QualiO' and Quantity, 14 (1980) 593-602 593 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands

BOOK REVIEWS

Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd (Editors), Cognition and Categorization, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1978.

This book is the result of a conference sponsored by the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Cognitive Research. It is a highly coherent volmne which makes an important contribution to cognitive studies. A particularly satisfying aspect to this reader is that it synthesizes recent work in cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology on taxonomy and similarity, showing important ways in which the two disciplines have been converging.

The book is broken down into three sections, labeled structure, process and repre- sentation. The section on structure is concerned with the organization of natural taxonomies; the section on process with features, dimensions, and similarity judg- ments; and the section on representation with visual imagery, prototypes, and prac- tical knowledge.

The first chapter, by Brent Berlin, "Ethnobiological Classification," is concerned with cross-linguistic universals in folk-biological classification. Berlin, an anthro- pologist, has been a leader in the current search by anthropologists for lexical uni- versals, which began with Berlin and Kay's well-known book on color terminology, Basic Color Terms: Their UniversaliO, and Evolution, University of California Press, 1969. Berlin has isolated three important levels of biological taxonomy: life-form, generic, and specific. He asserts that the most fundamental of these levels is the generic level, labeled by mono-lexemic forms such as "oak," "cat ," and "hawk." He further states that people classify life-forms at the generic level on the basis of per- ceptual and behavioral similarities, not on the basis of cultural utility, so that the practice of large game hunting, whaling, or cattle herding would not affect the generic classification of animals. The other two levels of taxonomy are less impor- tant than the generic level. Generic categories are not necessarily subsumed into life-form categories nor are they necessarily sub-categorized into species. Life-form categories are defined by a small number of shared features, and include such cate~ gories as " t ree" and "bird." Specific categories differ from generic categories in that they are often based on cultural utility. As an example, Berlin provides data from Aguaruna to show that cultivated plants are much more likely to be subdivided into specific categories than are non-cultivated plants.

The second article, by Rosch, "Principles of Categorization," includes a similar schema to Berlin's three levels of taxonomy. Rosch calls her three levels basic, superordinate, and subordinate. She uses a feature model of meaning to differen~ tiate among them, assuming that features occur in correlated clusters, so that there are easily perceived natural boundaries at the basic level. Members of the same basic category share many features, whereas members of different basic categories contrast on many features. Members of the same superordinate category share only a few features. Members of different subordinate categories of the same basic cate- gory will share many features, and will contrast only on a minimal number of fea- tures. Hence, as with Berlin's generic categories, basic categories are easily per- ceived.

0033-5177/80/0000-0000/$2.25 �9 1980 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company

594

Rosch goes on to talk about the internal organization of categories, introducing the concept of prototype. Here her argument is similar to the fuzzy set model, in which some members are better members of a set than are others. For example, a robin is a better bird than is an ostrich. There are no true protoypes, but category members differ on degrees of prototypicality.

Chapter Three, by Elissa Newport and Ursula Bellugi, "Linguistic Expression of Category Levels in a Visual-Gestural Language," is an investigation of American Sign Language, showing that Rosch's three taxonomic levels are present in ASL. ASL has an interesting way to form superordinate categories, by listing some exem- plars of the category followed by a sign glossed as etcetera. For example, "parent" is signed by "mother," "father," "etc."

Section 2, on process, begins with an important article by Tversky and Gati titled "Studies of Similarity." The concept of similarity has been widely used in the social sciences, especially since the development of multidimensional scaling. Tverski and Gati employ several clever experiments to show that similarity judg- ments are often asymmetrical. Their formulation is based on a feature model of similarity in which similarities judgments are based on matching of features. The similarity of A to B is a function of (a) the number of features that A and B have in common, (b) the number of A's features that are not found in B, and (c) the num- ber of B's features that are not found in A. If the latter two quantities are weighted differently, it follows that most similarities judgments will be asymmetrical. Tversky and Gati assume that the features of the subject are weighted more heavily than the features of the referent. They then employ the concept of prominence, highly prominent concepts being those that are coded on a large number of features. If A is not prominent (coded for few features), and B is prominent (coded for many features), then it follows that the number of A's features that are not present in B will be lower than the number of B's features that are not present in A. Hence the similarity of A to B will be higher than the similarity of B to A. For example, the similarity of Bulgaria to the USSR will be higher than the similarity of the USSR to Bulgaria. The authors test this prediction using names of countries and show im- pressive evidence for the hypothesis. They also relate the concept of asymmetrical similarity to Rosch's prototype concept; pointing out that asymmetrical similarity is consistent with Rosch's finding that numbers like 103 are more similar to numbers like 100 than are the round numbers to the non-prototypical numbers.

