The discipline of Psychology
is, to put it mildly, broad, and its philosophical study naturally follows
suit. To write a text which serves, in the series editor’s words, as ‘an
accessible but substantial transition from introductory to higher-level work’
(publisher’s inset) of such an area is a challenge which Bermudez meets
admirably, although a slight tension between comprehensiveness and being
concise does show in certain chapters.

Chapter one provides a light background discussion to the main topic of
the book, dwelling briefly on cognitive psychology’s roots in Descartes,
Berkeley and Kant, and on varieties of conceptual analysis — which is,
apparently, the ‘business of’ the philosophy of psychology, albeit a variety
which is partly empirical. Chapter two then introduces the problematic which is
explored in the remainder of the book, the ‘interface’ problem of how to relate
our everyday, or ‘commonsense’, psychology to the machinations of our cognitive
goings-on at a subpersonal level (or levels). In particular, how does
‘personal-level’ psychological explanation interface with the explanations of
‘subpersonal’ cognitive activities? In the following three chapters Bermudez
considers in turn four pictures of the mind, each of which supply an answer to
this conundrum, before turning to increasingly fundamental concerns that
underlie all four.

Chapter three differentiates
the autonomous mind from the functional mind, which hold that there is no
connection between commonsense psychology and that the connection can be
characterized in causal terms respectively, according to how they treat
commonsense psychological explanations. Autonomy theorists such as Davidson and
McDowell take them to involve a normative ideal of rationality, whereas for the
legion of functionalists they are subsumed under causal explanations quite
generally. The functional mind is then differentiated from the representational
mind in chapter four on the grounds that mental representations, unlike simple
functional states, admit an internal structure and so can distinguish the
content of a state from an attitude taken towards it. Oddly, though, Bermudez
characterizes the representational picture solely by Fodor’s Language of
Thought hypothesis (LoT) — this despite not only the fact that there are many
varieties of representationism but many, if perhaps not all, share this feature
of he takes as central. Millikan, for example, has defended the view that a
defining feature of representations is their having internal structure
(‘semantic compositionality’), but a structure that is more analogous to a map
or model than a sentence. Brevity, it seems, won here over completeness, although
perhaps the opposite may be said of the discussion of the neurocomputational
mind in chapter five. According to which the different levels coevolved and
need to be studied together, possibly through use of neural networking
techniques.

The four pictures introduced,
Bermudez returns to the nature of personal-level commonsense psychology, and
considers objections raised to the standard view of it consisting of prediction
and explanation in terms of propositional attitudes. In chapter six Dennett’s
‘mild realism’ concerning intentional states and his use of ‘real patterns’ is
subjected to a probing exegesis which exposes tensions in the supposed
observer-independence and causal status of these patterns, and the arguments
Bermudez gives also lend some credence to his slightly curious classification
of Dennett as an autonomy theorist rather than a representationalist. Both
Davidson’s Anomalous Monism and counterfactual approaches to intentional
explanation receive somewhat milder criticism, but are effectively analyzed and
dismissed nonetheless. Chapter seven considers the scope of commonsense
psychology through a discussion of the theory versus simulation debate over its
underlying mechanisms, which concludes with a mild advocacy of the view
Bermudez has advanced elsewhere, that we can often interact effectively without
propositional attitude psychology, using instead our grasp of social roles and
routines; thus the scope of commonsense psychology may well be somewhat
narrower than commonly thought. Another standard view is examined in chapter
eight, which is concerned with understanding the move from perception to action
and contains a particularly lucid account of the ‘massive modularity’
hypothesis that holds that all reasoning is domain-specific.

Latterly, chapters nine and
ten are concerned with propositional attitudes and language, and are followed
by some concluding thoughts on how a fifth picture of the mind might be
developed. The need for the vehicles of propositional attitudes to have a
structure isomorphic to that of their content is canvassed through further
discussion of the Language of Thought hypothesis — sadly, once again other
relevant varieties of representationism are left by the wayside — as well as
the apparent tension between this structural requirement and the
neurocomputational picture. Once again in chapter ten Fodor looms large, where
LoT is contrasted with rival hypothesis concerning linguistic thought before
its take on practical reasoning and concept learning is scrutinized, if not criticized
particularly heavily.

Although doubtlessly highly
significant in the philosophy of psychology, given their specialization these
topics may seem a little curious for the late chapters of an advanced
introductory text, but the rationale for their placement becomes much clearer
after reading the concluding remarks — the fifth picture outlined therein is,
in essence, a hybrid of each of the others bar the autonomous mind, with a core
of ‘central’ processing divided into two types understood, one directly and the
other indirectly, in terms of language.

As an advanced introductory
text, this book has much to recommend it to undergraduate and graduate
philosophy students: as being clearly and engagingly written and, on the whole,
striking an excellent balance between exegesis and criticism and between
brevity and completeness. On this account it may well also prove of interest to
yet more sophisticated philosophers and readers more familiar with other
disciplines, but where it really excels is in Bermudez’ pedagogy which succeeds
in not only clearly presenting what are often seen as rather murky issues, but
relating them together in a genuinely illuminating and unified discussion. For
this alone, the book should be essential reading for anyone with at least a
little background in the philosophy of psychology who wishes to learn more; I
should also mention the inclusion of an annotated bibliography to guide further
research.

© 2006 Richard de Blacquière-Clarkson

Richard de
Blacquière-Clarkson, University of Durham

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology