Margaret A. Boden. Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science .Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science by Margaret A. BodenReview by: By Jamie   Cohen-ColeIsis, Vol. 99, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 811-812Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597681 .

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BOOK REVIEWSf General

Margaret A. Boden. Mind as Machine: A His-tory of Cognitive Science. 2 volumes. xlviii �1,631 pp., figs., tables, apps., bibl., indexes. Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2006. £125(cloth).

Margaret Boden’s Mind as Machine is a two-volume, sixteen-hundred-page account of thehistory of cognitive science and the disciplinesthat compose it. Mind as Machine opens withfour chapters detailing the early history of ma-chine models of mind and biological processes.These chapters cover such figures as Descartes,Vaucanson, La Mettrie, and Babbage, as well asthe opponents of mechanistic biology. The suc-ceeding chapter focuses on the intersecting workof Alan Turing, Warren McCulloch and WalterPitts, and cybernetics in the years during andafter World War II. Subsequent chapters aredevoted to cognitive and computational psy-chology, symbolic artificial intelligence, con-nectionism, anthropology, linguistics, neuro-science, artificial life, and philosophy.

Boden contends at the beginning of the bookthat there have been two strands from whichcognitive science has been braided: artificial in-telligence and control theory. This argument,however, remains mostly in the backgroundthrough the book’s first volume. In the secondvolume, where Boden turns to explicit discus-sion of artificial intelligence and artificial life, itbecomes clear that these two strands have beencomposed of still finer threads. While artificialintelligence was composed of symbolic process-ing and connectionism, control theory was madeup of both artificial life and cybernetics—eachof which, as Boden explains, was in turn formedfrom the contributions of multiple disciplines.

Echoing earlier studies on the topic, thebook’s central theme is that cognitive science,defined as the study of mind as machine (p. 9),is a field thoroughly shaped by its interdiscipli-narity (see Howard Gardner, The Mind’s NewScience: A History of the Cognitive Revolution[Basic, 1985]; and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mech-anization of the Mind: On the Origins of CognitiveScience [Princeton, 2000]). Through extensive andthorough cross-referencing, Boden details how thework in a particular discipline intersected with theresearch in the fields examined in her other chap-ters. For instance, when discussing how to evalu-ate the quality of computer models of mind, Boden

lists Alan Newell’s twelve criteria and then ap-pends a couple more of her own. Having assem-bled this list of fourteen criteria, Boden subse-quently devotes a page to indexing the othersections of the book where these fourteen criteriaare also examined (pp. 509–511). By using in-dexes such as these in combination with thebook’s eighteen-page table of contents, the readermay track the interdisciplinary linkages to whichBoden points.

Boden has been an active and prolific practi-tioner in the cognitive science community sincealmost the very beginning of the field. She istherefore well situated to draw on personal con-tacts’ inside knowledge of the field, as well asfile cabinets full of offprints and working pa-pers. Her intimate knowledge and personal ex-perience enlivens this book and provides in-sights that are unavailable in any other existingbook and, indeed, any other book likely to bewritten. Although Mind as Machine is primarilyan intellectual history and leans most heavily onpublished sources, the text is peppered withlively anecdotes drawn from published oral his-tories, Boden’s memories, and personal and pri-vate communications. The book is at its bestwhere Boden addresses the areas in which shehas worked most directly, including artificialintelligence, artificial life, and philosophy.

Boden’s use of personal communication ismost interesting where she uses it to establishpriority or uncover the fine-grained details ofhow researchers in the various parts of cogni-tive science joined the field or came to beconnected with other researchers. For in-stance, she explains how the recent attentionto emotion in cognitive science had importantprecedents within cognitive science itself.Similarly, she uses evidence drawn from per-sonal communication to explain how HubertDreyfus’s critique of artificial intelligencemanaged to receive the attention it did. Drey-fus’s brother, a mathematician associated withthe RAND Corporation, connected him withRAND, where he observed work on artificialintelligence directly. Ultimately Hubert man-aged, despite efforts to censor it, to have theinitial form of his critique published in aRAND memo, where it was certain to receiveattention from the artificial intelligence com-munity. While the use of personal communi-cation and personal memory is frequently pro-ductive in illuminating details such as these,such data are also, at points, in conflict withavailable documentary evidence.

