Abstract

Review of Fodor: Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong The cover of Fodor’s book proudly claims that this is his most irritating book in years, guaranteed to exasperate all those who read it. The book lives up to this promise. Although leavened by moments of wit and humour, Fodor misses no opportunity for the one-liner put-down, be it about lexical semantics, empiricism, cognitive neuropsychology or the psychology of cognitive development. He even writes a whole chapter on Prototypes without referring to Rosch except in a footnote, where her name is consistently mis-spelled for good measure. Those looking to see how his ideas relate to current work in psychology and linguistics on lexical concepts will be disappointed