Library Classification Z Bibliography, Library Science, Information Resources Book

Jerry Fodor said that "In intellectual history, everything happens twice, first as philosophy and then as cognitive science." After having read this book, one might without much exaggeration add to this that in between philosophy and cognitive science, everything happened at the Macy conferences, the regular meetings of the cyberneticians from 1946 to 1953.

I started reading the book to find out what `the viewpoint of the cyberneticians' was, but while reading it became clear to me that this viewpoint itself evolved considerably during the years and that the only common ground between the group's members seemed to be an interest in the mechanization of the mind. The book makes it strikingly clear that the major strands of 20th century cognitive science: cognitivism, connectionism and enactivism developed out of the internal disagreements between this select group of thinkers.

The book is pretty dense, puts the intellectual development of the cybernetics group on the foreground and complements it with a sociological perspective. It will be a very interesting read for anyone interested in how cognitive science came to be as it is today. This book left me with a lot of "what if's", first and foremost what would have happened if cybernetics had left aside the analytic linguistic view of intentionality but accepted Brentano/Husserl style intentionality form the start. In the end, Dupuy convinces that the history of cybernetics is a history of missed encounters. Hopefully, modern cognitive science, built upon the foundations of this small group of thinkers, will not miss these encounters a second time. Having read this book might help a bit.