Abstract

Although there have been several reviews of the The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, the six reviews in this issue of Artificial Intelligence represent an unusual opportunity to see in one collection how scholars from a wide range of perspectives evaluate MITECS. I found it very useful to consider the reviews side by side and am grateful to the reviewers for providing a number of new insights into the nature of the cognitive sciences. It is also gratifying to see such generally positive assessments from five of the six reviewers (Carr, Dorr, Husbands, Okamato and Peterson) and it is intriguing to consider the more negative comments by Lakoff. In this essay, rather than consider in detail the many points raised by the reviews, I examine more globally how a project like MITECS might be evaluated and how it seemed to fare in light of these reviews.