This book has a pair of goals. First, it is intended as a textbook aimed at upper level undergraduates in philosophy and beginning level graduate students in the cognitive sciences. But in addition, the authors tell us, they hope to make their own contributions to the problems discussed, contributions which “might engage the interest of the professionals, and help move the debates forward.” (ix) In some of the chapters, each of which is designed to be used in a course for a week or two, the authors achieve an impressive balance between their two goals; in other chapters they are less successful.

The focus of the book is on the problems that are generated within philosophy by contemporary work in psychology. More specifically, the authors are concerned with “the relationships between scientific (cognitive) psychology, on the one hand, and common-sense or ‘folk’ psychology on the other” (x). There are various ways in which theories and findings in psychology might be thought to refute or undermine aspects of our common-sense view of the mind. But, while the authors agree that some of the psychological theories they endorse do “not sit entirely easily” (75) with our common-sense conception of ourselves, they characterize their overall take on the issue as “Panglossian.” “We regard it as quite reasonable to hope for an integration of common-sense psychology and scientific psychology which will leave our pre-scientific psychological thinking substantially intact, although certainly enriched and revised” (12). One result of structuring the book around the relationship between scientific and folk psychology is that some issues which might be considered in a philosophy of psychology textbook are either omitted entirely or given rather short shrift. But I think the majority of people who offer courses in the philosophy of psychology will be well pleased with the range of topics covered. A course built around this book will expose students to most of the interesting and important debates in the area.

The volume begins with a useful “background” chapter offering both a quick history of theories and arguments in the philosophy of mind and a fast sketch of some of the developments in psychology from Freud to the present. The second chapter defends a robustly realistic construal of the commitments of folk psychology, arguing against both Davidson's “anomalism” and Dennett's instrumentalist account of folk psychology. It also challenges some of the arguments for eliminativism offered by Paul Churchland and by an earlier time slice of the author of this review. The following chapter argues that much of cognition, including both peripheral sensory processes and more central processes leading to belief and desire formation are subserved by innate mental modules that have been shaped by natural selection. Botterill and Carruthers’ view in this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, is quite similar to the account of the mind championed by evolutionary psychologists like Cosmides, Tooby, and Pinker. In Chapter 4, they extend this “nativist/modularist” approach to the processes underlying ordinary folk psychological skills, like the attribution of mental states and the prediction and explanation of behavior. They challenge both simulation theorists and psychologists like Gopnik and Wellman who think that the knowledge underlying our folk psychological skills is acquired in the same way that scientific knowledge is acquired. Chapter 5 is devoted to rationality and the evidence suggesting that humans are systematically irrational in a variety of domains. Both Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 deal with the notion of intentional content. The former chapter argues that the notion of content required for both common-sense and scientific psychology will be “narrow” rather than “wide”; the latter considers various programs for naturalizing intentional content and argues that “some form of functional-role semantics stands the best chance of success.” (190) Chapter 8 reviews the debate between connectionists and advocates of the language of thought hypothesis, and defends a non-Fodorian version of the latter on which the language of thought is not Mentalese but is related to the natural language that the cognitive agent speaks. The final chapter provides an overview of the recent literature on consciousness and defends a version of the higher-order thought theory of phenomenal consciousness.

By far the best part of the book, in my view, is the chapter on consciousness. That chapter begins by setting out some of the crucial distinctions that are required to think clearly about consciousness, and then tackles the arguments of the “mysterians”—philosophers like Nagel, Jackson, McGinn and Chalmers, who argue that “phenomenal consciousness is, and must forever remain, a mystery.” (234) With those arguments plausibly rebutted, the authors set out an exceptionally clear and useful taxonomy of cognitive theories of consciousness, and then systematically discuss the strengths and shortcomings of each. This is the most purely philosophical chapter in the book—there is almost no discussion of empirical literature on consciousness. But it is by far the best short introduction to the large philosophical literature on consciousness that I have seen. If you want to get students (or yourself!) up to speed on what has been going on in that literature for the last few decades, this is the place to send them.

Other chapters are somewhat less impressive. In the chapter on modularity and nativism, for example, we are never really told what a module is. Fodor's now classic treatment of modularity, in The Modularity of Mind (Reference Fodor1983), lists a number of features which mental modules must have, including being domain-specific, mandatory, fast, informationally encapsulated, having shallow outputs, being subject to characteristic patterns of breakdown, and having an ontogeny that exhibits a characteristic pace and sequencing. Botterill and Carruthers maintain, reasonably enough, that a notion of module applicable to central cognitive processes will have to give up some of these features. But they never say which features have to be retained for a mechanism to be a module in their more relaxed sense. Rather, they suggest, modules should be viewed as a natural kind of cognitive processor, and that “what modules are is primarily a matter for empirical discovery” (49). Until the relevant discoveries are made, they offer the rough and ready characterization that a module is “a causally integrated processing system with distinctive kinds of inputs and outputs” (49). But, of course, it is entirely possible—indeed, I am inclined to think it is likely—that cognitive mechanism will be found with just about any subset of the Fodorian features. If so, we won't know which of these mechanisms to count as modules, since the interim description that Botterill and Carruthers offer would apply to almost any mental mechanism.

Despite their occasional slips, Botterill and Carruthers succeed in presenting a systematic and integrated treatment of most of the major issues in the philosophy of psychology. And it is that integrated picture, rather than any of the details of the arguments they offer, that will “engage the interest of the professionals.” For students, I know of no single book that offers a better introduction to the philosophy of psychology.