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How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997, 660 pp., $29.90, ISBN 0-39304535-8.
Steven Pinker's previous book, the widely successful The Language Instinct (Pinker 1994) forcefully promoted Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar underlying particular natural languages, the innate language ability of humans, and presented a theory of how a language organ could have evolved through Darwinian natural selection. His provocative monograph is now attracting challenging texts from other cognitive scientists (for example, Deacon [1997]), but Pinker himself is ahead by leaps and bounds. This time, he has decided to tackle an even larger issue; in his latest book, How the Mind Works, Pinker presents his hypothesis of the origins and the logical structure of the whole human mind. A book with such a title and content must, surely, interest any AI researcher.
The book is intended for a wider audience than just the professional cognitive scientists' circle. Therefore, it contains many discussions that appear simple and superficial for anyone who has studied the philosophy and foundations of Al a little deeper. However, working within Al-related topics, there are many of us who have not followed closely the involved cognitive science arguments and are not aware of all the recent developments in psychology. For us, Pinker's book serves as a good introduction to the big picture. The less advanced passages of the book should be worth tolerating even for a dedicated cognitionist because of the book's other merits.
It is not an accident that Steven Pinker keeps authoring popular science books that attain great attention and success; he is a talented writer, and together with his background team, he is capable of digging up funny anecdotes from movies, literature, cartoons, and so on, to invigorate the text. All this adds up to a fluent and entertaining reading experience. However, what about the substance? Partly, the research surveyed in this book can already be considered classical; for example, the extensive coverage of human stereo vision is mostly based on Marr's (1982) seminal account of the subject. However, the experimental psychology research that is reviewed in the book is relatively recent. Many of the ideas that Pinker presents have been in the air in evolutionary psychology; particularly influential and...