Short Reviews Other Books in the Field (Annotated bibliography)

This is a collection of short summaries of many books in cognitive science. They are all worthwhile texts, and I have learned much from them even when, as it inevitably happens, my ideas differ from the author’s. My list is not remotely complete. There are many excellent cognitive science books that I have not included. In addition, please note that the length of my comments does not reflect my opinion of the book being discussed. Links for each book are to one online bookstore selected arbitrarily simply to provide the reader with a precise reference and to lead him or her to other reviews. My comments are not intended to be objective but rather to explain how the book in question relates to my book.

Acts of Meaning by Jerome Bruner argues that cognitive science’s modeling the brain as an information processor has mistakenly led psychology away from focusing on understanding the mind as a “creator of meanings.” Acts of Meaning and Bruner’s earlier book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, are a humanist and educator’s plea for viewing the human mind as something richer than a machine. My book, I Am Not a Machine!, gives substance to that plea. Bruner describes the “narrative mode” of cognition that provides personal “meaning” by linearizing one’s experience in a way that identifies the ordinary and justifies and interprets the extraordinary by ideas and themes derived from folk psychology. Bruner’s focus is on the social, cultural and literary uses of narrative, while in I Am Not a Machine, (Book II) I model how underlying mental and neural processes support human narrative. I also show how narrative can in turn be used to reason scientifically or tell tall tales. Bookstore Link

The Algebraic Mind– Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science by Gary Marcus argues for a theory of mind diametrically opposed to my view and hence addresses some of the same issues. Marcus uses connectionism only as a tool for understanding how symbol-manipulating processes could be implemented in the brain. The Algebraic Mind presents an in-depth technical treatment of symbols, rules, and the relationships between abstract variables that is suitable for a knowledgeable reader. The Algebraic Mind is well reasoned and the brain and mind could work using symbol-manipulating processes the way Marcus says it does. In fact, engineers, using silicon-based computer technology, are designing robots according to this model of the mind. Bookstore Link


Animal Cognition – An introduction to modern comparative psychology by Jacques Vauclair reviews many experimental studies of animal cognition emphasizing the similarities and differences between species. The variety of species described and the depth of the descriptions of the experiments make this book particularly valuable because it helps us to avoid vague and superficial characterizations of animal cognition. Vauclair’s arguments are well reasoned, well supported, and unbiased. He devotes a chapter to Piagetian style experiments, describing the thinking behind the experiments on human children, and explains how researchers have attempted to extend the paradigm to nonhuman primates and other animals. Bookstore Link

The Animal Mind by James Gould and Carol Gould has wonderful photographs and sketches that vibrantly illustrate the cognitive characteristics of many animals. In general, the animal behavior is interpreted in the highest possible terms without serious analysis. For example (p176), “Researchers have so far discovered that the essentials of Aristotelian logic are accessible to at least one other species: the sea lion.”
Bookstore Link

Animal Minds by Donald Griffin gives many examples of the interesting natural behavior of many species of animals. Griffin states quite often that the behavior being described is proof that the animal has an intelligent and rational mind but never characterizes what the concept means to him, does not describe experimental evidence that would delineate the limits of expected behavior, and does not evaluate alternative and simpler explanations. Bookstore Link

The Cognitive Animal by Bekoff, Allen and Burghardt, editors, has 57 articles by researchers in many disciplines. Each contributor was asked to comment on research questions, methods, possible findings of internal psychological states, future work, and opinions on the limits of the study of animal cognition. The purpose of the compendium was to stimulate researchers to be more interdisciplinary in their thinking and research and to give us a snapshot of the field of animal cognition. To the best of my knowledge no common themes or consensus emerged in the effort. Bookstore Link


The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello focuses on the cultural aspects of human cognition in a way which is entirely congruent with Merlin Donald’s External Symbolic Storage (ESS) hypothesis found in Origins of the Modern Mind and is consistent with the centrality-of-emotion hypothesis found in Stanley Greenspan’s, The Growth of the Mind. Tomasello emphasizes that emotion cognition, shared attention, and an innate understanding of others as intentional creatures are crucial to human development. Based on these abilities, human beings are able to “ratchet-up” their mental capabilities, creating a cultural evolution that is one thousand times faster than biological evolution. I basically support this hypothesis; it is an important part of my last chapter (Book-II) on human reason.
Bookstore Link

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett treats us to the subtleties of Darwin’s theory of evolution in a very accessible way. His ideas about minds (see Dennett’s, Kinds of Minds as well) is important for understanding the fundamental characteristics of animal and human cognition. Dennett supports the main stream ideas in cognitive science. I think it fair to say that he is one of the most articulate writers and speakers in the field. Bookstore Link


The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, et al presents an elaborate argument for a position that I basically endorse, but it does so in a very general, almost philosophical, way. The book lacks a set of models to explain how these ideas actually work. I believe that my two chapters (in Book-II) on how language means and works fill that need.
Bookstore Link

Evolution and Human Behavior by John Cartwright focuses on how human beings behave, that is, on sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. It deals with the content of thought, while I focus on the underlying mechanisms that support thought. Bookstore Link

