I agree that there isn’t an overarching theory at the level of specificity of ACT-R that covers all the different aspects of the mind that cognitive science researchers wish it would cover. And so yes, I can see cognitive scientists saying that there is no such theory, or (more accurately) saying that even though ACT-R is the best-validated one, it’s not validated on the particular types of tasks that they’re interested in, so therefore they can ignore it.
However, I do think that there’s enough of a consensus about some aspects of ACT-R (and other theories) that there are some broader generalizations that all cognitive scientists should be aware of. That’s the point of the two papers listed in the original post on the “Common Model of Cognition”. They dig through a whole bunch of different cognitive architectures and ideas over the decades and point out that there are some pretty striking commonalities and similarities across these models. (ACT-R is just one of the theories that they look at, and they point out that there are a set of commonalities across all the theories, and that’s what they call the Common Model of Cognition). The Common Model of Cognition is much more loosely specified and is much more about structural organization rather than being about the particular equations used, though, so I’d still say that ACT-R is the best-validated model. But CMC is surprisingly consistent with a lot of models, and that’s why the community is getting together to write papers like that. The whole point is to try to show that there are some things that we can say right now about an overarching theory of the mind, even if people don’t want to buy into the particular details of ACT-R. And if people are trying to build overarching theories, they should at least be aware of what there is already.
(Full disclosure: I was at the 2017 meeting where this community came together on this topic and started the whole CMC thing. The papers from that meeting are at https://www.aaai.org/Library/Symposia/Fall/fs17-05.php and that’s a great collection of short papers of people talking about the various challenges of expanding the CMC. The general consensus from that meeting is that it was useful to at least have an explicit CMC to help frame that conversation, and it’s been great to see that conversation grow over the last few years. Note: at the time we were calling it the Standard Model of the Mind, but that got changed to Common Model of Cognition).
I agree that there isn’t an overarching theory at the level of specificity of ACT-R that covers all the different aspects of the mind that cognitive science researchers wish it would cover. And so yes, I can see cognitive scientists saying that there is no such theory, or (more accurately) saying that even though ACT-R is the best-validated one, it’s not validated on the particular types of tasks that they’re interested in, so therefore they can ignore it.
However, I do think that there’s enough of a consensus about some aspects of ACT-R (and other theories) that there are some broader generalizations that all cognitive scientists should be aware of. That’s the point of the two papers listed in the original post on the “Common Model of Cognition”. They dig through a whole bunch of different cognitive architectures and ideas over the decades and point out that there are some pretty striking commonalities and similarities across these models. (ACT-R is just one of the theories that they look at, and they point out that there are a set of commonalities across all the theories, and that’s what they call the Common Model of Cognition). The Common Model of Cognition is much more loosely specified and is much more about structural organization rather than being about the particular equations used, though, so I’d still say that ACT-R is the best-validated model. But CMC is surprisingly consistent with a lot of models, and that’s why the community is getting together to write papers like that. The whole point is to try to show that there are some things that we can say right now about an overarching theory of the mind, even if people don’t want to buy into the particular details of ACT-R. And if people are trying to build overarching theories, they should at least be aware of what there is already.
(Full disclosure: I was at the 2017 meeting where this community came together on this topic and started the whole CMC thing. The papers from that meeting are at https://www.aaai.org/Library/Symposia/Fall/fs17-05.php and that’s a great collection of short papers of people talking about the various challenges of expanding the CMC. The general consensus from that meeting is that it was useful to at least have an explicit CMC to help frame that conversation, and it’s been great to see that conversation grow over the last few years. Note: at the time we were calling it the Standard Model of the Mind, but that got changed to Common Model of Cognition).