In his 2003 retrospective “The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective,” published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences and archived at Princeton, George Miller picked a single date as the symbolic birthday of cognitive science: 11 September 1956, the second day of a Symposium on Information Theory held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
By Miller’s account, that morning began with Allen Newell and Herbert Simon presenting the Logic Theory Machine, their program that proved theorems from Principia Mathematica - the first running artificial intelligence program. Miller himself presented the work that became “The Magical Number Seven.” And the young linguist Noam Chomsky presented an early version of his theory of grammar. Three researchers from three supposedly separate fields - computer science, psychology, and linguistics - were, Miller realized, all treating the mind as a system that processes information according to formal rules.
Miller wrote that he left the symposium “with a conviction, more intuitive than rational, that human experimental psychology, theoretical linguistics, and the computer simulation of cognitive processes were all pieces from a larger whole.” That conviction, spreading among the attendees, is what later observers came to call the cognitive revolution - the displacement of behaviorism by a view of the mind as an information processor, which in turn gave artificial intelligence its theory of what it was trying to build.
The date is a historian’s convenience rather than a hard boundary; the ideas were already in the air, at the Dartmouth workshop earlier that summer and elsewhere. But the symposium is the moment Miller, who was there, chose to mark.