Two articles by Garner and Shepp take an information processing approach to analyzing stimulus dimensions. Garner, in "Aspects of a Stimulus" discusses the various words that have been used to refer to stimulus dimensions such as "attrib- ute," "feature," and "dimension." Shepp, in "From Perceived Similarity of Dimen- sion," contrasts multidimensional similarity structures (integral dimensions) to sep- arate dimensions, which are analyzable into perceptually distinct components. He then invokes evidence that shows a developmental progression from judgment on the basis of integral dimensions to judgment on the basis of separable dimensions, with a concomitant increase in selective attention.

Part III, representation, deals with attempts to describe the actual cognitive representation of such concepts as prototype. Kosslyn, in his article "Imagery and Internal Representation," poses the question whether images are actually stored as images or whether they are stored as verbal descriptions, for example as lists of fea- tures. He cites several kinds of experimental evidence to support the hypothesis that they are stored as images. Palmer's article "Fundamental Aspects of Cognitive

595

Representation," is concerned with the development of a representational meta- theory, and describes some operational relations that can produce representations. George Miller's article, "Practical and Lexical Knowledge," concludes the volume by discussing the relationships between linguistic knowledge and pragmatic knowl- edge.

MICHAEL BURTON University of California. Irvine

James C. Lingoes, Edward E. Roskam and Ingwer Borg (Editors), Geometric Repre- sen tations of Relational Data: Readings in Multidimensional Scaling, Mathesis Press, Ann Arbor, i979, 85I pp., $ 26.50. Samuel Shye (Editor), Theory Construction and Data Analysis in the Behavioral Sciences, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, and Sage Publications, London, 1978, 426 pp., s 17.00. Joseph B. Kruskal and Myron Wish, Multidimensional Scaling, Sage Publications, London, 1978, 93 pp., s 1.95.

Rapid developments are occurring in Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) and the relevant material is scattered over a wide variety of sources - unpublished research memoranda, published journal articles, books of contributed papers. But there are virtually no extensive overviews, either at the elementary or at the advanced level. Certainly a number of such texts are promised, or are "'in process", but to data no instances have yet appeared. In this review, I shall look at three publications, in order of decreasing size. First, a compendium of definitive and hitherto unpub-

lished papers from the Michigan-Nijmegen workers (Lingoes, Roskam, Borg), secondly a set of papers in honour of Louis Guttman and edited by Shye, and thirdly an elementary introduction to MDS from the Bell Laboratories group (Kruskal, Shepard, Carroll, Wish),

Let me take the first two volumes together. At last we have an extended account of the Guttman and Lingoes tradition of Multidimensional Scaling. The Lingoes volume is a revised, hardback, edition of an earlier (1977) "Orange volume" and it is excellent value on any criterion. The contributions are divided into four main sec- tions: Introduction; Theory of Data and Survey of Methods; Algorithms; and Spe- cial Topics. The first section covers basic definitions, specification and interpreta- tion in measurement, and includes Borg's very lucid account of facet theory and a linked set of articles on identifying directions, regions and manifolds by Lingoes and Borg. The second section begins with an extended version by Eddie Roskam of Coombs' theory of data and the MDS models corresponding to each type and it contains a basic rationale and descriptions of the Guttman-Lingoes-Roskam pro- gram series. Section Three includes the famous 1973 Psychometrika Monograph Supplement (which compares the basic Guttman-Lingoes with the Shepard-Kruskal algorithms), and a set of articles documenting more recent Nijmegen and Michigan models (Triadic, Metric distance, Structure fitting, and the Lingoes "qualitative" scaling procedures). Section Four focusses principally upon the assessment of con- figurational similarity which underlies Procrustean Individual Differences analysis) and upon confirmatory scaling with side-constraints. Given the enormous range of these 33 substantial articles, it is virtually impossible to provide a general assess-

