Review of Brave new mind: A thoughtful inquiry into the nature of mental life.

Abstract

PETER DODWELL Brave New Mind: A Thoughtful Inquiry into the Nature Of Mental Life New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 262 pages (ISBN 0-19-508905-7, C$56.00, Hardcover) Reviewed by LEENDERT P. MOS author poses the major question for cognitive science: Can mental life be exhaustively studied as purely natural phenomenon, or must go beyond the mundane, the merely physical, to grasp its reality? (p. viii). His answer is, that absolutely no psychological consequence follows from model couched exclusively algorithmic, physical, or physiological terms, which the way contemporary cognitive proceeds (p. 190). Planned as history of cognitive science, and its contributory disciplines of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and computing science, and contemporary survey of its strengths and weaknesses, the project, according to its author, one of this country's most respected researchers, got out of hand (p. vii). This then the second book (the first, Roots of Cognitive listed as in preparation): a plea for the widening of the field of cognitive to include some well-documented features of mental life - the `drama of mental life' - that have suffered neglect over the past many decades but are nevertheless valid topics of inquiry (p. vii). While documenting the achievements of cognitive science, this volume much more mature retrospective on its limitations and, implicitly, its failures of intent, and this by participant the enterprise whose reflections reach back more than 40 years to the beginning of his academic career. It also book about science, the kind of to which cognitive aspires but cannot possibly attain given that it deals only with the of mental life and not with its drama. In other words, inquires the author manner reminiscent of the very beginnings of our discipline, is cognitive just natural science, or it ... also moral science? weight of contemporary opinion accepts the former, but I shall argue strongly for the latter, more accurately that cannot dispense with either, that need (p. vii). consequent tensions that may be expected to infuse Dodwell's critical reflections on what many our discipline deem to be its furthest reaches, are already evident the Preface, where immediately following his caution that cognitive science's concern with the should not blind it to the drama of mental life, he writes that we cannot take full measure of the drama without first apprising ourselves of the basic grammar (p. ix). But can cognitive be both moral and natural science; if it now natural can merely add on its essential moral component? Cognitive defined as the study of mental life and of self, and characterized, the opening chapter entitled The Scope of Cognitive Science, as the latest triumph the materialistic, mechanistic, and naturalistic tradition of natural science. If science has made metaphysicians of us all (p. 6) Dodwell writes, noting the failure of positivism's claim to metaphysical neutrality, cognitive too, especially neuroscience and artificial intelligence, has profoundly affected the kinds of questions philosophy can ask. Since philosophy feeds on rather than leads science, cognitive philosophy has merely affirmed the 19th-century materialist and mechanist, view, that entrenched cognitive science. trouble that cognitive has been unable to incorporate natural science's own critique of this clockwork view of (e.g., Heisenberg, Hawking, & Penrose) largely because advances sciences are no longer readily accessible, and understandable, even to scientists. But if neither philosophy nor can lead cognitive to critique of its reductionist groundings, can cognitive do so out of its own resources? …