The Evolution of Cognition edited by Cecilia Heyes and Ludwig Huber promises to deal with categorization and the representation of objects and events and hence caused me to fear that I had been scooped because of its promise to deal with categorization and the representation of objects and events. This promise is laid out in the MIT Press synopsis, in the Chapter 1 introduction, and in the introduction to Part 2, Categorization (pp. 81–83), but it is never brought to fruition in the chapters that follow (5–8). Chapter 6, on stimulus equivalents, never gets beyond a detailed description of several interesting experiments. My treatment is based on global models, while the Heyes and Huber book is based on examination of detailed experiments—a worthwhile endeavor, but one that, at least in this case, does not address deep issues of animal or human cognition. Bookstore Link

The Growth of the Mind by Stanley Greenspan, M.D. presents an argument that is consistent with Merlin Donald’s (Origins of the Modern Mind) but emphasizes that it is specific emotional experiences of infants and children, not cognitive stimulation, that is responsible for human intelligence. I agree and use this hypothesis in my modeling of human cognition. Bookstore Link

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, which tempted me, when I was in an unkind mood, to title my book, “How the Mind Really Works. Although Pinker’s book has one chapter (“Thinking Machines”) devoted to discussing computational models of the human mind and the rest of the book assumes that model, his book is mostly about evolutionary psychology. That is, it is about the content of human thought, not the underlying mechanisms that support it. My book almost exclusively discusses these underlying mechanisms. Bookstore Link

If a Lion Could Talk by Stephen Budiansky is written by a scientific journalist with a clear mind and engaging writing style. He warns us of the difficulties of being objective about animal cognition. He asserts that even open-minded intelligent scientists tend to report only those behaviors that remind them of their own human behavior. In addition, we feel the need to be succinct in our descriptions of animal behavior to the point of leaving out crucial information that might reveal a more mundane explanation of an animal’s behavior. Furthermore, many people have significant bias that distorts how they describe animal behavior and cognition. These lessons are hard to internalize in the abstract, so Budiansky describes many specific situations and shows the range of interpretations of them that have been put forward by different researchers. Budiansky also weaves the impact of his ideas of animal cognition into an analysis of human cognition that parallels my own analysis. In particular, he notes that the animal mind can be characterized by many specialized nonlinguistic and noncomputational processes that also serve to support the languageless cognition of humans. Human reason, by his and my account, is the powerful add-on that natural language supports. This is an extraordinarily cogent and readable, largely overlooked, book. Bookstore Link


Language and Species by Derek Bickerton deals better than any book I know with the origins of human language, as well as with hominid and human cognition. Bickerton’s arguing the importance of the primary representation system (PRS) of primates and hominids and the secondary representation system (SRS) of humans is precisely on target, as is his discussion of the two-word sentence protolanguage of hominids and the full syntactic language of human beings. Instead of human beings growing clever enough to invent language, Bickerton argues that they blundered into language and as a direct result became clever. Unfortunately Bickerton hypothesizes that language syntax arose because of a crucial genetic mutation, and his entire set of ideas has largely been ignored because of this one admittedly unsupportable idea. I Am Not a Machine uses the ideas of cognitive linguistics to argue for language syntax as being a descriptive property of language rather than a set of rules realized somehow in the brain (Chomsky’s hypothesis), thus avoiding the pitfalls of Bickerton’s gene mutation hypothesis. I also develop a more comprehensive model of the primary representational system (PRS) to support further Bickerton’s hypothesis.
Bookstore Link

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker is a focused look, not a survey, at the most unique aspect of human intelligence and I consequently recommend it to anyone who is just starting to learn about cognition, although professional scientists should read it as well. It strikes a balance between technical detail and entertaining stories and is thoroughly a “good read” without trivializing the subject matter. Although I argue for a very different fundamental model for how the mind works than that offered by Pinker, I think it critically important that any serious student of the mind understand alternative models and the reasons that support them. Bookstore Link


The Mind within the Net, by Manfred Spitzer is a serious in-depth presentation of neural networks and neural network models of the mind written for the highly motivated but not necessarily technically educated reader. Spitzer presents semantic networks as a way to model certain meaning aspects of language, but he sidesteps the issue of language syntax. Spitzer’s book has many illuminating discussions of brains that have gone awry. His treatment of the disordered mind is the best I’ve seen and indeed offers deep insights into normal cognition.
Boosktore Link

Mind by Paul Thagard is written for the general reader and presents a broad-scoped introductory survey of the entirety of research activity in cognitive science. Bookstore Link

Mindware and Being There by Andy Clark are excellent books containing well-written comprehensive reviews of cognitive science by a philosopher with both feet on the ground. Clark argues, as does most of the cognitive science community, that mental representation implies symbols in the brain and this “mechanism” has no limitations. He also has one of the clearest discussions I have seen of formal systems, that is, systems that are characterized by formal rules, symbols, and procedures. He goes into enough depth on many issues for readers to grapple with the fundamental issues he raises and ponder the many experiments he cites. Mindware defines current thinking in traditional cognitive science. Bookstore Link

