Abstract

This excellent book presents a timely critique of present trends in cognitive science and computational psychology. What makes this critique so remarkable is, in addition to its lucidity and the depths of its arguments, the fact that it comes from someone who has actively contributed much to the field of computational psychology for the past quarter of a century. This book, then, is a remarkable work in many ways. The title refers to Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, a relentlessly optimistic evaluation of the explanatory power of present-day cognitive science. Although Fodor himself shares many of the presuppositions of cognitive science and computational theories of how the mind works, and in fact, his writings have shaped the thinking and the work of an entire generation of cognitive scientists, he contends that a great deal of homework is still to be done before cognitive science can claim to have come even close to a thorough understanding of the mind and its workings. One trend which particularly disturbs Fodor, and at which he directs much of his criticism, is what is termed “New Synthesis” — a combination of computational and evolutionary psychology put forward in the last few years by authors like John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, Stephen Pinker, and Henry Plotkin. Though the approach taken by these authors certainly has some merit, it presupposes too much and it presupposes it much too early. For, before the evolution of cognition can be constrained in a convincing way, we first need much better theories of the cognitive processes whose evolutions are in question. And that is exactly, says Fodor, what cognitive science has not been able to produce so far