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Because of cognitive science’s complex inter-disciplinary structure, Boden’s insider perspec-tive on her field is invaluable. Owing to thefield’s numerous subdivisions, the circulation ofimportant findings in unpublished working pa-pers, and its members’ practice of attendingnonoverlapping conferences, it is no simplematter to track which places and contexts are themost important. One of the book’s critical con-tributions is therefore its survey of the specificmedia forums in which cognitive science mate-rials and debates initially emerged.

In seeking to explain how and why particularapproaches received attention, Boden is alsoquite sensitive to the relevance of who the per-son associated with a particular approach was,the importance of writing style, and the locationin which a new report was published. She ex-plains, for instance, how certain connectionistideas such as Hopfield nets received attentionand acclaim because they were advanced by aphysicist rather than by a psychologist (p. 940).Similarly, Boden notes how the idea of backpropagation reached a wide audience via theParallel Distributed Processing (PDP) handbookof David Rumelhart and Jay McClelland. Be-cause of this work’s design as a textbook and itsaccessible format, credit for back propagationwas initially given to Rumelhart and McClel-land, despite the fact that similar ideas had beenproposed earlier (pp. 953–955).

Although Boden’s perspective as an insiderenables her to provide a detailed picture of theintellectual structure of cognitive science, it of-fers less help in explaining broader issues, in-cluding the relationship of cognitive science toother elements of the intellectual, political, andcultural world. For instance, Boden uses “coun-tercultural” as an epithet with which to dismisscritics of positivism, empiricism, or cognitivescience—unless those critics happen to havebeen fellow philosophers.

This book will be most useful to historians ofscience as a map of cognitive science. Becauseof its length and structure, many readers will betempted to treat the text as a reference work, tobe negotiated via the table of contents and theindex. However, reading the book this waywould undermine its argument for the intercon-nections among the various parts of cognitivescience. Mind as Machine, then, is not a buffetfrom which the reader may sample one or an-other dish. It is a seventeen-course sit-downmeal.

JAMIE COHEN-COLE

Brenda J. Buchanan (Editor). Gunpowder, Ex-plosives, and the State: A Technological His-tory. Foreword by Bert Hall. xxiii � 425 pp.,figs., tables, index. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate,2006. $99.95 (cloth).

It is always surprising to discover that an area ofscholarship has effectively been ignored whenthe subject matter is both commonplace andfundamentally important in geopolitics. Such isthe case for the nontechnical study of somethingFrancis Bacon called “obscure and inglorious”in his Novum Organum (1620): gunpowder. Theobscurity of its origins and properties—wheregunpowder was invented, how it came to Eu-rope, whether it was independently rediscoveredthere, and especially why Europe rather than Asiaturned it into a particularly deadly weapon—hasof course been rehashed endlessly and has becomeso commonplace that it is simply explained anddismissed in precollegiate lectures. Surprisingly,though, a deeper understanding of its manufacture,trade, and status is hard to come by. The ingloriousnature of gunpowder has hindered any wider anddeeper appreciation of the substance until quiterecently. In the late nineteenth century—just as itbecame a historical curiosity for military use—anumber of scientists delved deeply into its chem-ical properties (but only partially exhausted thatstudy), but sociocultural understanding of gun-powder has not effectively received its due untilnow.

Brenda Buchanan can rightly be said to be thedoyen of academic gunpowder studies, on thebasis of this and her previous edited collection,Gunpowder: The History of an InternationalTechnology (Bath, 1996), both of which bringtogether a diverse array of historical researchersin pursuit of a broader understanding of thetopic. This volume collects nineteen essays, pre-sented at various biennial conferences of theInternational Committee for the History ofTechnology in the last decade, into a very strongargument that gunpowder studies need not beshunned in academia as they have been. Gun-powder is as much an economic product as cot-ton, as much an industrial concern as iron andsteel, and as politically crucial a national re-source as shipbuilding ever was. In fact, this andits companion volume make a strong case thatgunpowder may well have been more crucial,particularly to governments from the fifteenth tothe nineteenth centuries, than these other com-modities—perhaps even combined. Gunpowderwas the linchpin without which empires wouldfall, trade would cease, and power would crum-ble; it was crucially, as Buchanan notes, “aninvisible factor in the historical process” (p. 1).

812 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 4 (2008)

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