Review

Author(s): Fred Dretske

Review by: Fred Dretske
Source: The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 104, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 609-612
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1422944
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BOOK REVIEWS 609

not impose arbitrary precision on our views of "strategy," but instead draws
upon many years of research to identify some of the defining characteristics
of the term. When strategies are viewed in this light, attention is directed
away from narrow domains and focused instead on mechanisms and inter-
actions that may be general to all strategic thinking.
This change in perspective constitutes a promising approach for advancing
understanding of strategy use and strategy development. Twenty years of
empirical study have shown these are not simple phenomena that can be
isolated from other developmental advances. The central issue in the study
of strategic development is no longer when children become strategic, but
rather how interactions among knowledge, contextual variables, and specific
procedures combine to produce change. Children's Thinking seems likely to
give further impetus to this desirable shift in perspective.
Kevin Crowley and Robert S. Siegler
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

In and Out of the Black Box: On the Philosophy of Cognition

By D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. vi + 179 pp. Cloth, $29.95.
The sins of the father-in this case, behaviorism-are visited upon the
children: cognitive psychology and cognitive science (a conglomeration of
cognitive psychology, physiology, computational theory, and artificial intel-
ligence). The sins in question are inadequate conceptions of stimulus (what
goes into the black box) and response (what comes out). Though now free
to speculate about what is happening inside, centralist theories of the mind
are flawed by a faulty understanding, inherited from behaviorism, of what
the internal processes and mechanisms are supposed to be doing, of what
the input (perception) and output (behavior) is that the internal states are
supposed to mediate. It is no use going into the black box in order to explain
its behavior if you are confused, at the outset, both about what the box is
doing (behavior) and what it is using (perception) to do it with.
Such is the thesis of Hamlyn's book. His aim is twofold: to arrive at a
proper conception of input and output, of both perception and behavior,
and, in terms of this conception, to say what (inside the box) must intervene
between the two.
Some people (e.g., materialists) will doubtless question the validity of the
metaphor. We are not, after all, black boxes. We know what's inside. It may
still be a problem saying how it all works, how all those neurons manage to
transform receptor stimulation into appropriate and timely muscular and
glandular activity, and how, in addition, learning and experience modify
these circuits, but, surely, the kind of machinery available to do this work
is obvious enough. Just ask biologists.
This is the kind of attitude that Hamlyn is anxious to thwart. It betrays
one, but only one, of the naive conceptions of input and output (our legacy

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610 BOOK REVIEWS

from behaviorism) that nourishes misguided theories about intervening

mechanisms and processes. It presupposes-mistakenly, in Hamlyn's view-
that perception and behavior have the kind of description that makes a
physical or biological account of what comes betweenperception and behavior
appropriate.
This, surely, is advice worth heeding. It is not enough to aspire after
explanations of behavior, and to argue about the best means of explaining
it, if we remain unclear about what, exactly, behavior is. Are we, for instance,
trying to explain intentional behavior-why, for example, an agent delib-
erately moved an arm? Or are we merely trying to explain why an agent
moved an arm (where this may have been unintentional)? Or are we, perhaps,
trying to explain why the agent's arm moved (where this is understood to
be something that can happen without the agent's moving it)? It may be
that a neurobiological scheme is quite adequate to explain one (e.g., why
the arm moved), but not to explain another (e.g., why the agent moved it
or, if this is really different, why the agent deliberately moved it). Hamlyn
raises these particular questions in chapter 7, "What Is Behavior?" They
are, I think, questions that are seldom raised but that are very much worth
raising beforeworrying about what is available in the box to do the explaining.
Once one appreciates the indeterminacy here, in behavior, in what is to be
explained (a similar indeterminacy will infect perception), one is in a position
to see why simply looking inside the head does not gain access to the interior
of the black box.
According to Hamlyn, however, there is a constraint on all this speculation
about what is inside the box. What is in there doing all the work has to be
pretty much what folk psychology, our commonsense picture of the mind,
says is in there-namely, thoughts, knowledge, hopes, feelings, intentions,
fears, and so on. Science can deepen that understanding, modify it perhaps,
but it cannot abandon it. For folk psychology constitutes the benchmark "by
reference to which any theory must be judged if it is to be assessed as
psychology" (p. 5). So, talk of receptor stimulation and muscle flexions does
not provide adequate descriptions of input and output for psychology, be-
cause (as Hamlyn is at pains to argue in the rest of the book) that is not
what folk psychology means by perception and behavior. Any theory about
what intervenes between input and output described in that way is not really
psychology.
If what is allowed to pass as psychology is to be construed so narrowly,
why, then, suppose we need a science of psychology? We certainly do not
need physics or chemistry if, in order to be called physics and chemistry, the
explanatory projects have to square with folk physics and folk chemistry.
Why not do whatever will give us the best overall explanatory and predictive
package of inputs, outputs, and (in terms of this taxonomy) intervening
(explanatory) mechanisms? Maybe brute physics or biology. Or, if this, as
Hamlyn says, would get too complicated, maybe a more abstract approach,
an information-processing account, will do. Maybe a computational story
involving internal representations. If the result does not resemble com-
monsense psychology enough to be called psychology by Hamlyn, if what

