Book Reviews

Review of The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology If you are interested in writing a review, contact chandra@ cis.ohio-state.edu. AT question: Which one of the following doesn't belong with the rest? It is the only discipline in the list that is not under attack for being conceptually or methodologically confused. Objections to AI and computational cognitive science are myriad. Accordingly, there are many different reasons for these attacks. However, all of them come down to one simple observation: Humans seem a lot smarter than computers--not just smarter as in Einstein was smarter than I, or I am smarter than a chimpanzee, but more like I am smarter than a pencil sharpener. To many, computation seems like the wrong paradigm for studying the mind. All this is because of another truth: The computational paradigm is the best thing to come down the pike since the wheel. The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology, Jerry Fodor, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2000, 126 pages, $22.95. Jerry Fodor believes this latter claim. He says: [The computational theory of mind] is, in my view, by far the best theory of cognition that we've got; indeed, the only one we've got that's worth the bother of a serious discussion.… There is, in short, every reason to suppose that Computational Theory is part of the truth about cognition. It is a fascinating read. This dispute about quantity of truth is where the book gets its title. In 1997, Steven Pinker published an important book describing the current state of the art in cognitive science (see also Plotkin [1997]). Pinker's book is entitled How the Mind Works. In it, he describes how computationalism, psychological nativism (the idea that many of our concepts are innate), massive modularity (the idea that most mental processes occur within a domain-specific, encapsulated specialpurpose processor), and Darwinian adaptationism combine to form a robust (but nascent) theory of mind. Fodor, however, thinks that the mind doesn't work that way or, anyhow, not very much of the mind works that way. Fodor dubs the synthesis of computationalism, nativism, massive modularity, and adaptationism the new synthesis (p.