It belongs to the millennial mood to want to sum things up and see where we have gotten and point in the direction that further progress lies. Cognitive science has not been spared this impulse, so here are two books purporting to limn the state of the art. They differ a bit in their intended audience; Plotkin's is more or less a text, while Pinker hopes for a lay readership. Pinker covers much more ground but he takes an ungainly six hundred pages to do it, compared to Plotkin's svelte volume. Both authors are unusually good at exposition, Pinker exceptionally so from time to time. Their general sense of what's going on and of what comes next are remarkably similar, considering that they are writing about a field that is notoriously fractious. Taken severally or together, they present what is probably the best statement you can find in print of a very important contemporary view of mental structure and process.

LRB 22 January 1998 | PDF Download