Not a page-turner, but a very intellectually-challenging book.

Abstract

Not a Page-turner, but a Very Intellectually-Challenging Book: Review of S. Pinker, How the mind works. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998 (660 pages). Often when describing a good book, reviewers will call it a The apparent implication is that the work was so well written, and the story so engrossing, that the reader simply could not put the book down. Given this viewpoint, books are not judged by their covers, but by the time it takes to get from one cover to the next. Steve Pinker's book How the mind works is not a page-turner. At least, it was not for me. In fact, as the editor of this journal can easily validate, I spent a very long time traversing the terrain from the front cover to the back cover. I had no problems at all putting the book down, and did so on a number of occasions, sometimes for days at a time. By the page-turning theory of good books then, How the mind works does not fair well. However, if we consider the quick index of book quality in more detail, it becomes immediately obvious that whereas reading speed may be a good index of quality in the fiction domain, it fails miserably in the scientific domain. A good fiction book is one that prompts you to give over your mind and imagination to the author, allowing him or her to take you on a journey they create. Any two readers of the same fiction should recount it similarly, insofar as they themselves played little role in the reading experience. They were merely privileged viewers of a series of events in which they themselves had little stake. Thus, the book is read more with the imagery part of the brain than with the logic and problem-solving part. In contrast, a good scientific book should force readers to think about the path they are being led on, rather than describing how pretty that path is. In fact, a very good scientific book should challenge readers to decide for themselves whether the path onto which they are led is even the right path at all. The reader should become an integral part of the story being told, and the final product of that story could consist of not only the author's words, but also of the reader's reactions, agreements, and disagreements. As such, any two readers should have a similar but different recounting of the story, with the similarity due to what the author said, and the differences due to their own thoughts and ideas. How the mind works provides an excellent example of what I consider a very good, thought-provoking scientific book. It is true that I often put the book down, sometimes for long periods. But during those down times I still continued to read, in the sense described earlier. That is, I continued to consider the thoughts and issues raised by Pinker, often discussing them with colleagues, in an attempt to decide for myself where I stood on the issues. I found that I agreed with some of Pinker's views while disagreeing with others. However, I will not recount my opinions here, because I expect a different reader would have very different opinions for the reasons described above. Instead, I will highlight the characteristics of Pinker's book that make it such a nonpage-turner. In my view, the strengths of the book are rooted in three characteristics: (a) the perspective, (b) the subject matter, and (c) the writing style. I now comment on each of these briefly. PERSPECTIVE The book is written from a reverse-engineering, cognitive science perspective. That is, the mind is seen as the workings of some amazing and complicated machinery that we do not understand well, despite the fact that we interact with and observe the machine most of the time every day. It is as though a different kind of computer suddenly appeared on our desk and nobody knew how it worked -- perhaps a computer of extra-terrestrial origins, not built by us and therefore not necessarily conforming to our engineering principles. The question then is, how is it able to do the things it does? …