596

ment. It is a fairly massive resource book, containing both classical papers and more recent developments within a single cover. (My only complaint is that the editors did not wait to include the full set of PINDIS articles: perhaps this will form a sep- arate volume?). This volume differs from the previous edition chiefly by including chapter 1 of Roskam's well-known doctoral thesis, Borg's account of confirmatory multidimensional analysis and a final chapter by Schoenemann comparing various individual differences scaling models. This edition also contains a most welcome and useful index - thank goodness. I have only two criticisms. First, the frequent change of print fount is very irritating - but then I suspect few will wish to read through the volume sequentially. Secondly, and more importantly, changes in nota- tion (or, rather, changes in notation when moving from Lingoes to Roskam to others) can be confusing. The 1973 Lingoes-Roskam Supplement contains a glossary of symbols (pp. 377-378) ; I only wish the same had been done for other main con- tributions.

The Lingoes volume is dedicated to Louis Guttman and Clyde Coombs, and the Shye volume is actually a festschrift for Guttman's sixtieth birthday. It contains a few contributions which have appeared in substantially similar form elsewhere but most are new papers, contributed by Guttman's students of various vintages, with a preponderance of younger scholars. This gives the volume a curious flavour - a mixture of methodological adulation and the conscious striving of some contrib- utors to make their papers relevant to Guttman's thought. The organisation of this book is a lot tighter than the Lingoes volume, and focusses sharply upon facet the- ory (as a form of problem specification and interpretation) and upon the currently fashionable models in the Guttman tradition.

It is in no way a reflection on Guttman's truly massive and innovative contribu- tion to scaling to say that I found the most fascinating articles were those which seemed least deferential, or most tangential, to the Guttman paradigm. Personally, I find facet theory a helpful means of specifying problems and a valuable sensitizing device when looking for structure in configurations. But I detect distinct whiffs of incense among the acolytes, and I cannot be alone in thinking that Guttman's so-called Laws of Attitudes are either highly simplistic or well-nigh vacuous. In any event, do not neglect to read Shepard's fascinating paper on spatial manifolds (especially circular structures), Steiger and Schoenemann's "History of factor indeterminacy" (a sobering review of unlearnt lessons), "Stochastic Cumulative Scales" (for the analysis of binary data in the presence of massive error) by Coombs and Lingoes and Raveh's interesting proposal for detecting of monotonic trends in time series data. (Wollenberg' paper on the factor pattern parametrization of the nonmetric representation of the radex is also particularly interesting, but technically deficient in parts.) The volume also contains a full bibliography of Gutt- man's published works and a useful index.

These two very different books testify in different ways to the enormous impact which Guttman has had on scaling, through his own work and that of his students. His persistent insistence upon forgetting dimensions and looking for patterns in problems and configurations, and upon attempting a theoretical and not simply an empirical justification of scaling - all these characterise his approach and are still frequently ignored in current examples of scaling. But Guttman's breadth of vision has often been accompanied by a proprietorial neglect of other traditions. This myopia is not apparent in the Lingoes volume, where one is taken straight to the centre of current developments in MDS. I would not wish to claim to detect a corn-

5 9 7

plete convergence be tween the Bell Laboratories and the Gut tman-Lingoes tradi- t ion, but the overlap, similarities and complementar i t ies are now so great that an integrated approach can be discerned.