Origins of the Modern Mind by Merlin Donald presents a view of the evolution of mind that is primarily based on four epochs of stable culture characterized by the highest level of cognition and behavior exhibited at each stage. The four stages are: the “episodic” culture of primates and very early (barely bipedal) hominids, the “mimetic” culture of Homo erectus, the “mythic” culture of Home Sapiens, and the “theoretic” culture of modern human beings who use written records. By contrast, I deal primarily with the underlying mental processes that support observable cognition and behavior. I argue that language is the evolutionary achievement that supports the behavior that Donald describes, rather than asserting that some other fundamental generalized “intelligence” evolved at each stage. I fully concur with Donald on the importance of the External Symbolic Storage (ESS) that characterizes the “theoretic” cognition of modern human beings who can write and use graphic symbols, and I draw upon his characterization of that process in my models.
Bookstore Link

Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition by Howard Margolis starts with the same premise that I did when I began writing my book a decade before he published his book: namely that pattern recognition is the fundamental process that can explain all human cognition. His book presents a serious look at association without distraction by the mechanics of neural networks (which, of course, model the pattern classification process). He argues persuasively that the mind is not governed by rules, algorithms and symbols, but he avoids the one area in which the argument gets into serious trouble—human language. Bookstore Link

Rethinking Innateness by Jeffrey Elman, et al. does a better job than any other work at presenting the implications of connectionism, especially as it relates to human language and development in general. My book is written for a less technical audience than this one and argues that connectionist models need to be augmented by an object-and-event representational mechanism and a planning mechanism for immediate action. My book (that is, Book II) also devotes more attention to exploring the broader implications of the model for human knowledge and the limits of human thinking. Bookstore Link

The Symbolic Species–The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence Deacon focuses on what Deacon calls symbolic representation—the key idea critical to my theory of language. The Symbolic Species also contains significant complex material on the physical and neurological structure of brains, while I Am Not a Machine! has little of that material and instead focuses on functional models of human and animal cognition. I consider this book a must read for anyone interested in the mind, language, and evolution. Bookstore Link

When Elephants Weep by Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy is about the emotional lives of animals, as the book’s subtitle accurately reflects.. Even pet owners convinced of the rich emotional life of their pet will be surprised and enriched by learning about the diverse emotionally-based behavior of a wide variety of animals. It’s very hard for me as a reader not to place myself in an animal’s shoes, so to speak, and reflect on what I would be thinking if I were in the animal’s place. I think Masson and McCarthy also have that tendency to interpret an animal’s emotional behavior in human terms and then to be led to “moral” conclusions based on those interpretations. It is enjoyable and not very hard work to read When Elephants Weep, but I think the unbiased reader should also do the hard work of reading about how other authors make very different interpretations of similar behavior. Bookstore Link


Wild Minds by Mark Hauser analyzes experimental evidence that delineates the limits of expected behavior from a variety of animal species. He gently warns us of over interpreting anecdotal observations of “interesting” behavior because of our tendency to imagine what we would do and think in the animal’s place. By these objective comparisons he shows that many species have a fundamental cognitive “toolkit” that allows them to deal effectively with numerosity, navigation, and common objects. Uncharacteristically, he supports the mainstream cognitive science view that animals as well as human beings have complex minds that can think complex thoughts without using natural language. Although this philosophical belief is the opposite my own views, it is such a small part of this work that I regard this book as a pillar in our understanding of animal cognition—a must read.
Bookstore Link


Words and Rules by Stephen Pinker was written for someone like me and caused me to lose several nights’ sleep. Although I think a person without formal education in linguistics or cognition can read this book, it does require concentration. The appropriate light treatment in his The Language Instinct leaves open the possibility for someone like me to make loosely constructed arguments countering Pinker’s fundamental models of language cognition—not so with Words and Rules. Here Pinker elaborates on the details that can make or break a theory, and he does so with style and grace. Thanks to his careful analysis I was able to refine my own ideas about how language works.
Bookstore Link


Words, Thoughts, and Theories by Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff. I discuss the “theory theory” of cognitive development in my chapter on cognitive development (Book III), in which I describe it as being only one interesting part of a complex story. But more broadly Gopnik and Meltzoff present a set of ideas on the relationship between thought and language that I fundamentally disagree with. In a sense one would need to read my entire book to understand the reasons for that disagreement. Let’s just say that the authors are at odds with second-generation cognitive science and cognitive linguistics.
Bookstore Link

Home I Annotated Bibliography I For Pet Owners I Thought You'd Never Ask I Contact

Click on the cover image for more information about the corresponding book.



Buy the Book...
Click on a vendor below to purchase

Amazon.com
Paperback I Hardcover

Barnes & Noble

Paperback I Hardcover

Books-A-Million
Paperback I Hardcover

 

Buy the Book...
Click on a vendor below to purchase

Amazon.com
Paperback I Hardcover

Barnes & Noble

Paperback I Hardcover

Books-A-Million
Paperback I Hardcover

Buy the Book...
Click on a vendor below to purchase

Amazon.com
Paperback

Barnes & Noble

Paperback

Books-A-Million
Paperback

 

Book I: Thinking Without WordsBook II: Thinking With WordsBook III: Rethinking Cognitive Psychology