Cognitive sciences, as defined by its practitioners, seeks to understand a variety of "higher" brain functions, examples of which are thinking, memory, perception, and language. The purpose of Newell's book, based on the William James Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1987, is to bring together the various aspects of this complex field under the intellectual scepter of a single theory. Not surprisingly, Newell finds the unifying catalyst to be his own Soar program developed over the last three decades. Soar is a computer architecture for artificial intelligence that has been the object of considerable interest (and some controversy) among those interested in AI (see Waldrop [2,3]). Newell argues that the entire spectrum of cognitive functions is subsumed in--and can be explained by--this architecture.
Whatever the value of Newell's program to those interested in artificial intelligence, neurobiologistsmthat is, reductionists who take it as axiomatic that cognition must be understood in terms of the brain and its component parts--will find this book wanting. The tenor of the discourse is foreshadowed on page 17 of the Introduction where Newell states that his aim is to understand cognition in the context of mind, rather than brain. Indeed,