Turning now to the third book by Krusk-al and Wish, it is hard to find enough praise for it. As an in t roduc tory text , it assumes very little of the reader, it is or iented towards applications, and it succeeds admirably. Written lucidly and in a "user - f r iendly" manner, it banishes useful but complex material to a few technical appendices. The coverage is wide, especially considering its size: Basic concepts , In terpreta t ion, Dimensional i ty and Three-Way Scaling, plus a final section on pre- processing data and available programs. It is just the book to put in the hands o f prel iminary users, and 1 now make it required reading for all MDS courses I teach - a thing I have never felt able to do before. I especially r ecommend a reading of pp. 27 28, which describe the me thod of steepest descent. These pages illustrate the brevity and clarity of the exposi t ion, which manages to be both accurate and non- mathematical . The price makes it all the more attractive.

In reading these texts I have been particularly alert to c o m m o n themes or direc- tions. Some do exist, and it may be wor th ment ioning them. Methods for imple- ment ing the basic nonmet r ic model are now sufficiently stable to allow a t tent ion to be focussed upon in terpreta t ion, and this is obviously a major growth point: how the reseracher 's knowledge and hypotheses can be used as constraints on the solu- tion, and how external in format ion can be embedded in various ways within a con- figuration. Fol lowing the rapid prol i ferat ion of different models in the early 70s, it is now possible to point to a fairly small set of models which are in regular demand

point -vector models for the analysis of sets of ratings and rankings, scalogram- based models for binary data and metr ic models which include well-defined stable loss funct ions and inferential tests. Thirdly, there has been a rapid expansion in three-way scaling (still based heavily upon INDSCAL), al though the algori thmic im- p lementa t ion of these models - most ly al ternating least squares is still not suffi- ciently stable.

I still retain a strong sympathy for the beginning user of MDS: how does he or she impose some coherence on the buzzing complexi ty , redundancy and compet ing claims of various models, methods and programs? Unfor tunate ly no satisfactory candidate for an organizing typology has yet appeared in print. But 1 r ecommend that readers should make a note to read the excel lent summary paper by Carroll and Arabie in the for thcoming Annual Review of Psychology.

TONY COXON University of Wales

A. Sloman, The Computer Revolution in Philosophy, Harvester Press, Hassocks, 1978, xvi + 304 pp., s 12.50 c lo th / s 5.50 pb.

This is an odd and interest ing book which contains a nufnber of impor tan t obser- vations on the current state of Artificial Intell igence (AI). It describes in some detail the author ' s program (AI books always work up to that , and quite rightly) called POPEYE which is an original approach to the problem of compute r recogni- t ion of visual scenes (even if not qui te "giving a compu te r visual exper iences" which is how the book bills it). It also has a lot of interest to say about the relations

598

between science and philosophy and hence between AI and philosophy. On the other hand the book tries to say far too much, and about topics periph-

eral to its main claims: the long sections on, "What are the aims of science", "Science and philosophy", and "On learning about numbers" do not justify all the space they take in terms of what they add to the book's message. Sloman has managed to draw parts of philosophy papers written over the last fifteen years into the book (including papers on the relations of "'is", "ought" and "better"!). It is a common failing to think that whatever one has thought, about any topic, must be part of some seamless whole simply because one has thought it. The fault here, if it is one, has other causes: first, the bulk of the book originated as a number of un- published papers circulated among AI workers. Secondly, Sloman underwent a fairly spectacular conversion from being a philosopher to being a programming AI researcher, and it is quite natural for someone to want to show continuity under- lying an apparently diverted and revolutionised career.

This personal aspect of things is inseparable from the the style of the book, for in many places it displays a strong distaste for accepted modes of Anglo-Saxon philosophical argument, and opts instead for the A1 mode of dismissive assertion: the "formalisms and theories (of cybernetics and systems theory) are too simple to say anything precise about the communication of a sentence" (p. 8); "Similarly, the mathematical theory of information . . . is irrelevant . . . " (ibid.). In fact I believe he is right, but the form of words and the style prevent the book being a philo- sophical book, pre- or post-revolutionary.

