Books

etcetera

Cleeremans et al. Implicit learning

70 Whittlesea, B.W.A. and Dorken, M.D. (1993) Incidentally, things in general are particularly determined: an episodic-processing account of implicit learning J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 122, 227248 71 Whittlesea, B.W.A. and Wright, R. (1997) Implicit (and explicit) learning: acting adaptively without knowing the consequences J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit. 23, 181200 72 Barsalou, L.W. (1990) On the indistinguishability of examplar memory and abstraction in category representation, in Content and Process Specificity in the Effects on Prior Experiences (Srull, T.K. and Wyer, R.S.,

eds), pp. 6188, Erlbaum 73 Cleeremans, A. (1997) Principles for implicit learning, in How Implicit is Implicit Learning? (Berry, D.C., ed.), pp. 195234, Oxford University Press 74 Dulany, D.E. (1997) Consciousness in the explicit (deliberative) and implicit (evocative), in Scientific Approaches to Consciousness (Cohen, J.D. and Schooler, J.W., eds), pp. 179212, Erlbaum 75 Becker, S. et al. (1997) Long-term semantic priming: a computational account and empirical evidence J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit. 23, 10591082

Mind as Action
by James V. Wertsch, Oxford University Press, 1998. 22.95 (xii + 203 pages) ISBN 0 19 511753 0
Mind as Action is the latest refinement of Wertschs theory of socially mediated mind1,2. With his usual clear prose and effective balance of theory and experimental evidence, Wertsch argues that neither social nor biological reductionism is the proper methodological stance (Chapter 1), since both lead to essentialism (for a similar, more detailed argument, see Chapters 1 and 2 in Ref. 3). The unit of psychological study is mediated action the agent and sociohistorical means in mutual determination a proposal that directly takes on the often-defaulted promissory note in cultural psychology of a unit of analysis that can be identified by someone other than the believer. Wertsch follows through with an important catalogue of properties of mediated action (Chapter 2), the use of which can lead sociocultural research programs in new directions. For example, mediation constrains as much as it facilitates, and so even well-intentioned mediational contexts can restrict inquiry by reproducing their limiting conditions while claiming otherwise. Moreover, mediation can be accidental, with some sociocultural affordances the inadvertent consequence of other cultural means. I take this as evidence that culture is both sub-optimal and open (with contextual mind operating as a kind of social exaptation4 or characteristic that arose in a way unrelated to its present function; for a good discussion of how social facts originate and change semiotic function, see Ref. 5). Importantly, this view yields leeway for individual action and productive error in the development of mediated mind. One of the most powerful and prevalent cultural mediations of mental action is narrative. Wertsch describes how this form of discourse both facilitates and limits access to historical knowledge in schools (Chapter 3). The linguistic structure of American students historical narratives suggests that they move from a dispersed understanding of their own history in fragmented narrative form (fostered by textbooks that fail to promote the coherence of the historical story) to an overcoherent understanding guided by a quest-for-freedom narrative that excludes alternatives. The educational problem is how to engender coherence without exclusion. This kind of analysis of emergent historical mind might be advanced in two ways. One is by using the work of Kieran Egan6, who has identified five kinds of understanding that guide the development and instruction of historical knowledge somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic. These might provide a framework for examining the student-produced historical narratives that drive Wertschs analysis. For example, the quest-for-freedom narrative appears to be one at the transition between romantic knowing (literate, personal narrative) and philosophic knowing (abstract, truth-driven narrative); the satirical narratives of college students are clearly at the level of ironic knowing (self-critical metanarrative); fifth- and eighth-grade narratives appear to be mythic knowing (oral, binarily structured narrative). A second enhancement of Wertschs narrative analysis might come from using the notion of illocutionary point: the ultimate pragmatic goal of speech action. When students, and official historians, produce narratives in which the constituent propositions are factually correct but which, together, make a text that is pragmatically skewed (as in the reporting of correct American settlement facts in the service of a dubious quest for freedom), then the consumers of such historical narratives must deploy elaborate inference chains to plug the gap between truth and appropriateness. It would be worthwhile studying the strategies of reasoning from textbased speech acts to try to locate the ways that illocutionary point in historical narratives is coded and used. In looking at how linguistic mediation generally works in forming the educated mind (Chapter 4), Wertsch nicely shows how many school failures result from mismatches in speech genre7 between the child and the school. The solution involves appropri-

ation of the actual speech of school exchange in the service of a learners selfregulation. The larger lesson, as I see it, is that educational progress comes from changing the participatory structure of educational intersubjectivity and from manipulating mediation in its material forms (actual speech) in short, a change in the mediated action of schooling. Lest this suggest a happily-everafter scenario for schools, we should recall the lesson of Chapter 5: resistance and appropriation are two sides of the same coin. The narrative choices of school-based knowledge give voice to some ideas at the expense of others either by quiet approval or by deliberate silencing. The more institutionalized the unvoiced narratives become, the more dialectical tension there will be in the mediated mental action of school. Can this tension between the said and the unsaid be a productive force in education? I recall my three-and-a-half-yearold daughter working on a preschool book in which she had to identify all the things that belong together. On one page, there was a picture of a boy, a girl, a school, and a clown. She put them all together, saying that the boy and girl belong in the school, and the clown does also because a clown is a people, too. Think of the hard work needed to legitimate that is, not exclude that insight in her school performance, to use it as a way to push her knowledge forward, rather than to bracket it out as unspeakable in the official narrative of logic. Think especially of how the relationship between her and her teachers, her family, her classmates (i.e. she and other people) would all have to be involved for

