Beginnings of Cognitive Science

Abstract

The first mention of cognitive science can be found in the works of Aristotle, who proposed two dominant categorisation methods describing all varieties of cognitive science in different ways. Aristotle’s considerations, also of the concept of a category, led to distinguishing accidental and substantive categories based on the differences Aristotle saw between the subject of a sentence treated as the substance and the predicate treated as an accidental category. The substantive category includes concepts that describe something and present something concrete, so they were a ‘concrete substance’, the subject of a sentence, something material. Within the accidental categories, Aristotle distinguished nine basic notions, which included quantity, quality, relation, place, time, location, property, action and sensation.