Customer Reviews

The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution

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This is a very readable, very complete introduction/history to the thinking, questions and issues underlying cognitive science from its philosophical origins. It pulls many threads together to give a cohesive and complementary account of the development of the fields involved in cognitive science in a way that garners a strong feel for the field for those new to it, and that will grant new insights to those well acquainted with the field.

Damn impressive, all told.

The book is a history of ideas. This breaks down into some light historical content, and much presentation of positions (sometimes with a little supporting argument).

As a history, I would compare this book to what you might expect from an account of the Cuban revolution written by a relatively conscientious Castro partisan: sensitive reports of leaders' statements, factual aspects painted in slightly punched-up colors with a vague and gentle brush, heroics and ideology emphasized. Naturally, you can expect a wildly inaccurate and polemic treatment of 'life before the revolution.'

As a presentation of ideas, its main virtue is its fidelity. Gardner has taken up the opinions of a handful of big-name cognitivists and represented them here. You could tell who was saying what without any citations, just from what is written. As such, it would be undoubtedly useful for reviewing just what claims people liked to make during the revolution, not too unlike having a set of extracts from classic guerilla texts.

The claims themselves are a parade of ad hominem attacks, conclusive strikes on straw men, vast overstatements, and unbelievable exclusions (e.g., cognitive psychology can't even peripherally be bothered with: emotion, cultural or social factors, or the state of the environment at any point). There is no use in adopting these viewpoints, nor in arguing against them. They are out of touch. Gardner himself has a few interesting things to say about psychology getting involved with epistemological issues, but here they don't amount to more than an appetizer. Too bad, since I thought these were pretty interesting and much more substantive than what Gardner was reporting on.

Given the above, I would only recommend the book as supplementary material in a broader look at the history of psychology, or in order to satisfy very casual interests in the history of cognitivist ideas. You should not bother with this book if you want an introduction to or a clearer understanding of cognitivism, nor if you want support for or ammunition against cognitive work as it is practiced. If these are your goals, you should instead get in contact with research, whether by text or by directly checking out articles.

IF you want a REALLY good cognitive science primer don't buy this book.

Best Cognitive Science Primer --> MIND: Introduction to Cognitive Science, 3rd Edition, By Paul Thagard, ISBN(13): 978-0-262-70109-9 , The MIT Press. See my review at amazon.com

This book, "The Mind's New Science", provides good historical perspective on cognitive science before 1985. "MIND" does so in less detail. The text was written while the information revolution was in it's infancy and it shows. The chapters on mental representations are archaic but provide an excellant opportunity to see the evolution of the science as well as author's quite understandable student-of-psychology bias. The author is a well-respected academic from Cambridge, MA. But this is an "inside cognitive science book written by an "insider".

The author knows too much about cognitive science and forgets to share that knowledge with the reader. It is a very well done essay or report for "those in the know" - for the rest of us??

As a learning tool this is an unremarkable text. The author's style is obtuse and reminscent of early 19th century philosophers. The flow of prose is stilted by rigorous adherence to grammar and terminology. The author fails to fully define concepts inherently referenced. My most freqent experience was bewilderment at the end of each paragraph. By careful dissection of each sentence I could MOSTLY figure out what information I needed to have - and did not - in order to UNDERSTAND what he just said.

My personal assessment----> The text is not a textbook designed for students, the goal of this book is NOT to illuminate the realm of inquiry into human cognition. The book is a very long persuasive essay whose thesis statement is: "The maturation of cognitive science DOES NOT eliminate the NEED for philosophy as a specific discipline".

***THE END*** :)

Howard Gardner (born 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and Professor of Cognition at Harvard University.

He states in the Preface to this 1985 book, "I decided that it would be useful and rewarding to undertake a study in which I would rely heavily on the testimony of those scholars who had founded the field as well as those who were at present its most active workers. But in lieu of an oral history or a journalistic account of current laboratory work ... I decided to make a comprehensive investigation of cognitive science in which I could include the long view---the philosophical origins, the histories of each of the respective fields, the current work that appears most central, and my own assessment of the prospects for this ambitious field." He then adds in an Epilogue to the paperback edition of the book, "the research program described in 'The Mind's New Science' is being actively pursued on many fronts: a substantially changed second edition could be written, describing advances in our understanding of visual perception, natural language processing, imaging, categorization, and human rationality."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"Having no insight about the subject matter of a problem, the computer is consigned to make blunders that, in human beings, would never happen or would be considered extremely stupid."
"Here we are, two thousand years after the first discussions about perception, several hundred years after the philosophical debates between the empiricists and the rationalists first raged, and leading scientists are still disagreeing about fundamentals."
"I find it distorted to conceive of human beings apart from their membership in a species that has evolved over the millenia, and as other than organisms who themselves develop according to a complex interaction between genetic proclivities and environmental processes over a lifetime. To the extent that thought processes reflect these bio-developmental factors and are suffused with regressions, anticipations, frustrations, and ambivalent feelings, they will differ in fundamental ways from those exhibited by a nonorganic system."