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Books
etcetera
her to learn productively. This, I think, is the ultimate lesson of Wertschs book.
William J. Frawley Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA. tel: +1 302 831 6706 fax: +1 302 831 6896 e-mail: billf@udel.edu References 1 Wertsch, J.V. (1985) Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind, Harvard University Press 2 Wertsch, J.V. (1991) Voices of the Mind, Harvard University Press 3 Frawley, W. (1997) Vygotsky and Cognitive Science: Language and the Unification of the Social and Computational Mind, Harvard University Press 4 Gould, S.J. and Vrba, E.S. (1982) Exaptation: a missing term in the science of form Paleobiology 8, 415 5 Searle, J. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality, The Free Press 6 Egan, K. (1997) The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape our Understanding, University of Chicago Press 7 Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Esssays, University of Texas Press

Books Received
Review copies of the following books have been received. Books that have been reviewed in Trends in Cognitive Sciences are not included. The appearance of a book in the list does not preclude the possibility of it being reviewed in the future.

(xvi + 461 pages) ISBN 0 521 62986 1, 0 521 58360 8 M. Koslowsky (ed.) Modeling the StressStrain Relationship in Work Settings Routledge, 1998. 45.00 (221 pages) ISBN 0 415 15320 4 J. McDowell Mind, Value & Reality Harvard University Press, 1998. 23.50 (ix + 400 pages) ISBN 0 674 57613 6 D.N. Osherson (ed.) An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues Vol. 4 MIT Press, 1998. $35.00 (xiv + 950 pages) ISBN 9 780262 65046 5 A.R. Palmer, A. Rees, A.Q. Summerfield and R. Meddis (eds) Psychophysical and Physiological Advances in Hearing Wuhrr Publishers, 1998. 50.00 (iii + 614 pages) ISBN 1 86156 069 9 R.F. Port and T. Van Gelder (eds) Mind as Motion, Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition MIT Press, 1998. $30.00 (x + 590 pages) ISBN 0 262 66110 1 S. Sutherland Breakdown: A Personal Crisis and a Medical Dilemma Oxford University Press, 1998. 19.99 (308 pages) ISBN 0 19 852380 7

J.A. Anderson and E. Rosenfeld (eds) Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks MIT Press, 1998. 31.95 (xi + 434 pages) ISBN 0 262 01167 0 R. Audi Epistemology, A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge Routledge, 1998. 40.00 (xii + 340 pages) ISBN 0 415 13042 5 W. Bechtel and G. Graham (eds) A Companion to Cognitive Science Blackwell, 1998. 75.00 (xvii + 791 pages) ISBN 1 55786 542 6 M.R. Bennett The Idea of Consciousness Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997. 14.50 (xi + 176 pages) ISBN 90 5702 203 6 J. Bickle Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave MIT Press, 1998. $35.00 (xi + 240 pages) ISBN 9 780 262 024 327 M.R. Brent (ed.) Computational Approaches to Language Acquisition MIT Press, 1997. 20.00 (199 pages) ISBN 0 262 52229 2 W. Frawley Vygotsky and Cognitive Science. Language and the Unification of the Social and Computational Mind Harvard University Press, 1997. 26.50 (ix + 333 pages) ISBN 0 674 94347 3 M. Gopnik (ed.) The Inheritance and Innateness of Grammars Oxford University Press, 1998. 25.00, 50.00 (232 pages) ISBN 0 19 511 5341, 0 19 511 5333 C.G. Gross Brain, Vision, Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience MIT Press, 1998. 22.50 (xviii + 255 pages) ISBN 0 262 07186 X R.P. Haligin and S.K. Whitbourne (eds) A Casebook in Abnormal Psychology: From the Files of Experts Oxford University Press (USA), 1998. 22.50 (292 pages) ISBN 0 19 509298 8 S.R. Hameroff, A.W. Kaszniak and A.C. Scott (eds) Toward a Science of

Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates MIT Press, 1998. 70.00 (xx + 764 pages) ISBN 0 262 08262 4 J. Haugeland Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind Harvard University Press, 1998. 19.95 (390 pages) ISBN 0 674 38233 1 I. Katsushi and M. Veloso (eds) Symbolic Visual Learning Oxford University Press, 1997. 55.00 (vi + 355 pages) ISBN 0 19 509870 6 S.S. Kazarian and D.R. Evans (eds) Cultural Clinical Psychology: Theory, Research and Practice Oxford University Press, 1998. 25.95 (xii + 410 pages) ISBN 0 19 510946 5 W. Kintsch Comprehension: A Paradigm For Cognition Cambridge University Press, 1998. 19.95, 55.00

BOOK REVIEWS
Publishers: send copies of books you would like to be reviewed in TICS to the Editor. Readers: would you like to review a particular book for the journal? Contact the Editor to discuss the project. Other types of publications (software, CD-ROMs, films, art exhibitions, etc.) will be considered as well. Send any ideas or proposals for reviews to the Editor.

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