The reader will have to fight a great deal to get through the book, quite apart from the enormous number of misprints and howlers, and the chattiness "Computing is a bit like the invention of pape r . . , and the invention of writing combined". Well, yes, but only a bit. He will have to face the crankiness: the first few pages warn him, out of the blue, of the dangers of cigarettes (later on, statistical methods are dismissed in a sentence; the very methods on which the demonstration of the evil of tobacco rests). Unanswerable, but seriously intended, Zen koans spring up off the page: "After all primary schools are more important that Universities aren't they?" The references are patchy, though everyone working in the subject at Sussex seems welt referred to (except, oddly enough; Power whose elegant work on number systems is not mentioned in the whole chapter on numbers). Dreyfus, one of the small band of philosophers concerned with AI, is not discussed in connection with the differ- ence between analogical and digital computation which has a close relation to a dis- tinction, vital for Sloman, between analogical and, what he calls, Fregean represen- tations. I remain agnostic about Sloman's distinction, if only because all representa- tions in the sort of language AI workers use are, at some level, Fregean in the sense of being expressible as predicates and their arguments. But this is an issue of great importance in the representation of knowledge and anyone interested should famil- iarise themselves with Sloman's position.

The informing spirit of the book is, as Sloman says, Kant; though scholars will wince at "Immanual (sic) Kant's claim that no experiencing is possible without information-processing . . . and that no information-processing is possible without pre-existing knowledge in the form of symbol-manipulating procedures, data-struc- tures . . . " (p. 1 1). But perhaps we should say: too bad for scholars, and consider whether this may not be a revealing and helpful updating of Kant's rather pithier remark about percepts and concepts. For this issue is the nub of the book: what stored structures must we posit to explain the ability of a human or machine to see

599

scenes? The scenes Sloman chooses for his program POPEYE to see are superim- posed (and partially occluded) letters forming a familiar word. The key example is the letters, E,X,I,T squeezed together to form an overlapping jumble: one in which the human viewer can soon "see" the four letters and hence the word. The principle behind this is one that has informed much British work on machine vision: namely, top-down processing whenever possible. That is to say, not seeking individual letters only by their proper criteria but also by guessing from the partial (non-occluded by others) letters what they might be and looking at the rest of what is available to see whether or not it confirms such a guess.

The program in operation is not yet sufficiently top-down: intuitively, it should form such hypotheses not only on the basis of the partial letters it can see, but using its knowledge of what groups of letters form English words (what the human does in scanning the agglomeration is presumably to seek a word). However, this program is undoubtedly an interesting step in the right direction.

One should note though that it is not in any strong sense an answer to Kant's question "How is knowledge possible", because Kant was concerned primarily not with what knowledge structures are available to any given act of knowing but what structures are a priori necessary for any possible act of knowing, or in other words, and here I gloss in Sloman's manner, what must be present ab initio so that learning knowledge structures is possible? Sloman has a number of interesting things to say about learning but, like all AI workers, he is unable to say anything fundamentally revealing about how the structures he posits and programs might develop.

This brings one to the theme of the book's title: that computer methods and AI ways of thought should, properly seen, constitute a revolution in philosophy. This is an enormous issue, but I do not believe that Sloman has shown there has been or is about to be such a revolution - in the sense of a radical change in every area of philosophical thought - nor does he need one to support his detailed claims. It is certainly true that physiology and AI are about to detach vision from philosophy proper, and with it will go a number of old and well loved philosophical problems such as the status of sense-data. But philosophy has had its limbs lopped off in this way for centuries and survived. The machine metaphor has taken on a new lease of life in the last generation, and I believe, like Sloman, that AI can provide a quite

new way of looking at problems like consciousness, but again, is this a revolution? Philosophical argument, ethics, aesthetics and most of metaphysics, to name but a few parts, seem much where they were. The changes are all additions of new evi- dence, and re-examinations of old positions: reform if you will, not at all revolu- tion.

It has been said for some time of a well-known American figure in AI that his work would be more plausible if, at the same time as everything else, he did not claim that he had solved Russell's paradox of the theory of sets. A cold shiver was therefore appropriate on being directed to a postscript entitled "Do we need a hier- archy of metalanguages?" where Sloman attempts to show that we do not. This final addition is somehow symptomatic of what is wrong with the organization and selection behind this book, and it also, though this was not the point of the post- script, shows the way in which AI considerations do not solve philosophical prob- lems.

