In this interesting book, the author attempts to
provide a historically informed account of the development of the human mind.
His methodology is interdisciplinary, drawing from contemporary analytic
philosophy and cognitive psychology, anthropology and biology. Unfortunately
the way in which these disciplines can contribute together to a coherent and
novel view of the mind does not clearly emerge from the book and remains a
mystery. This is probably due to the lack of a rigorous structure in the
presentation of the author’s arguments and to the way in which the author uses
the available evidence. He seems to rely on particular historical episodes or
textual evidence to illustrate some of his points but he does not manage to
convince the reader that the evidence actually supports his view.

The main thesis of Johnson’s book
is that the mind is not a set of brain informational functions, but that the
nature of the mind depends on culture and past historical events. He proposes
to criticize those philosophers who "have a keen desire to think, reason
and speculate in a manner typical of natural scientists" (page 4),
without really identifying what the problem is with a scientific approach to
the nature of the mind. He argues that brains appeared before minds appeared
and he concludes from that that the mind cannot be a set of informational
functions of the brain. But of course it is possible to think that after the
brain appeared, its different functions developed at different stages and some
of these functions are now identified as ‘the mind’. Johnson then goes on to
say that paleoanthropology shows that there is "always a delay between the
development of larger and more complex hominid brains and subsequent cultural
advances"(page 12). For instance, he tells us that Homo Hergaster had a
bigger brain than his predecessors but there was no significant difference in
the tools he made or the preys he hunted. This of course does not show much.
What if there was some significant difference, but in a cultural domain that
had little to do with these aspects of tool-making and hunting? Johnson
concedes that Homo Hergaster was eating more meat than his predecessor, so he
might have been a more successful hunter after all. The significant improvement
in tool making happens when Homo Erectus appears, four hundred thousand years
after the first appearance of Homo Hergaster. Johnson draws from that the
conclusion that a change in mental activities was present at that later time.

Not only is the use of evidence
simplistic. Johnson’s account of the different views of the mind in
contemporary philosophy is very sketchy, and sometimes misleading. In
describing behaviorism, Johnson claims that the behaviorist slogan is ‘talk is
cheap’ and that the underlying message was that only observable physical
movements that constitute reaction to stimulation can be taken to be reliable
manifestations of mental activity. This might be true for some weak version of
psychological behaviorism, but it is definitely unfair towards sophisticated
versions of philosophical behaviorism that underpin totally respectable and
progressive research programs such as cognitive ethology.

The rest of his book is about the
birth of reason, which according to him did not develop before 1,000 BC (the
so-called Greek revolution). Johnson argues that present-day eliminativists are
leaving something out when they talk about neurophysiology being the future of
psychology. The problem is that he does not use original arguments to make this
point, but recycles Ryle’s notion of a category mistake. At the end of his line
of reasoning, the author states that our conception of the mind as separated
from everything else (I am not sure what he means here), as connected with
reasonableness and internal consistency, and as involving the notion of beliefs
that could be true or false, is a creation of the Greek Revolution and was
unknown before that time. Evidence for this is that Egyptians would regularly
violate the law of non-contradiction€¦ ‘Egyptians neither employed or
presupposed the same ideals of literal truth that we do now; and therefore they
also did not have minds, in the strict sense of the word we now employ’ (page
114). What he might mean by this puzzling statement is in some cultures there
was no talk of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, intentions) that
corresponds to the folk-psychological talk we have in contemporary English.
This of course does not begin to show that the notion of an objective truth was
missing.

The subject of Johnson’s book is
fascinating and the reader is bound to form very high expectations when a
culturally sensitive and historically accurate account of the human mind is
promised. But the author fails to deliver what he promises and disappointment
ensues.

© 2004 Lisa Bortolotti

Lisa
Bortolotti is a research associate in the Centre for Social Ethics and
Policy
at the University of Manchester (UK). She obtained her PhD from the Australian
National University in Canberra with a thesis
in the philosophy of mind. Now
she is interested in rationality, animal cognition, applied ethics and mental
illness.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology