Content area
Full Text
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...