chapters four through nine, consists of brief targeted histories of the six fields (philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience) of cognitive science. Part III, chapters 10 through 14, is an assessment in which the focus shifts from work within a traditional discipline to lines of research that represent an intersection of a number of disciplines or a single, unified cognitive science. Also included are an epilogue, references, name index, and subject index. (RT)