Purpose and Objectives

Collaborations will take the shape of individual projects but also national and international seminars and conferences, resulting in publications in book form or special issues of journals. The need for such multidisciplinary work is increasing as many scientists themselves are turning to the humanities for evidence or validation. The reverse is also true as many humanist scholars seek the methodologies and quantifying technologies of the hard sciences in order to deal with huge data sets and complex phenomena. The success of such interdisciplinary approaches is becoming more and more feasible as important funding bodies in the world of science are increasingly aware of these interdisciplinary trends to re-invent liberal education by bringing together the arts and the sciences. In the field of Cognitive Science itself there is a widely recognised need for the sciences that comprise it to do exactly this—to modify their approaches and make them more “situated” and “ecologically valid” in both orientation and scope. Many scholars are calling for a paradigm shift, not unlike the shift that took place several decades ago in psychology, as it moved from Behaviorism to the Cognitive Revolution. We are witnessing indeed a “cognitive cultural revolution” where the future of human knowledge and development is understood to depend crucially on integrating thinking with feeling, and knowledge with values.