Sloman starts from the paradoxical sentence "This statement is not t rue" which is true if false and false if true. He th~n uses a function-definitiqn in a list processing language, such that, given a sentence variable S, it is evaluated as the corresponding

600

negation (i.e. NOT S). Yet, since we are in a language based on recursive functions, a request to give the truth value of S will never terminate. Hence the computer prints an error message when its store is full of nested Ss and NOT Ss. Nothing fol- lows from this at all, although it is a pretty demonstration of recursive program- ming. It certainly does not follow, as Sloman believes, that there is now no contra- diction and hence no need of metalanguages. The example could equally have been programmed without such nested evaluations and in such a way that the store did not fill but instead the truth value of some S oscillated from True to False as long as the current was switched on. The philosophical problem, such as it is, remains: namely that, i f you adopt a representation in which every sentence does have a truth value, such as the propositional calculus, then attempts to represent the paradoxical sentence, such as (P-q P)v (P D P) will yield a logical contradiction. That this could be avoided by giving up the law of the excluded middle was known long before AI and list processing languages. AI, as Wittgenstein might have said, leaves many things just as they are.

YORICK W!LKS University o f Essex

R.A. Carr-Hill and N.H. Stern, Crime, The Police and Criminal Statistics: an analysis o f official statistics in England and Wales using econometric methods, Academic Press, London, 1979, xiv + 356 pp., s 14.00.

Different disciplines differ markedly in the way they regard official statistics. For economists such data are, despite their deficiencies, basic to their discipline and widely used, far more so than economists use social survey data. For sociologists, despite (or because of ?) the early impact of Le Suicide, there has been increasing scepticism in the last two decades as to the value of official statistics in sociological research (cf. Bulmer, 1980). Nowhere has this scepticism been sharper than in crim- inology and the sociology of deviance, a field within which Crime, The Police and Criminal Statistics is firmly located.

Carr-Hill (a criminologist) and Stern (an economist) aim in the monograph to develop a model of the generation of criminal statistics for police districts in England and Wales in 1961, 1966 and 1971, and to estimate the model using statis- tical techniques appropriate to the three theories being examined, the "economic", "traditional criminological" and "interactionist". The work is permeated by aware- ness of the need for circumspection in the quantitative analysis of crime data. Indeed, its focus is as much upon theories of the generation of criminal statistics as it is upon theories of crime. The difference between offences as recorded and the number of illegal events is central to the design.

The three key variables in the study are: (1) the recorded level of crime, as mea- sured by statistics of all indictable offences known to the police; (2) the proportion of such offences solved - the "success rate"; (3) the number of police. Deterrence theories, for example, postulate that the level of offences will depend on the prob- ability of being caught, which in turn depends on the number of police. But i,n turn, the proportion of offences solved depends on the number of offences to be solved and on the number of police.

601

Faced with this problem of simultaneous causation, the authors favour the application to their data of the simultaneous-equation methods of econometrics. These, they maintain, are superior to single-equation regression or analysis of vari- ance techniques hitherto common in criminology, for use in testing hypotheses derived from the model. They also point to their value in handling of problems of unobserved variables in a formal way, and the potential of information contained in the relation between errors in different equations.

The book is a sophisticated attempt to apply advanced anaiyticaI techniques to an intractable problem in a difficult field. It is informed throughout both by aware- ness of data quality and a determination to test rigorously alternative theoretical models. To what extent, however, is it the right direction in which to be proceed- ing? Are the problems of data quality so intractable that some other course is needed? A thoughtful chapter (8) by Carr-Hill finds some support for labelling theories of social bias in the selection of individuals as offenders. He rightly cautions against the use of administrative statistics on crime as a means of setting coherent policy goals. But how (if at all) can such data be improved?

