Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present paper examines the historical choice points the led 20th century cognitive science to its current commitmentto correspondence approaches to reality and truth. Such a correspondence driven approach to reality and truth stands incontrast to coherence driven approaches that were prominent in the 1800s and early 1900s. Coherence approaches refusedto begin the conversation regarding reality with the assumption that the important thing about it was its independenceof observers. The present paper fleshes out the differences between coherence and correspondence driven approaches toreality and truth, propose an explanation of why cognitive science came to favor correspondence approaches, describesproblems that have arisen in cognitive science because of its commitment to correspondence theorizing, and proposes analternative framework (i.e., Wild Systems theoryWST) that is inspired by a coherence approach to reality and truth, yet isentirely consistent with science.