Cognitive Orthodoxy
The established, institutionalized set of beliefs about cognition that dominate psychology, neuroscience, and public discourse—the often-unexamined assumptions about how thinking works, what minds are, and how cognition should be studied and understood. Cognitive orthodoxy includes commitments: that cognition happens in individual brains, that thinking can be modeled as information processing, that cognitive processes are universal, that brains are the right level of analysis, that cognition is separate from emotion and body, that laboratory studies reveal how thinking works, that cognitive science is the best framework for understanding mind. Like all orthodoxies, it provides a framework for research and understanding, but it functions as ideology—making particular conceptions of mind seem natural and inevitable, obscuring alternative frameworks (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), and delegitimizing approaches that question cognitive orthodoxy's assumptions. Cognitive orthodoxy determines what research is funded, what theories are taught, and who counts as "scientific" versus "unscientific" in the study of mind.
Example: "She suggested that cognition might extend beyond the brain—into body, tools, and environment—and was dismissed as 'not real cognitive science.' Cognitive orthodoxy had made its boundaries feel like the boundaries of legitimate inquiry."
Cognitive Orthodoxy by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026
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