Some would have us shift the attention to the social processes of statistics pro- duction (cf. Cicourel, 1976). Others would retreat to a bastion of rationalist theory where empirical evidence as conventionally understood is not relevant to the valid- ity of concepts or propositions (cf. Hindess, 1973). Yet others would see the solu- tion as a political one (cf. Irvine et al., 1979). In fact a more fruitful way forward, pointed in Morgenstern's classic and somewhat neglected monograph (1963) would be to pay much greater attention to improving data quality. Carr-Hill and Stern sug- gest one indirect way of getting leverage on this. The work of Sparks, Genn and Dodd (1977) on unrecorded crime provides a different and arguably better strategy in examining the pitfalls of crime data directly. This is not, however, to underrate the novelty or the interest of Crime, The Police and Criminal Statistics.

REFERENCES

Bulmer, M. (1980). "Why don' t sociologists make more use of official statistics?", Sociology 14 (1980) in press.

Cicourel, A.V. (1976). The Social Organisation o f Juvenile Justice. London: Heinemann.

Hindess, B. (1973). The Use of Official Statisties in Sociology. London: Macmillan. Irvine, J., Miles, I. and Evans, J. (eds.)(1979). Demystifying Soeial Statistics. Lon-

don: Pluto; reviewed in Quality and Quantity (1980) 14: 365-366 . Morgenstern, O. (1963). On The Accuracy of Economic Observations. Princeton

University Press. Sparks, R., Genn, H. and Dodd, D. (1977). Surveying Victims. London: Wiley.

MARTIN BULMER London School of Economics and Political Science

602

Jeff Coulter, The Social Construction of Mind." Studies in Ethnomethodology and Linguistic Philosophy, London, Macmillan, 1979, ix + 190 pp., s 10.00.

Despite, say, Mead's emphasis on a social behaviourism, or Schutz's stress on objectiver Geist, the critics of "interpretative" sociology in its various guises have tended to see it as confounded by rampant subjectivism. There is a widespread mis- apprehension, for instance, that a concern with "meaningful" human conduct

necessarily implies the attempted inspection of the contents of members' minds. This is linked with the criticism that such sociologies fall into the trap of solipsism, and in effect abandon any attempt at the principled investigation of social life. Some phenomenologists and others of similar persuasion have been their worst enemies in this regard, and they have got themselves into frightful tangles over the issue of intersubjectivity. Schutz, for instance, tried to by-pass the problem in var- ious ways, including the highly unsatisfactory solution that actors' intentions were mutually given to direct understanding in the "we" relationship.

Coulter's collection of essays all address the topic of intersubjectivity in a way which obviates the apparent need to inspect the entrails of individual consciousness. Drawing extensively on the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and Ryle he shows how members routinely engage in the description and attribution of mental states, intentions, meanings and so forth. The point of departure, then, is the logical gram- mar of mental concepts, such that attention is focused upon publicly available, conventional activities, rather than putative private mental categories.

In this exercise Coulter continues in the same vein as his earlier Approaches to Insanity, which was concerned with insanity ascriptions. This issue is recapitulated in one of the essays in the new volume, "The Metaphysics of Mental Illness". This is a most valuable contribution, which unravels some of the confusions surrounding the arguments of such anti-psychiatric writers as Thomas Szasz. Coulter points out that the fact that insanity ascriptions are not based on objective, unambiguous criteria and are context-dependent does not therefore imply that mental illness is no more than a "myth". This chapter - indeed, the whole book - must be read by anyone interested in the issue of "labelling" (a topic which may receive renewed attention in the wake of Downes and Rock's recent collection Deviant Interpreta- tions).

To some extent this book disappoints. The essays are all really prolegomena to a sociology of mind (a fact which Coulter himself acknowledges). Here too it resem- bles Coulter's previous work in being somewhat anticlimactic: there is little sus- tained analysis. It will be valuable, however, if it suggests some redirection to ethno- methodology. There is a grave danger that ethnomethodology may lose all contact with its philosophical and sociological forebears in favour of excessively limited ver- sions of conversational analysis. Coulter shows how the social organization of talk can be analysed for "the investigation and careful description of the culturally avail- able procedures for commonsense subjectivity-determinations and mental-predicate avowals and ascriptions in interactional situations". I hope that Coulter's essays will redirect attention towards such issues of practical reasoning and rescue them from an obsessive concern with the sequential organization of conversation alone.

PAUL ATKINSON Department of Sociology, University College, Cardiff