Abstract

This book is fun-full of amusing anecdotes, historical tidbits, and scientific asides. It is also informative and challenging, telling one man's version of cognitive science's intellectual origins. Superficially, it is indeed, as Leiber calls it, "a narrative account of cognitive science in a look through its classical formulations," but it is also much more. Leiber winds together the technological advances of Greece, Wittgenstein's disdain for the autonomous, coherent mind, Turing's formulations of computations and computability, and a bit of Chomskian linguistics in a way that is altogether refreshing and new. The juxtaposition of Wittgenstein and Turing form the center of the text, and Leiber uses the contrast to cast a fresh glance at the old question: How much of our understanding is insight and how much invention? More specifically for cognitive science, that question becomes: Does our experience of formal systems allow us to carve ourselves at the proverbial joints, or are we instead forcing ourselves to fit that description? Is the computer really a mirror, or is it only a mold?