MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, The

Canadian Psychology, Nov 2002 by Bub, Daniel

ROBERT A. WILSON and FRANK C. KEIL (Eds.) The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001, 1,096 pages (ISBN 0-262-73144-4, US$65, Softcover)

Reviewed by DANIEL BUB

Cognitive science is the banner under which the combined forces of philosophy, psychology, the analysis of computational intelligence, linguistics, and anthropology have rallied in an attempt to make headway against the ultimate scientific question: How do the capabilities of the human mind emerge from physical matter? Recently, another formidable ally, the field of neuroscience, or more specifically, cognitive neuroscience in its new setting, has added brain-based methodologies to the alliance. It is an exciting mixture of disciplines, its activities driven by the common goal, at least in principle, of advancing our understanding of human cognition. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is an attempt to put together a summary of the "...full range of concepts, methods, and results derived and deployed in cognitive science over the last twenty-- five years" (p. xiii), a description given by the editors in the preface of this ambitious undertaking.

An encyclopedia can be evaluated according to two criteria: How are the entries organized? and What has been left out, given the (necessarily) abbreviated exposition of concepts, methods and results? MITECS has 471 articles relevant to cognitive science presented in alphabetic order, beginning with one entitled "Aboutness" and ending with one on "X-bar Theory." Each article is no longer than the length of this review and includes at the end a list of additional entries that the reader can peruse to further explicate the topic. To organize this impressive collection, the volume begins with an overview (average length about 20 pages) of each of the six domains that make up the content of MITECS, written by one or two consulting experts. As summary statements, part of their rationale is to provide a key to the linkages between different articles. This goal is difficult to accomplish if one is seeking an introduction that makes transparent the threads connecting the diversity of ideas summarized in MITECS, and in many instances the reader is simply told in effect that if he or she wishes to know more about topic X, he or she should also consult topics A, B, C, etc. This limitation one must accept as inevitable given the logistics of the enterprise, and the overviews are valuable tools that anyone who has taught a course in the foundations of cognitive science will relish.

More problematic in reading these overviews of the subcomponents of the field is the impression that the different domains, while showing signs of some integration at the margins, often make little contact with each other at the core. For example, the review section on "Neuroscience" includes a discussion of the neural mechanisms involved in translating a decision into action but makes no reference at all to the problem of the homunculus (what part of the brain decides, in the end, to act?), a major topic analyzed in the corresponding section on "Philosophy." The section on "Computational Intelligence" has little use for the evidence from neuroscience that human cognition is made up of functionally independent modules. For detailed theoretical modeling of cognitive architectures, we learn in this section that the evidence from neuroscience is too subjective and informal, and the nature of the connections between modular components remains obscure. Thus, "...the basic organizational principles of intelligence are still up for grabs" (p. lxxvi).

The summary of "Psychology" is perhaps less perfidious in connecting up with the other members of the cognitive alliance, but only because its style is more a synopsis of history and empirical methods than an analysis of core methodological issues in the field. The advantage is that the reader is given a clear, relatively uncontentious presentation of the major topics that currently occupy many psychologists. The cost is that we learn little about the full scope and limits of this enterprise, nor about possible avenues in which the domain might be extended.

The section on "Linguistics and Language" presents a delightful and energetic defense of the argument that certain cognitive representations must be innate and universal to enable language acquisition The evidence is based on abstract analyses of syntactic structures and appeals to the intuitions of native speakers. Again, there seems little contact between this approach to the analysis of language and the treatment of language by neuroscientists. Studies of brain-damaged cases have identified neural tissue in the left hemisphere that is specialized for some aspect of language, but this kind of evidence does not have much bearing on the foundational issues of syntax and semantics that comprise linguistic theory.

The claim that some aspects of language must be innate raises fundamental questions about human evolution, discussed in the section entitled "Culture, Cognition and Evolution" and also in the section on "Linguistics and Language". Did language evolve through natural selection, the way a complex organ like the eye evolved, or did it emerge as a by-product of other adaptations or even through nonselectionist processes, such as random genetic drift? This kind of question is necessarily interdisciplinary, requiring an understanding of principles in genetics, linguistic theory, evolution and population biology, and here, the value of MITECS becomes fully apparent. The reader not only has a thorough overview of the arguments for innateness based on linguistic analyses of syntactic structures, but the issue is reworked from several other angles as well. We are given ways to think about the possible interplay of evolution and culture in the development of cognitive structures in the section on "Culture, Cognition and Evolution." In addition, there are numerous short articles on evolution and its influence on various cognitive abilities (e.g., "Ethics and Evolution," "Evolutionary Psychology," and "Evolution"), and central to the question, a stimulating and informative short article on the evolution of language itself. Since each article also includes a useful list of references, anyone consulting MITECS on questions that currently allow for an integrative approach may well discover a valuable tool.