Although the term is used more in the humanities, the methodology is inherently interdisciplinary due to its reliance on both humanistic and scientific research.
In some cases, particularly since the rise in the 1970s of psychoanalytic, ideological, semiotic, and Marxist approaches to theory in humanities research in Western academia, cognitivism has been explicitly rejected due to its reliance on science, which some scholars in those schools believe offers false claims to truth and objectivity.
Within aesthetic research, cognitivism has been most successful in literary and film studies (in the forms of cognitive literary theory (as proposed by Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson) and cognitive film theory (as proposed by Noël Carroll) respectively, where it generally aims to explain audience comprehension, emotional elicitation, and aesthetic preference.
[3][4] Cognitivism is considered a naturalistic discipline in that it discusses concepts it believes are ultimately grounded in observable evidence.
Prominent cognitivists include Murray Smith, Carl Plantinga, Patrick Colm Hogan, and Joseph Anderson.