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BOOK REVIEWS 611
we end up doing-and what we end up explaining-cannot be called be-
havior or action because not enough folk psychology is presupposed, well,
then, who cares?
Hamlyn cares. He thinks the result will be too complex to be very man-
ageable. Besides-and here, I suspect, we get to Hamlyn's real reason-
what would inevitably be missing from any such theory is the provision of
understanding of people as people: "[S]omething very important is left out
when people and animals are treated merely as physical or biological systems"
(p. 6). Despite Hamlyn's avowals that he is not registering a view about
dualism, the only way this can be true is if there is something very important
about people and animals that is not biological or physical. We are not told
what this is.
The book is divided into three parts. We have, in chapters 1-3, a critical
appraisal of various current approaches to the mind (information-processing
models, theories that posit internal representations, etc.). All are rejected,
and for basically the same reason. They misinterpret perception or action
or both. The criticisms are generally quite superficial and will surely be
found such by the theorists in question. It does not strike me as a devastating
criticism of Dennett's instrumentalism, for instance, to say that he must be
wrong, at least in the case of beliefs, because we all know (presumably by
introspection) that we have beliefs (p. 41). Why did nobody think to use this
crushing objection against behaviorism 50 years ago or against current forms
of eliminative materialism? Nor does it strike me as a useful criticism of
information-based theories of the mind that naturalized versions of infor-
mation are too feeble to capture the normative aspect of knowledge (pp.
28-29). Assuming, which I doubt, that knowledge has a normative aspect,
this could be used as a quick and dirty argument (i.e., "is" does not imply
"ought") against any science of psychology.
But these are quarrels that I (and many others) will have with Hamlyn
about substantive details. And, frankly, I cannot imagine Hamlyn much
interested in the nitty-gritty details. He adopts a loftier stance in this book.
He thinks we are social beings, and his complaint, over and over again, is
that this aspect of our mental lives is neglected in currently fashionable
approaches to the study of mind (more of this in a moment). What he gives
in these early chapters is not a philosophically tough critique of alternative
views, but, as it were, a breezy tour through the gallery and an annotated
roster of players. For those who cannot identify the players without a pro-
gram, Hamlyn's tour may be useful. But his program of players should not
be mistaken for a scorecard of the game.
Given his project-a better picture of what is inside from an improved
conception of what is outside-the heart of Hamlyn's book necessarily comes
in the chapters on input (perception), chapters 4 and 5, and output (behavior),
chapter 7. Shorn of all niceties, and there are some, the argument on the
input side looks like this. Perception is not simply the transduction of energy.
It requires concepts (all seeing involves seeing as); concepts, in turn, require
knowledge of what it is to be an instance of that concept; knowledge means
having a conception of truth, something you cannot have without under-

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612 BOOK REVIEWS

standing norms (pp. 116-117); norms cannot be understood unless one has
attitudes. These attitudes require feelings (pp. 123, 147). All this, finally, is
impossible unless the perceiver is a social being, subject to correction by
others. So perception (input to the black box) is impossible unless the black
box comes equipped with a host of attitudes and mental states that require
a social context for their existence.
The argument from the output side looks pretty much the same. At least
it has the same conclusion. Behavior is action; actions (intentional) are done
knowingly or, at least, can be done knowingly, and knowledge, as we learned
above, is a social phenomenon. So there can be no relevant output from
the black box unless it is a very fancy box indeed.
All this seems to imply that, no matter how actively engaged with their
inanimate environment, animals that have no friends to play with (that are
raised in social isolation) can neither see nor do anything; they are blind
and, in some odd way, paralyzed. Hamlyn does a lot of qualifying and hedging
to avoid this stark conclusion, but it is, nonetheless, the bottom line. No
social context, no knowledge; no knowledge, no perception or behavior. So
black boxes that do not have the right stuff inside-knowledge and all that
this implies about social development-cannot have the right stuff outside
either: What goes in and comes out cannot count as perception and behavior.
Hamlyn's conclusions should be familiar to anyone who read his 1983
collection of essays, Perception,Learning and the Self (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul). Hamlyn, in fact, often relies on, and repeatedly refers to, this
earlier book. As far as I can tell, though, not only are the conclusions the
same, the arguments are too. Different packaging. So anyone who read the
earlier book, and who found what is inside unacceptable, need not bother
looking inside the new box.
Fred Dretske
PhilosophyDepartment
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch

By Carol L. Krumhansl. Oxford Psychology Series: No. 17. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990. 307 pp. Cloth, $45.00.
The psychology of music perception and cognition, nearly dormant 15 years
ago, has made considerable strides in the last decade. Several textbooks and
edited collections of articles have appeared, two new journals have been
established, societies have been formed, and many reports of empirical stud-
ies have been published, including one in monograph form (Serafine, 1988).
However, the field is still new and small,' and few researchers have had the
persistence and the good fortune of continuous grant support to develop
and bring to fruition an extended and coherent program of research. Carol
Krumhansl, of Cornell University, has accomplished that feat, and her mono-
graph documents a decade of individual achievement, resulting in a critical

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