โ Scribed by Alistair J. Bray; Lynne J. Cahill; John P. Rae
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
To determine, describe and assess the foundations of cognitive science is undeniably a worthy, yet Herculean task. Michael Posner has made a valiant attempt, but unfortunately met with limited success. This is due to unasked and unanswered questions about the nature of cognitive science: does it stand alone as a single enterprise, or is it a confederacy of disciplines brought together under the umbrella of common interest? Surprisingly the book does not address this issue. The authors of the first chapter, entitled "Foundations of Cognitive Science" (see final section for list of contributions), do provide a working definition of cognitive science as "the study of intelligence and its computational processes in humans (and animals), in computers and in the abstract". However, such definitions reflect individual approaches and are unsatisfactory if they are to refer to all the topics discussed in the later chapters.
That such a central theme should go without closer inspection is characteristic of the book, and goes to emphasise that there is little cross-talk between the communities brought together in this volume. We found the chapters to be uncoordinated. It is to be expected that chapters should reflect individual style; however, we had hoped that some underlying structure might arise that would pull the work together. This was not the case. Although the book is split into * (MIT Press,
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