This book was weird, but I couldn't figure out why until about page 220. I picked it up because of a rave review for it in Choice magazine. After I became offended by the text, I stuck with it, hoping to find out what in the world caused the rave review. I was hoping that it would improve, but was mostly
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This book was weird, but I couldn't figure out why until about page 220. I picked it up because of a rave review for it in Choice magazine. After I became offended by the text, I stuck with it, hoping to find out what in the world caused the rave review. I was hoping that it would improve, but was mostly disappointed. I did, however, figure out why it got the rave review.Even from the first page, Donald starts misrepresenting other mind researchers and philosophers and making fun of them. He grouped many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, into a stereotype that he called Hardliners, and then basically called them all fools. The Hardline position that he set up as a straw man seemed to be akin to Dennett's memetic theory of consciousness. But he tossed Pinker and others in to this human kind, despite the fact that Pinker is anti-memetics. This bashing goes on for the first fifty pages. Next, Donald tries to outline his own new theory of consciousness. Its better parts look suspiciously like the ideas of Pinker. However, he keeps hinting that language is not learned using dedicated brain modules, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. His willingness to accept some brain modules, but not others, such as language faculties, strikes me as self-contradictory. Also, most of the ideas do not seem new. Along about page 210, he finally shows his cards. He is part of the old Establishment that rejects the hardwired brain and that the evolutionary psychologists fought when they started their reforming of psychology, basing it on brain modules. He has accepted just enough of the evolutionary psychology and its modular theory of the mind so as to not be contradicted by a lot of basic research, but then he draws the line and excludes modular structure from the higher faculties of human thought, which he claims are built by associative learning a la Condillac and Piaget. So he preaches against the reformation, and then adopts enough of it to spruce up constructivism with a new foundation of evolution by natural selection. Clearly, the Choice reviewer also belonged to this counterattack, trying to save the socially constructed mind from those who argue for the hardwired pre-existence of the soul (read monkeys). The reason the book gets two stars instead of one is that Donald clearly has expertise in the neurological structure of the brain, and his point is well taken that what one can demonstrate through testing is operated by modules does not map to clean chunks of gray matter. Also, the chunks that are active for a task in one person are different from the ones active in another person. That doesn't prove Donald's point, but it does present challenges for evolutionary psychologists who favor a strong version of modules. I give only two stars because of Donald's rhetorical poor sportsmanship and weak positive arguments.
