Justin Leiber

(1938 - 2016)

Alan Turing draws a firm line between the mental and the physical, between the cognitive and physical sciences. For Turing, following a tradition that went back to D=Arcy Thompson, if not Geoffroy and Lucretius, throws talk of function, intentionality, and final causes from biology as a physical science. He likens Amother nature@ to the earnest A. I. scientist, who may send to school disparate versions of the Achild machine,@ eventually hoping for a test-passer but knowing that the vagaries of his experimental course are history and accident

In his short life, Alan Turing (1912-1954) made foundational contributions to philosophy, mathematics, biology, artificial intelligence, and computer science. He, as much as anyone, invented the digital electronic computer. From September, 1939 much of his work on computation was war-driven and brutally practical. He developed high speed computing devices needed to decipher German Enigma Machine messages to and from U-boats, countering the most serious threat by far to Britain's survival during World War Two. Yet few people have an image of him.

This is an excellent book for philosophers, and others concerned with natural language and cognition, who have not kept up with post-Aspects work in syntax, in particular with the Extended Standard Theory work on government and binding that relates to anaphora and quantification. It is a direct challenge to those who think that there must be a reasonably clearcut semantic level of description for sentences in natural language, one which is crucial for explaining how we learn, understand, and use natural language. Hornstein argues that the properties of quantification such as relative quantifier scope and pronoun binding in natural language are best explained in purely syntactic terms. "Not only are the explanations best construed syntactically but, more important, the distinctions and concepts needed to articulate them cut against the semantic distinctions one would naturally make". This syntactic theory will, of course, be supplemented in a full theory of language use by pragmatic theories that will assign meaning, force, reference, etc., in particular contexts, given all sorts of real world knowledge. But what we won't have will be a compositional, context insensitive level of semantic description in which true, denotation, object, model, etc., loom large. Though Hornstein is a philosopher, his arguments derive from a linguist's familiarity with recent syntactical work; however, the general line is consonant with Stich's From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief, in which Stich argues beliefs are so context and intrepretive-stance relative that they cannot be grist for a scientific psychology, which must rather limit itself to syntactical characterizations of sentences in cognition.

This spare book amply maintains the distinction of the Bradford Book series. In chapter 1 Cummins argues that the familiar deductive-nomological notion of scientific explanation only covers transitional theories and fails to give an account of explanation through property or system analysis that is pervasive in both the physical and psychological sciences. This inadequacy of the D-N view is supposed particularly injurious in the unrobust and infant science of psychology. Explanation through analysis ranges from decidedly morphological to the decidedly systemic, and from the interpretive to the descriptive. Explanation through analysis is typically an interactive two step: one gives a revealingly helpful component-function or programmatic analysis and one hopes to find an explanatory instantiation of this analysis. Psychological explanation is importantly systemic and its most challenging problem is that of finding isomorphisms between interpretive instantiations and descriptive instantiations-the hope for two-stepping isomorphisms in human psychological explanation is bio-logical, the sorts of structures that genes can determine being the likely candidates for our psychological capacities.