Her story of cognitive science

I have mixed feelings about this monumental 1600 page book. Most readers of the AIJ would not be advised to buy it, but it would be a good addition to the university or lab library. This is a very well written and very personal chronicle of Cognitive Science in the 20th century. Margaret Boden, a British philosopher with strong ties to MIT, has put her considerable energy and intelligence into providing a nontechnical overview of many (but by no means all) of the developments leading to the current state of Cognitive Science, construed broadly as the inter-disciplinary effort to understand intelligence using both biology and computation as cornerstones. It is basically science journalism written by someone who has been passionately interested in the developments. There is no technical detail, but she does try to convey the scientific ideas in a general way. I quite enjoyed reading (parts of) the book and even got new perspective on some events that I was involved in. The book has a good deal of juicy gossip about personalities and conflicts. MB has done an outstanding job of promoting some of the forgotten contributors and tries to present a balanced view, but she has her heroes. Heroic personalities help the narrative flow, but it does detract from any sense of objectivity. For example, she dismisses some critics of Minsky’s later work as “callow MIT graduate students hardly fit to lick his boots” (p. 921). It is unlikely that anyone else will produce a rival account. In his TLS review Michael C. Corballis [2] says both that he is an outsider to the field and that “it is hard to imagine any other work that could so completely document the intellectual ferment of the past fifty years”. While the developments stressed in the book were all important, several others were omitted that were arguably equally central. This caveat, and my detailed remarks to follow, are not so much criticism of Boden’s effort as a suggestion that the task is impossible. There are several distinct Cognitive Science narratives and each suggests rather different directions for future research. Among the conspicuously missing fields is Cognitive Linguistics. Anyone who wants a balanced view of Cognitive Science should also read at least Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh [3] which also has significant biological and computational aspects. Readers interested in contemporary work in vision would need to consult books like those of Palmer [5] or Wandell [6]. You will find little about AI developments after 1980 and very little about speech, probability, inference, or motor control and robotics altogether. More generally, there are several alternative narratives on the development of Cognitive Science. For example, the Berkeley narrative (long before I arrived) features em-